[marcus_holmes]

Seen so much of this bullshit while travelling around SE Asia. I swear 90% of nomads are dropshipping/life coaches running ponzi schemes, and the other 10% are geeks like me who lucked into remote-friendly coding gigs.

Sprinkled with some truly fascinating folks who genuinely discovered some new and interesting way of making this work for them.

[fxtentacle]

I'd say 95% of digital nomads are just online marketers who market their own lifestyle so that they can sell a course on how to imitate them. And obviously, their customers will imitate them and sell a course on how to imitate them. And so the cycle continues.

[peteretep]

> I'd say 95% of digital nomads are just online marketers

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

[fxtentacle]

If you can afford to rent a table in a coworking space, then you have already separated yourself from the other 95% of digital nomads.

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.

[moltar]

Same here.

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.

[seppin]

> I’ve been nomading for ten years.

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?

[peteretep]

> 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

[seppin]

Ah ok you are married. Do you have long term friends locally ? Is your wife your anchor to a local community ?

[moltar]

I didn't say I was homeless :D I have a home base, but I spend 6 months or more outside of my home country.

[seppin]

I mean a home with local ties and roots, not just someone else's airbnb :)

[anm89]

What utopia have you found? I couldn't stop meeting these people on the road.

[peteretep]

Last year I was in Kohub, Hub Hoi An, Outpost Penestanan, and some time at Hubud. This year, due to Covid, just Kohub.

[marcus_holmes]

Yeah, Hubud is cool, or was last year. I understand the whole of Ubud has been shocked by COVID killing the tourism industry so it'll be interesting how it goes when we can travel again.

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.

[anm89]

Kohub is the coliving on a thai island right? I've been really interested to check that out but never ended up making it there.

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.

[netsharc]

I've fantasised about the vanlife, living the nomad lifestyle out of a van. When looking for build inspiration videos on YouTube, I ended up seeing a lot of vanlife "influencers", but what I notice is many videos just have a few thousand views, which is surely not enough to make a living..

[blaser-waffle]

It's a meme, man. I did the van thing for a year while working in Australia on the NBN (big fibre optic project). Drove around and spliced and oversaw fibre projects.

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

[fxtentacle]

Most influencers can't make a living. There's so many of them that it's a buyer's market.

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.

[ryanar]

I also fantasized about vanlife. Eamon & Bec is an awesome channel if you want to learn about that sort of thing. They certainly grew their channel enough to be comfortable.

[seppin]

vanlife, digital nomad, etc. It's all the same. You are only presented with the highs, not the lows.

[anm89]

Yeah, my running joke while living in Thailand was that it was a circular pyramid scheme, the yoga teachers are buying life coaching, the life coaches are all learning to become drop shippers, and the drop shippers are all getting training to become yoga teachers. They just buy and sell services from each other in a circle trying to grow their own thing until they give up and go home.

[jmcqk6]

I'm just a layperson, but it seems like you've described an economy.

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.

[anm89]

I get what both of the comments are saying here, but this is really nothing like how a real economy works.

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.

[jcytong]

> 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

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

[zdbrandon]

That’s a microcosm of how a real economy works, actually.

[mssundaram]

Dropshipping someone a life coach, now there's an idea

[arthur-st]

Really postmodernist take on mail-order brides.

[kilroy123]

Can confirm. I was a lucky geek nomad who worked remotely. I had a regular software developer job just like I would if I was "back home".