Comment by emanuer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emanuer | Hacker News Reader

Since almost 4 years now I do not have any other possession than what fits into my two suitcases. Wherever my 30 inch monitor is, I call home. I am very comfortable with the fact that I don't need to manage my possessions. And Dropbox, Google Apps and alike even made my fears of data loss a thing of the past.

I enjoy moving to a different country almost every year, thanks to being a digital vagabond.

I am taking a wild guess; The past 400.000 years of evolution in which our bodies and minds adapted to a nomadic lifestyle may still resonate in our genes. Only since a few thousand years were a majority of my ancestors bound to one place and this short period is unlikely to have had any genetic impact. A lack of constricting possessions is surprisingly rewarding (constricting in terms of hard to move). I suspect that this reward is universal to humans which would imply some kind of genetically predetermined preference. But it is just a wild guess.

Yet I feel with my son's first birthday approaching this lifestyle will be hard to maintain.

Are you self-employed or do you work freelance or who do you work for and what do you do?

I only ask because this is something I'm very much interested in doing myself, but I'm very apprehensive about making a big change like this due to job/money concerns.

Same thing for me. I just got my CS master degree and now I want to discover the world with only my bike, my laptop and my reflex camera, a few month to a couple of years at the same place...

But I'm worried by the first move. Where I live I got a lot of job opportunity but I don't know if I will be able to find a job in another country quickly enough and it doesn't work very well remotely.

Countries love tourists but they are often wary of anyone who wants to "steal the jobs". Best to be in a situation where you're earning income without having to "work" in the country.

If you have a popular web service or a iphone app you could do it.

Since you just got your degree, my honest advice is this: 1) Be slow to accumulate stuff. 2) Exploit the location where there are a lot of jobs, but do it in a way that doesn't tie you down for 4 years. Do consulting or contracting, or become a co-founder of a startup that is a virtual company such that the company isn't tied to this location. You need some good work experience, which you might have gotten while getting your CS degree, but if not, get it, and get some savings to boot. 3) Start practicing it. Start working away for a week at a time.

Unless you're independently wealthy you can't really spend your time without any work, so the challenge is working while you're a nomad.

You might find this useful: http://microship.com/bike/index.html

Look for a job where you can work remotely. Many US-based companies are striving for an increasingly remote workforce in order to reduce their cost of doing business. At my first job out of college, at a large tech company, they actually wanted us to be remote so they wouldn't have to pay for office space.

There is a- for lack of a better word-- synergy that comes with this lifestyle change. It really is a different way of living. One of the things that you change is what your values are-- what you value. When we lived in a house a lot of money went into house stuff. For instance, by now we'd have bought an HDTV to update the old TV we had. Of course an HDTV wouldn't fit in a backpack so we haven't bought one, and the savings of that offsets some of the increased costs of being nomadic.

Like anything else, it is best to work into it a bit at a time. It might be worth trying a 3 month consulting gig and then, after saving that money, try 3 months on the road as a nomad and see if you can earn money consulting that way. This way the initial gig covers the expenses if the nomadic lifestyle turns into a vacation where you just spend money.

But for us, paramount to being able to do this is the ability to earn our expenses. Most startups look at burn rate, we are keeping a keen eye on revenue vs. living expenses.

"I do not have any other possession than what fits into my two suitcases" ... "Wherever my 30 inch monitor is, i call home"

isn't that a little counter intuitive? you're hardly portable.

A 30-inch monitor fits into a suitcase. Still, if I were rationalizing my life down to two suitcases (which, incidentally, I've done before, and I didn't much enjoy it) then I'd have more clothing and less 30-inch monitor.

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