Photo illustrations by The Globe and Mail (source: Getty Images)
Rob Csernyik is a contributing columnist to The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business.
It’s the wee hours of Saturday morning in Sydney, Australia, and I’m struggling to find somewhere quiet to conduct a Zoom interview.
The din of slurred conversations and clinking bottles fills the air at my hostel. Tonight, revellers have overtaken almost every common space, even the so-called “business lounge.” I could conduct my 30-minute conversation in a dorm hallway, but foresee getting yelled at by one of the few sleeping residents.
Shortly before 12:30 a.m., I squeeze into a bathroom and carefully angle my laptop on the sink. I make sure the camera gets the plain white wall in the background, but not the toilet lid.
When Virginia Woolf mused about writers needing a room of one’s own, this is not what she meant.
Since February, 2023, I’ve been a digital nomad – an employee or entrepreneur who plies their trade while travelling, sometimes short-term and other times, like me, long-term without a fixed address.
The life I was living in a worn but cozy Saint John studio apartment has faded into memory. I traded it in for a year in Australia and visits to Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Fiji and New Zealand, among other places, along the way.
Though it was introduced 20 years ago, the term “digital nomad” didn’t leave the fringes of the corporate world for the mainstream until the recent remote-work revolution. Since the pandemic, job ads increasingly highlight freedom of mobility through hybrid or fully remote work. Firms that push for 100-per-cent on-site workplaces are (rightfully) vilified as clinging to obsolete models. A Robert Half Canada survey suggests nearly a third of Canadian employees want to reduce their time in the office, though this seems low based on conversations I’ve had.
It’s so normalized now that some companies, such as financial-services firm Wealthsimple, even offer employees the chance to work internationally part of the year as a perk. For many entrepreneurs, the increased adoption of remote-meeting software and improved access to cellular networks and the internet make it possible to command their businesses from wherever they lay their head. With seat sales and budget accommodations only a few clicks away, and no shortage of online advice – a Reddit forum for digital nomads has 2.2 million global members – it’s never been easier to experience the itinerant lifestyle.
One U.S. survey suggests about one in 10 workers is a digital nomad, with nearly half planning at least some international travel during the year. (No comparable statistic exists for Canada.) But the image presented on Instagram or LinkedIn is often idealized or flattened to working from private tropical villas without a care in the world: a rarified dream for a select few. The closest I got to this was several nights at a bargain-priced resort in Fiji in the low season.
Instead, being a digital nomad has meant living in hostels, Airbnbs and guest houses, and plying my trade as a journalist and writer anywhere and everywhere I can get WiFi. This ranges from the fairy-tale-style reading rooms of Australian state libraries and sunny coffee-shop patios, to airports and hostel common spaces. I once even submitted a book manuscript to an agent on a bench outside a grocery store. It’s not always easy, but I wouldn’t trade my experience so far for the conventional comforts I left behind.
Critics of digital nomadism suggest that we vagabonds are usually cooped up indoors without enjoying our new surroundings. They clearly haven’t tried it. In my off-hours I’ve hiked across a New Zealand alpine crossing, bobbed in the ocean at Waikiki beach, watched a Jakarta sunset from a rooftop bar and enjoyed light shows playing out over Sydney Harbour in view of the iconic opera house. Naysayers also suggest it hastens burnout, as though that can’t happen anywhere.
These flaccid arguments are holdovers from a less imaginative past where knowledge workers felt chained to their desks to do work that could have been done anywhere. Dreams of travel were frequently deferred until reaching a certain income level or retiring – if that even exists any more.
This more modest dream of working while travelling feels like a sign of the times, but not a downgrade. Facing the squeeze of living costs and realizing that deferred gratification may remain unrequited, why not move the goalposts?
We can embrace this more achievable freedom instead of pining for a fantasy. I think digital nomadism is here to stay, even if it requires some sacrifices – the least of which is making an occasional Zoom call from a bathroom.
One night, as my favourite pub closed, a guy I was chatting with proposed a nightcap, though we weren’t sure where to go. I suggested some wine on the veranda of the hostel next door, where I was staying in an eight-person dorm. He hated the idea. With a pained expression, he opined that staying in a hostel at our shared age was depressing.
