Ditching the office to work in paradise as a digital nomad has a dark side

I did this in Asia for a year.

If you can find a stable enough Internet connection (which costs a lot more in Asia), you will need to be very disciplined to actually get anything done.

All of the expats I met were 20 something college-aged students that just wanted to party, drink, and smoke weed every day or people that were rejected from their home country for one reason or another and can only find a job as an English teacher because most schools don't do their due diligence and weed out bad workers.

The rest are a small percentage of people that are in the same boat as you and were transferred for a short amount of time (usually 6-months to a year) for work.

It can be very isolating, unless all you want to do is party and get drunk. I was lucky because I had some other like-minded friends that came with me and I had studied the main language before I came. Almost all of my friends were locals, not expats.

I finally had to leave because my business was suffering and tripled my income after I came back.

True nomads move in groups of close units, and they do so out of survival and necessity. The lifestyle this article is describing as the "digital nomad" is more like an exile.

Travel itself takes so much energy, it has to be the primary thing or what's the point. But work expects to be the primary thing if that's what you're doing.

I think the only way to do digital nomad would be bug bounties, or something like that where it's an at-will contribution.