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Comment by phantom_oracle | Hacker News Reader

Nobody else has mentioned it (yet), so I'll be the first.

The problem with the DN lifestyle is that everyone marketing it hard has a vested interest (they run some product/service tied to the DN lifestyle).

For everyone else that wants to get their feet wet in this type of living, they soon realize that things get expensive really quickly (this applies to everywhere except South East Asia).

You just need to account for plane tickets, visas and short-term rent alone to see how it is expensive.

Also, the article conflates "work from home" with "digital nomad", which aren't exactly the same thing.

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It's unfortunate that some people can't seem to see the difference between remote working and being a "digital nomad".

Working from a dedicated space at home is very different from working in a noisy coffee shop or heck even a co-working space, and I wouldn't be surprised if some "no remote worker" policies were built around the idea that the person will be sitting in a Starbucks charging you $100/hr to share their screen with whoever looks over their shoulder.

A remote (where most people work from a home office or some semi-permanent co-working space arrangement) team can definitely adapt to some short term "work from anywhere" changes, but I think the key part is adapt and short term.

I've provided short-notice ops assistance to colleagues from a beach (literally, feet in the sand, under an umbrella) in Thailand using an iPad.

I'm not going to claim I can work from the beach all day every day though.

But is a Digital Nomad all about working from Starbucks or the beach? The impression I got from the book (4HWW) and blog posts I've read was more of people staying for a few weeks/months in rented houses in each place, not in an hotel for a few days.

I'm not really a fan of the term because it covers a huge variety of people and the most vocal ones are working here and there and largely just prioritizing the idealized "digital nomad life".

Then there are people, like you said, who are renting apartments for weeks/months, prioritizing quiet work spaces, and often continuing to hold full time jobs.

I'm kind of in this category right now and am certainly never working from the beach. I went to Latin America so I could find apartments with good internet and continue to work in the same timezone that I started out in.

Eastern Europe and South America are also pretty affordable, though obviously not quite as cheap as SE Asia.

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