When I first planned to spend a year in Australia, I envisioned getting a place for myself and living a similar life to what I lived at home, but with the occasional kangaroo sighting. Yet I quickly realized I wanted freedom to roam. There was too much to see to tie myself down with a lease and a hefty deposit.
I didn’t travel outside Canada or the United States until the age of 36. International trips weren’t of interest to my family when growing up, and as an adult I was unable to afford them, spending many years earning paltry wages under the fluorescent glow of retail-store and café lamps. Before I went to Paris in 2022, not having travelled abroad was an insecurity of mine. Not everyone cares if they travel or not, but I pined to see the world, and have the experiences many people I met and admired did. A stint as a digital nomad was my chance to make up for lost time, but I had to do it sustainably with the income I earned. If I waited until I could afford to do so in luxury, I might never do it at all.
I made a comment to this effect, but this guy and I had lived different enough lives that it didn’t land and we parted ways. If my line of thinking resonates, congratulations: You may be willing to pay the price of admission to be a digital nomad. For most of us, it doesn’t involve blithely putting down a credit card, but sacrificing creature comforts – such as staying in hostels sometimes – and developing a thick skin when the peanut gallery has opinions about it.
On Reddit, aspiring digital nomads anxiously debate practical matters, such as whether working from hostels is even possible. I’m in the yes camp. Hostels are probably easier to work in than ever, with a majority of residents behind their laptops or phones 24/7, headphones in, avoiding conversation and eye contact as if it will turn them to stone. The inconveniences are generally garden-variety – hostels are no more noisy or inconvenient than any office environment, at least during weekdays. (Although once my work in the common space of one hostel in the Blue Mountains was interrupted, first by a senior tour group taking dance lessons and then by a group of several dozen teenagers herded into the space to check in. I slammed my laptop shut and, facing limited options in the small tourist town, finished my work in the relative peace of a nearby shopping centre.)
Hostels are increasingly catering to workers like me. One Aussie chain offers co-work space for $10 a day in several locations, and another I stayed at on and off for a few months offered residents a free co-work space as a perk. This included, mercifully, a soundproof booth for video calls.
With short-term apartments and hotels out of my budget, the second-best option for privacy was Airbnbs. Those in my price range were mostly suburban houses, usually accommodating several travellers at once, 30 to 45 minutes by transit from city centres such as Brisbane, Melbourne or Newcastle. I spent a few months in these places off and on, reserved for times I needed to focus on business over pleasure.
But there, too, I occasionally had privacy issues. Once I got the dreaded “keep it down” from the next room when I tried to conduct a quick, discreet interview in my bedroom. For the next one, I sat in a lawn chair outside the house, doing a camera-off video call in the dark so as not to bother my housemates. A stray cat crawled over me the entire time, occasionally sinking its claws into my flesh.
The few times I paid a premium for Airbnb privacy came with caveats. One pad on Sydney’s North Shore turned out to be carved into about 10 tiny bedrooms, with only four chairs and a table as a common space. To my relief, there was a spacious municipal library less than five minutes away on foot.
A tiny home in suburban Perth turned out to be in a scrapyard instead of a backyard, but I was more offended that it lacked WiFi. Another was a windowless “adult playroom” carved out of a former garage bay. Though the host offered me use of various accoutrements for an evening in, I politely declined. I was there to work, after all.
Though I’m lucky to have a job I can do anywhere, I feared losing out on assignments while travelling. I thought editors would feel this made me inaccessible or would not want to accommodate the time-zone difference. In Melbourne, where I spent several months, the business day back in Toronto ran overnight. But other than filing some pieces earlier to avoid real-time edits when I should be sleeping, my work is mostly business as usual. Some editors, whom I communicate with mostly via e-mail, have even forgotten that I’m not in Canada.
The life side of my work-life balance has experienced greater changes.
There are certain personality traits that make this new avocation easier. It’s necessary for a digital nomad to be comfortable with their own company, because there will be stretches where it can feel solitary. It’s also necessary to have the self-confidence to ignore feelings of missing out and to recognize that some days call for hard work. The shadow side is knowing that it is equally necessary to plunge headfirst into the experience of travelling – to stop for a bite at the intriguing café, take that head-clearing walk on the beach, indulge in a lengthy conversation with an interesting stranger – and that, occasionally, the work needs to wait. But as working holidays wear on, anyone participating fully in the experience will build upon these skills like muscle.
