I’d really like to see something like Meetup but… better. Not really sure how. Like, I don’t know, you pick a date/time window and get paired up with five random people to go and debate what the best cuisine is at a bar. An app just to create low stakes, spontaneous and silly interactions for you.
I haven’t used Meetup for a while but I always found it so dry, and it was rare anybody from my age group attended, probably because the meet-ups are so boring.
In fact I just checked Meetup and all I see is weird scam courses and speed dating events.
Hell I’d love something like that even for random online interactions. Getting paired with random interesting people from all over and have casual exchanges that are private and not recorded forever on some social platform.
Why do they keep living that way then in your opinion? Being a digital nomad is something only people in very specific conditions can even afford to do so it’s a deliberate choice.
It’s hard for me to have much sympathy for someone who’s deliberately living a life that’s making them feel lonely.
1. They're sold on a lie. Here's a photo of my laptop in front of a beautiful pool, next to a delicous bowl of $1 Pad Thai. Ignore the February burning season and total inability to communicate with anybody outside of self-deceiving 20-something Westerners like myself.
2. There are benefits. Being a DN is freeing and fun, especially if this is your first shot at remote work. You don't justify to anybody what time you have your sandwich in the morning.
3. Most DNs have never experienced actual loneliness before, so they don't know how crippling it is. They think all their friends and family having been away/busy one weekend or even one month was loneliness. That's like how the people in 5-day COVID hotel lockdown thought of themselves as having experienced imprisonment. Sure, only in a glancing sense.
4. Sex/romance tourism. Look at the hot exotic naive foreigner who's here to exchange some emotions/experiences with you, the hot exotic native person who's otherwise boring or too slutty/free-thinking for people in your own country.
Being a Digital Nomad is a life experience that comes with as many negatives as positives. But there are positives.
Why do people do it? Because the alternative is to never have done it.
In fact I just checked Meetup and all I see is weird scam courses and speed dating events.