Returning to Civilian Life

Writing this is going to be an interesting exercise. I’ve told people before about my struggles with living nomadically, and the responses from people who live this way usually fall into one of two camps:

• Some people say: “That’s preposterous! You get to live in perpetual summer, experience different interesting cultures, and be your own boss while living on a fraction of what it would cost in a western country!”
• While others respond: “I know what you mean. I’ve found myself traveling slower and staying in each place longer as opposed to being in a new city every month; that shit just gets exhausting.”

In truth, there’s merit to both viewpoints. Each has it’s pros and cons, and as with most things in life I think the truth of what’s best lies somewhere in the middle. But it’s so easy to get swept up in the wave of excitement around living as a digital nomad that I think it’s important to properly identify the pitfalls. Only when you recognize a problem for what it is can you properly address it.

This is NOT to say “your way of living is wrong and no one should be a digital nomad!!!”

I’m not saying that! No one is saying that! Put away your pitchforks, for fuck’s sake.

I love traveling, and I plan to do it regularly for the rest of my life. As Mark Twain said:

But like anything in life, you can have too much of a good thing:

• More exercise is usually good. But too much can lead to injuries.
• More focus on setting and achieving goals can lead to a more successful life. But too much can lead to it crowding everything else out and leaving no room for fun or happiness.
• Eating a healthy diet will lead to a longer, happier life. But being overly dogmatic about it can sap the joy from food(one of life’s great joys) and turn it into a chore.

Travel and interacting with new, interesting people can shake you out of your prejudices or poor ways of thinking. It can be a boon to your perspective on professional life, wake you up from poor patterns of thought, and make you re-evaluate things that you once might have considered core tenets of who you are.

But new perspectives and ways of thinking are only useful if they lead to tangible changes in how you live your live. I’ve met people with endless stories to share about the fascinating experiences they went through, the lessons they’ve learned on the way, and all manner of other inspiring tales.

Yet often these people are still living the life of a trust fund brat on holiday; partying their asses off every weekend, swiping like mad on tinder to find some company for the evening, and covering all of that with a thin veneer; the perception of forward progress by just scraping by in whatever “side hustle” or “lifestyle business” they’ve conjured up.

Or they portray the image of someone who’s achieved supernatural levels of wokeness, enjoy talking about how travel’s helped them be more “conscious”, or how they went vegan to save the planet; all while living like a modern day colonialist in a third world country that produces obscene amounts of plastic waste.

So I’m writing what will become a series on this subject in an attempt to clarify and articulate my thoughts. This subject is very complex and has implications across health, stress physiology, circadian biology, peer groups and the social creatures we humans are, progression towards worthwhile goals, conscious vs subconscious choices, and a number of other things that will only become clear (even to me) as I elaborate on this topic.

So without further ado, it’s time to dive into it! This first topic I think will be more relevant to younger people from the US than from elsewhere(though not exclusively so). That can’t be helped, as I can only write from my own perspective. I don’t intend for anything I say to be regarded as a universal truth that applies to everyone.

But I do think that this applies to a large enough portion of people that some generalizations can be made, and this has to do with how many in the younger generation were raised.

Dropping the Ball

I don’t know what your upbringing was like, but I was raised by parents who themselves had grown up fairly poor. Life was tumultuous and difficult for them, yet in true American dream style they persevered, worked hard, and by the sweat of their brows were able to escape poverty, live comfortably, and provide a good upbringing for my brother and I.

What they went through was so difficult that they wanted to make certain that we didn’t have to deal with that kind of suffering. We were often shielded from the harsh realities of life, and given the freedom to simply focus on our studies and enjoy being kids.

