In Praise of a Nomadic Life | Hacker News Reader

In Praise of a Nomadic Life

wsj.com

18 pointsiwh13 comments

Nomadism is lovely but I believe that natural comfortable state for humans is to be Migratory. Find several comfortable places that you belong in specific seasons and move amongst them. You can develop ties and a sense of ritual belonging while having most of a benefits of a nomadic life.

Snowbirds, Celebrities, Jet Set, Aristocrats, Fashion industry have all figured this out as the most comfortable form of human life at some point or another.

I traveled around for a period, and my feeling is that any joy to be found in a nomadic lifestyle and travelling cannot compare to the feeling of belonging and connectedness that being a part of a real physical community gives you.

While the nomadic life does sound appealing to me I see it as the ultimate form of instant gratification. You sacrifice all stability and ability to effectively change the world around you in order for some momentary pleasure and as they say in the article they just seem to keep pinning their happiness on future events. It seems to me that pinning your joy on future events is a sure way to accumulate happiness debt (much like tech-debt) that you're effectively unable to pay down.

What do people think about a real solo nomadic life?

I'm a huge introvert and used to being alone and lonely all the time yet I cannot quite imagine myself enjoying being a moving ghost from an exotic location to another alone and getting much out of it.

I hear people talk about finding local friends and so on however I cannot imagine that is going to be that satisfying or practical. Making some broken language hello-how-are-you conversation and never seeing them again.

I think the feeling of not having someone to share any of the experience with would overwhelm me and dominate my experience.

I see people talk some feel-good stuff about learning to enjoy things on their own and so on but I don't really see practical examples of it. And as I said, if there was one person who would be comfortable spending time on their own that would be me, yet I don't find the idea of solo nomadic life appealing.

The few people that I have seen appear to be homesick and isolated they claim they are loving the solo trip but in reality they seem to be desperate to share it with someone and they seek that on Twitter and Instagram and on their blogs.

>>>I kept pinning my happiness on future events.

This is true. I don't think you have to go to the extreme of living a nomadic life to address it, but I definitely feel where the author is coming from.

The first time I realized this, in conjunction with how much of what my expectation of happiness comes from media, it was a really jarring experience.

> Nor will we have children

This is no way to run a civilization.

There's no moral obligation to help run civilizations.

How might I be incentivised to have children?

If I were in charge I would institute a basic income for all citizens over the age of 18 (no additional money for children) and would make each child someone had a significant tax break against income. People who could afford them would be incentivized to have them.

Why incentivize people to have children when there is no shortage of them?

Actually, in many Western countries there is, much of Europe for example. Sustainable demographics are why there are subsidies for having children in Italy for example.

I live in Germany, the country with the lowest birth rate in the world. The population is still slowly growing due to immigration.

Even once the developing countries reduce fertility below replacement (which will not happen for a long time yet) with increasing life spans and improving medicine the world's population will still continue growing(slow growth is still projected in the year 2100), then stagnate and then one day very far from today slowly decline...

but it will still take centuries to reach the population levels of the early 20th Century (only reached 2 billion people in 1927). In the meanwhile we have too many, not too few, people around.

Idiocracy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com