Migration in the digital age: digital nomads

In the past, a common reason to migrate was to look for a job, in other words, you went to were there were opportunities to compete for. This is still the case today, if you want to move to a large city. You’ll have to really want it, and you’ll have to put out, and you’ll have to make sacrifices — namely, living in big cities is expensive. It’s common to earn a large salary in a city, but you’ll also be spending much, or even most of it as the expenses are far higher in a big city.

With the emergence of digital nomadism and the digitalization of jobs, you now have a new generation of people seeking to maximize their standard of living by seeking out lower cost locations. If you are fortunate enough to secure an employment opportunity in a large, Western city, you might be better off to just take your job and go somewhere else altogether!

Many techies today, are therefore looking for slightly less competitive, saturated places. Therefore, you see places like Chiang Mai (Thailand), Ubud (Bali), and Prague (Czech Republic), Berlin (Germany) seeing a steady inflow of digital professionals looking to enjoy life, maximize their purchasing power and just take in new places.

This phenomenon does lead to something of a parallel economy in the nomad hotspots. Yes, the nomads will bring in money to the local economies, but it might go into relatively few hands. Meanwhile, some of the most obvious nomad hubs are downright getting undesirable as these pockets of value-for-money start to saturate.

Meanwhile, there’s also an entirely new sub-genre of people who are outright seeking to live off the grid entirely. Is this feasible? If you are fortunate enough to have an occupation that lends itself to the digital economy (and you have some wanderlust), should you take the plunge? Take a listen.

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