Sprinkled with some truly fascinating folks who genuinely discovered some new and interesting way of making this work for them.
When I was still selling naughty bikinis online, I did a few promotions with Instagram yoga teachers and I was always surprised by how low their asking prices were.
I guess most of them valued having any success to show for it much higher than being paid a livable wage.
It gets old pretty fast, has tons of hidden costs, and looks quaint and romantic to people who've never had to do it. Fun for a year, but I probably would have paid almost as much just booking into hostels or AirBnB's and renting a car on occasion.
I was able to go and see some cool places -- but breaking down in remote South Australia was scary and frustrating. And you get really, really tired of the lack of space.
What made it tolerable was being able to get out of the van and chill in places like the library or a coffee shop-- likely all no-gos in the COVID era
It’s strange ‘cuz I’ve been working in digital nomad hotspots for years and have met very very few people like that. Lots of translators, programmers, and then a complete mishmash of other people, but very few people selling courses, and the ones who _were_ selling courses generally nothing to do with being a digital nomad
I’ve been nomading for ten years. I haven’t met a single person who was not legit doing something of value. The closest I came to one was an online poker player in Chiang Mai back in 2010.
Maybe we just hang out in the “right” circles?
It’s probably just like in real life. I have never met anyone offering me a generic (non nomad) Ponzi scheme. But I sure had several legit investment opportunities thru my circles.
The most i've ever been able to do was half a year. How can you choose to be without a real home that long?
Depends what you mean by "real home" I guess. I have a tiny apartment in Bangkok, where we would normally spend ~ 8 weeks a year in total a year, and then we rent ad-hoc or stay with family the rest
Not really sure what that means, but most places we go we have friends we’ve known for many years, and those are often other nomadish types.
> Is your wife your anchor to a local community?
No, she’s from even further away than me
I personally never felt more than a temporary resident in most places i've been.
My email is in my profile. I'd be really interested to jump on a chat with you for a few minutes and hear about your experience if you are open to it. Get in touch if you are open to talking.
But yeah, you won't find the budget backpackers trying to scrape a couple hundred bucks a month monetising their awesome travel blog about their amazing life in Hubud. It's too expensive (relatively speaking). Find a cafe close to a cheap hostel, that'll let you spend the whole morning abusing their decent wifi for the cost of a single americano. You'll be able to tell them because of the number of inappropriately-dressed white folks somehow covering an entire 4-seat table to use their 13" MacBook.
When I was working remotely from Asia, I sometimes went to cafes in the backpacker areas and there would be lots of people working online and posting selfies about their dream life, but their entire monthly budget was like $300. Even in Asia, that's not enough to rent a good office, let alone for apartment +office +food.
Also, maybe you just didn't dig deep enough. I myself was once feeling quite impressed about someone getting rich from making iOS children's games. But when I had issues with my own apps and asked him for advice, it turned out that he was actually making a living from selling an Udemy course on how to get rich by selling apps... And as usual, the revenue from Udemy was presented as if it had come from the apps.
Especially when you realize that
>buy and sell services from each other in a circle
isn't true at all.
I don't know anything dropshipping - the name certain implies something scammy, but our economy is full of things like that.
It's a weird aspect of society - which lies are we all going to agree to accept - and since each person answers those questions differently, it leads to a lot of tension.
None of these people are solving any of the core needs of any of these other people (food, clothes, transportation, housing, any physical goods at all) and very little new money is entering this system at all, maybe some on the drop shipping side but that can also be a net loss in some cases. So yes this represents an economy but the denizens of that economy would be impoverished and miserable, constantly waiting for some outsider to come solve their problems. This is seen in the fact that most people do this as long as their pre existing savings can sustain it because they are doing it at a loss and then they give up when they have eaten through their existing wealth.
So yeah, i don't think it's much of a profound insight to point out the similarities to other economies just because of the existence of people engaging in trade with each other. The quality of the trade is the issue, not its existence.
The outsider in this case is the government bailing out industries like when these digital nomads(businesses) failed, they'd go back to their parents (government). When their parents(gov) run out of money, they'd put it on the credit card (print more money by the Fed) and the cycle continues...
It's funny how this sounds exactly like how our economy works LOL