In spirit this is a fine ideal, but when it come to the raising of a person there are some glaring holes. The world is often not a kind place. People will spend their lives competing for different things, whether it’s the business they’re starting, the job or promotion they’re pursuing, the romantic partner they’re interested in, or even the hobby they’re trying to improve at:

• A business competes with other businesses of the same type. Even if it’s completely unique, it competes for the attention of the potential customer against the endless supply of other businesses that have something to offer them.
• For jobs and promotions people compete against a laundry list of other candidates to get the role, and can go through a fairly brutal process of elimination and selection to find the one candidate who gets the gig.
• In the world of romance, people have more choice than ever before. This means when someone judges you as a potential partner, their perception of you is competing against their perception of every other potential romantic partner they have.
• Even if your hobby isn’t competitive, in your search for knowledge around it you’ll be bombarded with “articles”(read as: marketing messages) about how other people mastered this thing incredibly quickly. It’s easy to compare yourself to those unrealistic cases and subconsciously compete against this unrealistic standard!

Essentially, any time there is a limited supply of a given thing and a great many people who want that thing, people engage in competition for it. And competition is hard. Despite whatever misanthropic views we might have about most people being a bunch of idiots(I often think that on my less kind days), generally speaking people are fairly capable.

It’s just hard to beat out everyone else for any given opportunity. To do so regularly you have to be fairly exceptional, and to actually become exceptional you need to learn to face failure and continue striving forward. To not wilt under adversity, but view it as a challenge through which to persevere.

But to build the confidence necessary to do that, people need to first face adversity, then overcome it. They need to do this again and again throughout life, that’s how a person develops strong character and learns to persevere in pursuit of their goals.

Protecting someone from this reality does them no favors, because eventually they will have to face reality; and reality doesn’t care about your feelings.

This has always been a difficult subject to broach with friends and family, because people immediately get defensive. “Don’t you appreciate all they did for you? They gave you a great life and did the best they could!”

Of course I appreciate all they did for me! I’ve told them this before, explicitly, because I wanted to be sure they knew how grateful I was. But no one is perfect, and as I said above: only when you recognize a problem for what it is can you properly address it.

I heard someone say this in regards to the processed garbage and sugar-laden diet many of us grew up on and our parents role in that, but I think it applies just as well here:

“They dropped the ball that they didn’t know they were carrying.”

Given the circumstances I couldn’t expect anything better from them, they did incredibly well and I will be forever grateful. But in many ways growing up I faced a dearth of the type of difficult experiences necessary to mold me into the person I would eventually become through my own efforts.

I believe that many in our generation(the alleged “millenials”) suffer from a similar problem, and the generation that follows us is rife with it. Our parents grew up in a much more difficult time, and in some ways things are comparatively easy for us. But what they never realized is that the difficulties they faced molded them into the people they’d eventually become. They wanted to simply eliminate the bad part and keep the good, without realizing that if people didn’t go through some bad first, then the good would never come to be.

As any mathematician or engineer knows, if you remove a critical input from an equation the output will be VERY different.

And that brings us back to the issue of travel.

Solo Travel as a Crash Course in Independence

As glamorous and fun as it’s often portrayed to be, extended travel(in particular solo travel) is an incredibly difficult endeavor. And often there’s little(if any) safety net. You have to frequently do things that many people in civilian life only do once in a while, such as:

• Finding a living space
• Figuring out visas
• Budgeting (in a new currency every few months)
• Connecting with new friends in a city where you don’t know a single person
• Learning how to navigate life surrounded by people who speak a different language
• Or just persevere through difficult situations in general: like that time I got malaria at a meditation retreat in Thailand

Travel is fun and rewarding, but difficult. I’ve said before that I think traveling together is one of the best ways for a couple to determine if the relationship will work long term. It’s like an accelerated “getting to know you” phase, where you have to face difficult and stressful situations and see how you handle them as a team.

Similarly, I think extended solo travel also works as an accelerated “growing up” phase. Unless you’re one of the aforementioned trust fund brats, no one’s going to protect you from the difficulties of life on the road.

