One of the earliest known uses of the term digital nomad was in the 1997 book Digital Nomad by Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners, which describes how technology allows for a return of societies to a nomadic lifestyle.
I used to be a digital nomad, I suppose one of the really early ones. When I started backpacking in the early 90s I hadn’t even heard of the internet or the then brand new www yet. My first experience as a digital nomad was with a dial-up modem and a BBS. I was going on an interrail trip to Britain and Ireland and I was looking for a way to get from Scotland to Ireland by train and ferry. I never really was a travel guide, nor a planner, so I usually picked up maps, hotel flyers and tourist brochures at the local railway station upon arrival in a truly nomadic fashion. As I couldn’t find any information about the ferry link, I decided to post a question in one of my BBS fora. That was in the evening when I woke up the next morning, the answer was already there. Seems like a horribly long time when one grew up with google (which of course didn’t exist at the time). However, to me, it was a revelation. It was like I had seen the future. What’s more, I was pretty certain that I could trust that person who gave me the information. The word “troll” hadn’t even been invented yet (at least not in the sense it is used nowadays). No, cyberspace was a pretty safe place with people who loved sharing information (they might not always have been the friendliest of people, but they tended to be very helpful and honest, sometimes a bit like people on the spectrum).
That was the day that my life as a digital nomad began. Some years later in 95, I was a regular user of the computer lab at the University of Florence. The location was great, with a view over the river Arno, the internet connection was horribly slow. Then internet cafes sprang up and I visited dozens and dozens of them, from Moscow to Lisbon. At first, they were quite pricey, but as internet-enabled phones became common they also became really cheap and when the era of smartphones arrived they became a real rarity. The last time I have been to one was in Siberia in 2005, as there were no radio signals apart from the cybercafe that was operated via satellite.
If you were a digital nomad, chances were that you were also a pioneer, always the first among your friends to use a new digital device or service. Few people understood my excitement when I got my first Google Nexus phone with Google maps installed. Few people saw all the possibilities, so I couldn’t resist making a short YouTube video 10 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUCxTJbFvtY
It turned out that free information wasn’t the only perk of being a digital nomad. Meeting people of your own tribe was an even bigger one. There were always some really great people among those I met on my trips. It was like digital nomads attracted each other like magnets. And we do. The reason is we are high in a personality trait called “openness to experience”. This personality trait makes sure we are interested in
- Foreign cultures (for many the further the more interesting)
- Technology that helps us quench our thirst for knowledge
- People who are open to diversity
This trait made sure that the people we get to know on our nomadic enterprises are very much like ourselves. I have argued that such people have more ancient hunter-gatherer traits vs people who have more ancient farmer traits: highly conscientious, hard-working, but basically not very curious and sometimes even xenophobe. The evolutionary reason why hunter-gatherer types (N/iNtuitive in Myers-Briggs) are likely to become digital nomads is their “survival pattern”. Foragers have a split and merge system, in which they split from their band when resources become scarce or when the band becomes too big and conflict arises and then merge with other bands.
This is exactly the pattern we see in digital nomads. It has always been easier for me to make friends abroad than at home, for the simple reason that the people who are interested in me abroad tend to belong to my own tribe. We forager types may have many reasons for becoming nomadic: there is this “wanderlust” in us (and I am pretty sure most forager types have the DRD4-7R gene variant, which is called wanderlust genes). The next level would be being bored with farmer routine and longing for change and the final level would be total despair with life and society and the need for splitting. From the Buddha to millionaires who leave everything behind to start from scratch, such people have always been hunter-gatherer type people.
Sometimes we meet our fellow foragers only once, sometimes our paths cross frequently and sometimes we become a community. The last is quite rare because of modern circumstances and because we get used to “walking alone”. The best way of meeting fellow forager is to take the path less travelled (Robert Frost was undoubtedly a forager type). In the late 90s, I went to Romania to join international language classes. Almost all the people there were forager types. There was the occasional pastoralist type, looking for adventure, but mostly we were one big family. It didn’t matter if you were from the US, Russia, France or Japan, we got along like a house on fire. There was an INFP, like me, who I would later see again in Florence, London and Dublin. Little did I know she was an INFP then, but when I came across MBTI and she sent me her result, I wasn’t surprised anymore that we found it so easy to get along, we were basically born tuned to the same wavelength.
My digital nomadism ended when we started having children. Settling down isn’t easy for forager types as it brings along the farmer kind of lifestyle we don’t enjoy much. We feel there is less light in our lives. Some of us will never put up with settling down for good. Most of us do. I miss travelling sometimes, but my children compensate more than enough for the joy I miss out on. At the end of the day, it’s not travelling per se I miss, but the wonderful people I met along the way.
Through my writings, I have recently got to know many more digital nomads, the British guy who lives in Japan, the American girl who moved to many places before settling in Australia. A few days ago one woman told me that she moved to China to a place where everyone was an intuitive and she finally found her tribe there. There are so many forager type people who have their own Eat Pray Love stories to tell. Like Elisabeth Gilbert, most of them are ENTPs or ENFPs. I would like to dedicate the following song to them and all the people I personally met and who live scattered around the world now. The song is by Italian singer Alice (INFP), titled “Nomadi” and from her album “Viaggiatrice solitaria” (lonely female traveller):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TONJPM98AF0
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