The one that proved most challenging was dealing with the time-zone difference. As a night owl, I expected it to be easier. I was used to working evenings, though it was always my choice if I did. But it became easy – and sometimes necessary – to pick away at work, answering an e-mail here and there, nearly 24/7 during both the Australian business day and several hours later during the one back home. There’s a distinction between being awake and alert. Around midnight, for example, I may be awake enough to watch TV or go for a pint, but I’m not always alert enough to do meaningful work such as reviewing edits or composing important e-mails. One night, in the beach town of Byron Bay, where I spent an idyllic month at the end of Australia’s winter, a source e-mailed me around 1:00 a.m. She could speak in 90 minutes if I was free. I was tired and wanted to decline and reschedule, but we had been trying to connect for months. I did the interview anyway. This has happened frequently enough and often involves having to reorient myself afterward, being late to bed and to rise. It screws with the next day to the point that it becomes vital to plan for a light schedule, rather than working at a normal pace.
For a time, I developed an unhealthy fixation with waking frequently to check my phone, hoping for e-mails that never came. Workdays when projects don’t move forward or nobody responds are common, but people can’t hasten a response in their sleep. As a freelancer, a lot of my revenue and schedule is at the mercy of people responding in a timely manner. This faith isn’t always rewarded. Finding nothing but junk mail in the morning feels like waking up to find life has been pre-lived – a spoiler that my work might move ahead tomorrow, but not today. Sometimes this happens a few days in a row, and it feels like all my editors and sources are in cahoots. To avoid feeling too frustrated, I force myself to embrace some downtime.
By my last few months in Australia, such peculiarities were starting to wear me out. I also felt the other strains of digital-nomad life – the moving around, the minimalist approach to possessions, feeling occasionally out of the loop back home with friends and my industry. The cash-flow challenges from paying in advance for reservations and travel also started to grate on my nerves. A quieter life in Canada with all its faults – high rents, grocery-store sticker shock – seemed newly quaint. It felt like my time away had crested, that I was counting down until my return.
Needing another visa for my last stretch in Australia, I left the country this April to apply for re-entry, heading to Indonesia for three weeks – first to bustling Jakarta and then to tropical Bali.
It was my first time in Asia, and being somewhere so different than I was used to energized me in a way I hadn’t believed possible at this point in my travels. It was like hitting control-alt-delete on myself, and experiencing a restart. Realizing how far my dollar could stretch was another revelation. Though Canadian dollars were worth more in Australia, I had more financial breathing room in Indonesia than I’d had in ages. I realized that by putting up with the annoyances of a digital nomad’s life a little longer, there would be rewards. I could visit more countries than I had ever expected, and for longer. In conversations with others, I noticed my return date kept getting pushed back more and less precise. My mother hates it, but I’m excited to see what happens next.
After wrapping up my Australian adventure, I returned to Bali in mid-July. Lots of people come here to find themselves in the “eat, pray, love” sense, but thousands, like me, come to work. Canggu, a community along the southern coast, is sprinkled with co-work spaces and coffee shops, full of foreigners on Zoom calls. I haven’t met anyone who isn’t happy to be here, or feels that work impedes their chance to explore paradise. I have two side trips planned, including to one of the Gili Islands, where I’ve promised to put my laptop down and fully soak up the experience.
At a co-working hostel where I stayed for several nights, there was a cheap on-site restaurant catering to the several dozen of us hard at work. The ability to forget about domestic life and focus on work brought to mind an artists’ retreat, and how they are considered inspiring and restorative, even aspirational among musicians, painters, writers and the like. Yet taking a similar approach to career work isn’t as revered. Given that these travels also inculcate the problem-solving, budgeting and resilience that workplaces admire in their staff, corporate critics should start embracing the idea more.
Once I check a few projects off, I will reduce my workload so I can have some actual out-of-office days and travel for several weeks through other parts of Asia. I’ll make it back toward Canada and a more rooted life eventually. For now, I’m content to enjoy the freedom of being able to ply my trade on the road and to see the world in a way that I never expected. It’s a possibility for an increasing number of workers who are willing to embrace it.