This is a difficult-yet-rewarding thing to go through. It’s helped me reach clarity about some very important things in life, like:

• Who I am deep down, and what I actually like about myself(if you can’t tell from my writing, I’ve spent more than my fair share of days mired in self loathing)
• What I’m good at, and as a result what direction I should aim professionally
• The things I’ve enjoyed most in life, and how I can spend more time doing them for the rest of my life. Things like:
  • Cooking a good meal and having friends and family over
  • Building things I enjoy and sharing them with others
  • Learning and improving at various skills
  • Competing in sports or any type of game
  • Spending time in nature
  • Reading (both fiction and non)
  • Training for something difficult, then completing it (i.e. Tough Mudder, Medellin marathon)
  • Talking about history, philosophy, the future of technology, or other esoteric subjects

Notice how not a single thing there is dependent upon travel? The truth is that most of these things become more difficult to do when you’re constantly traveling. I can’t cook as well as I normally could in an AirBnB with a shitty kitchen. I can’t build things without a good set of tools. I can learn things, but if the things I want to learn about are skills that require specific tools then I’m shit outta luck.

If yoga’s your thing you can find plenty of that on the road, but other sports can be tough to come by. Sure you can spend time in nature, but training for difficult things only works if you find a way to fit the event into an already complex travel schedule. And finding interesting people to talk with is hit or miss, at best.

You will meet people who you instantly get along with like no other, but often you only have them around for a few weeks at a time before your travels take you in separate directions. I’ve found that travel often provides a good breadth of friendships as you’ll meet tons of people from different walks of life, but only a handful of friendships with real depth; and the ones that do surface are often short-lived, or lived for a few weeks/months then put on hold until you cross paths again.

All of this isn’t even touching the other aspects of travel I mentioned, like shitty apartments ruining sleep for extended periods and the damage that causes, the impact this lifestyle has on health through allostatic load and stress physiology, how making conscious vs subconscious choices affects our productivity and feeling of progress, and all manner of other things that I’ll write about later.

So it begs the question: if you’ve gotten the aforementioned benefits of travel but are sorely missing the comforts of a stable location, why would you continue to do it?

Now we’ve come full-circle, to:

My Return to Civilian Life

I don’t have a set date for this yet, but sometime within the next year or so I’ll be returning stateside and settling down for a good chunk of time. This coincides with the revelation I mentioned above in discovering “What I’m good at and what direction I should aim professionally”. I’m transitioning to computer programming as my career/entrepreneurial outlet, and will likely want to work at a company while I build some experience.

To my friends back in Buffalo: sorry, I’m not coming back. All the money in the world wouldn’t make me willing to suffer through another Buffalo winter.

I’ve yet to decide where I’ll end up, but I’ve got my eye on Portland or Denver. Both places seem to be rich in people who are into stuff from the “things that are important to me in life” section, but I haven’t decided on one yet.

I’ve often said that I think the schedule of a university professor would be ideal for me; working in chunks during the fall and spring, then taking 1-2 month breaks or reduced-workload trips elsewhere in the winter and summer. Once I establish myself as a capable coder who can work remotely or build a software business, I intend to give that a try. To my mind, it’s the best way to gain the benefits of traveling and the freedom we have access to in the modern world, while mitigating the negative aspects by always having a home base to return to.

This is just my story about the downsides of the digital nomad life, which obnoxious Instagram accounts will lead you to believe is nothing but pure bliss. I don’t intend for what I wrote to be universally applicable, as I know some people are more well suited to this lifestyle and continue to love it after years on the road. I just wanted to provide a counterpoint to the unrealistic depictions that so many people are bombarded with, and maybe some others who’ve been feeling the same will resonate with it.

Til next time!

Brandon

P.S. I don’t know when or why I began referring to living in one place/not living nomadically as “civilian life”, but it’s the only phrase I could think of to easily differentiate the two. If you live in civilian life and that offends you, well…I don’t really care. Go find something more useful to do with your time than whining at strangers on the internet.