Coping with the Realities of Being a Subpar Digital Nomad

It's 2 a.m., and my alarm goes off again. I know myself too well, and I'll turn off my alarm for an extra few minutes if it means I get a little more sleep. The last thing I want to do is get up out of bed and get ready for work at a local TV station, but that's just the nature of my life.

Well, it was my life until one July day when I sent an email and took a chance by applying for a remote job. I had never heard of the company, but I knew I would be excellent at this job; I could just feel like I was supposed to apply for this job. 

They offered me the job after only one interview.

I was free from the bonds of my office job! Goodbye PTO requests, hello working in airports and hotel lobbies and coffee shop-lined streets.

But that's not really how it went. 

Instead of being the cool digital nomad who travels to a new place every week, I find myself sitting in my office most days staring out the same window at the overgrown grass in my front yard.

I constantly feel like a bad digital nomad. 

When I worked in TV news with my graveyard shift hours, I would sit on Google Flights and dream of the places I would travel to once I finally shed my office job and was able to work from anywhere in the world. I would plan full trips down to a line-by-line detailed budget for all of these different locations I wasn't going to go to.

Now, I still do that, but in my pajamas because I just rolled out of bed 10 minutes before I should have been logged onto Slack, checking all of my messages from the night before. 

What happened to traveling around the world, logging onto work in foreign places, and spending my time off working, exploring, and meeting new people? Life. Life is what happened.

Life Barriers

We all have our dreams of how our ideal lives would be, and clearly, mine is traveling the world and working from some cafe on some random street in a city I have never been to. We covered that part already. 

But with every dream, there is some type of barrier that's stopping us. For some, it's money. For others, it's the job we're stuck in. The barriers stopping me from living my dreams can be boiled down to three reasons: money, time, and love.

Money

This is probably one of the biggest barriers for people who want to live a more nomadic lifestyle or who just want to be able to travel a bit more than they already do. It's so hard to book a plane ticket when you're clearing out your bank account each month to pay for run-of-the-mill bills and expenses. 

You'll always see travel influencers who just say, "I sold all my possessions to travel," or "I have my own business," or "I saved up for an entire year to travel." But what about the people who just can't do that? I have rent to pay; I haven't started my own business yet, and I still want to go out and have a nice dinner with my friends sometimes. As much as I want to travel, I don't want to stop my life just to be able to afford a few trips. 

It's so tempting to book that $70 flight to San Diego until you start factoring in how much you would actually spend on places to stay, dinners, and transportation. Of course, you could do it on the cheap, but when you start being real about the costs and your monthly bills, the idea of traveling becomes more and more difficult to reach.

Time

We all wish we had more time, but we just need to make the most of the time we have. That being said, it's hard to sometimes find time to travel, even when that's the only thing we want to do. 

At my job, I work the traditional eight hours a day. While I work a little earlier than 9 to 5, I'm still confined to those eight hours. It's hard to catch a three-hour flight in the middle of your work day. It's not always logical to take an early or a late flight or even road trip after work hours. Sometimes, the cheapest flights are in the middle of the workday, and catching one after the office closes usually results in prices skyrocketing.

If you happen to have a part-time job or you're stuck with an in-person job, it's even harder to find time. Factor in spending time with family, friends, and other people in your lives; it can be hard to make time to travel. 

Love

In an effort to be honest about what really does stop me from living out my dreams, I have to talk about how being in love with a wonderful person stops me from seeing the world. 

I have a wonderful, caring boyfriend with whom I want to see the world with. That's not the problem. The problem is that he works an in-person job where he has to go in, and he doesn't have the option to work from home at all. Literally, he works at a golf course – he needs to be there. 

But because I love him and I want to see the world with him, I often want to save certain trips and locations until we can visit those places together. So when I'm debating on taking a new trip, I sometimes stop myself from going because my boyfriend can't get off work or we just can't make it work in our lives at that moment.

You can call me sappy. I understand. I accept who I am. 

Overcoming the Obstacles 

While these are often the reasons I give for not traveling all the time, I think about how I can (and really should) overcome them. 

When it comes to money, I personally work a part-time job bartending and waitressing at a cocktail bar in the summer. I love bartending and how easy the money can be. For me, it's worth it to work a few months a year to save up for traveling next year. I usually don't travel in the summer when the weather is hot and prices are high, so it's a great time to work and save money.

As I said before, time feels like a big excuse for me. I think for myself, I need to just prioritize the time it takes to travel or maybe splurg a bit more for flights after work or before work.Traveling takes planning and sometimes, we hope to just find a good deal and hop on a flight without thinking things through. But often, other things in life come up.

I think there's something romantic about just getting on a flight hours after you book it because it was a good deal when, in reality, some things need to be planned.

I plan to have a few trips planned out next fall and winter, and if I happen to find a good flight deal that I can make work with my life, I'm going to encourage myself to take the change and book it.

As for the boyfriend, I have a lot of faith we'll see a lot of the world together. Maybe I'll just have to check some places out for us first. 

Overall though, I know I need to be kinder to myself about how much I'm able to travel. As much as I love it, I know that not all of my life will happen in foreign places and I need to live out a lot fo my life at home with my friends and family. 

But I'm working on forcing myself out of my comfort zone and, hopefully, making the world my office. 

Here's to being a bad digital nomad, and hopefully, I'll see some improvement in the next few years!