Digital nomad
A digital nomad is a person who travels freely while working remotely using information and communications technology such as the Internet. Such people generally have minimal material possessions and work remotely in temporary housing, hotels, cafes, public libraries, co-working spaces, or recreational vehicles, using Wi-Fi, smartphones or mobile hotspots to access the Internet.
The majority of digital nomads describe themselves as programmers, content creators, designers, or developers. Some digital nomads are perpetual travelers, while others only maintain the lifestyle for a short period of time. While some nomads travel through multiple countries, others remain in one area, and some may choose to travel while living in a vehicle, in a practice often known as van-dwelling.
In 2023, there were 17.3 million American digital nomads, which was a 131% increase since 2019, and the number increased to 18.1 million in 2024.
Etymology
One of the first digital nomads was Steven K. Roberts, who from 1983 to 1991 rode more than 10,000 miles across America on a computerized recumbent bicycle equipped with amateur radio and other equipment that allowed him to talk, type and work on the move during the day before camping at night. Roberts was featured in Popular Computing magazine; the magazine referred to him as a "high-tech nomad".The term "digital nomad" started to be used in the early 1990s to describe a new type of high tech traveling lifestyle made possible by the growth of computer networking and the popularization of mobile devices like laptops, tablets and PDAs. In his 1992 travelogue Exploring the Internet, Carl Malamud described a "digital nomad" who "travels the world with a laptop, setting up FidoNet nodes." In 1993, Random House published the Digital Nomad's Guide series of guidebooks by Mitch Ratcliffe and Andrew Gore. The guidebooks, PowerBook, AT&T EO Personal Communicator, and Newton's Law, used the term "digital nomad" to refer to the increased mobility and more powerful communication and productivity technologies that new mobile devices introduced.
Craig McCaw predicted in 1993 that the union of telecommunication and computing would create a new nomadic industry. By enabling people to conduct business from any location, wireless communication and digital assistants would facilitate a return to a nomadic lifestyle where people moved as they wished and took their environment and possessions with them.
The 1997 book Digital Nomad by Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners used the term to describe how technology allows for a return of societies to a nomadic lifestyle. Makimoto and Manners identified an emerging "digital nomad" lifestyle freed by technology "from the constraints of geography and distance." One of the first uses of digital nomads in research was in 2006 in the paper Towards the Epistemology of digital nomads by Patokorpi.
In contemporary usage, the term broadly describes a category of highly mobile, location-independent professionals who are able to live and work remotely from anywhere in the world with internet access, due to the integration of mobile technology into everyday life and work settings.
Benefits
People typically become digital nomads due to a desire to travel, location independence and the lowered cost of living often provided by leaving expensive cities. Cost of living ranks chief among the criteria that digital nomads value when selecting a destination, followed by climate, diversity, and available leisure activities. There are also benefits for employers, as a 2021 study concluded that there is a causal relationship between worker productivity and the option to "work from anywhere," as workers who were freed from geographic limitations showed an average output increase of 4.4% while controlling for other factors. Digital nomads also typically spend more than 35% of their income in the location in which they are staying, an injection of capital that has been shown to stimulate local economies in popular destinations, primarily promoting the service industry and the sale of consumer goods.Challenges
Although digital nomads enjoy advantages in freedom and flexibility, they report loneliness as their biggest struggle, followed by burnout. Feelings of loneliness are often an issue for digital nomads because nomadism usually requires freedom from personal attachments such as marriage. The importance of developing face-to-face quality relationships has been stressed to maintain mental health in remote workers.Other challenges include maintaining international health insurance with coverage globally, abiding by different local laws including payment of required taxes and obtaining work visas, and maintaining long-distance relationships with friends and family back home. Digital nomads also very rarely have access to retirement benefits, unemployment insurance, or set time off from work, and often make less money than they could make through traditional employment. As many digital nomads resort to gig work or freelancing, their opportunities for pay can be inconsistent and sporadic. Other challenges may also include time zone differences, the difficulty of finding a reliable connection to the internet, and the absence of delineation between work and leisure time.
There are a few contributing factors to the blurring of this line; certain paid work can be viewed as leisure when it is enjoyable, but many tasks that involve travel and acquiring accommodations can become viewed as another type of work, even though those would traditionally fall into the leisure category. Another issue faced by digital nomads is that of mobility; a travelling worker must be able to keep any necessary equipment with them as they move from location to location, and it is difficult for a digital nomad to manage personal belongings. In fact, many digital nomads do not have a "home base," and must therefore adopt a minimalist lifestyle.
One potentially negative impact of digital nomadism, that does not affect the nomads themselves, is the possibility of 'transnational gentrification.' Concerns have been raised about the nature of the relationship between digital nomads, who are most often from the Global North, and the countries they travel to, generally in the Global South. The problem may arise in regards to housing competition between native people and travelling workers, as well as in personal interactions and the risk of tourism over-dependency. However, the exact scope and real-world impacts of this problem have not yet been settled by research.
Impact of COVID-19
In 2020, a research study found that 10.9 million American workers described themselves as digital nomads, an increase of 49% from 2019. The primary reason for this rapid increase was office closure and the shift toward remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple countries were prompted to offer new visa programs and to change their policies towards foreign workers as a result of the pandemic.The pandemic had a larger impact, in terms of mobility, on traditional job holders than on independent workers. While the number of independent workers living as digital nomads increased slightly in 2020, the number of traditional workers who changed their lifestyle to live as digital nomads nearly doubled, from 3.2 million people in 2019 to 6.3 million in 2020. This is because many traditional jobs stopped requiring their employees to physically report to an office or set location everyday, so many people were subsequently able to travel freely while still working.
The majority of this increase consisted of Millennial and Generation Z workers, possibly due in part to their minimized concern about COVID-19. At the same time, another effect of the pandemic was the limited ability to travel, particularly across national borders. For this reason, more and more digital nomads have chosen to remain domestic, especially in the United States. Living as a digital nomad often entails travelling from high-cost areas to cheaper regions.