About Slowmadding

"Travel broadens the mind"

"To travel is to live"

"Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer"

This is just some of the stupid shit that people who've never been anywhere say on Instagram.

Travel is fun. It allows you to meet a lot of people. It lets you to spend your time in less financially demanding places. It enables you to stay in climates you're suited to. And it's suitable for people who just aren't wired to stay still.

A nomadic lifestyle stifles your instinctive ability to slump into an irrelevant routine, then act irrationally to prevent that routine getting disrupted.

That in a nutshell, is why I'm a digital nomad. It's a lifestyle for people scared of commitment to any place, person or way of being, because when you're a nomad and you don't like how things are going, you don't have to face the reality of trying to make the best of it, you just leave.

You could term it as a coward's lifestyle, and you'd perhaps be right to do so, but in today's polarised world so much is out of the control of any individual that being ready, willing and able to change location at a moment's notice could also be viewed as the ultimate acceptance of reality.

Yet let's not ignore the biggest motivator. Living the life of an affluent nomad, going where you please, to whatever climate you choose and to the people you feel like surrounding yourself with - it's fun. It's a fun way to spend your finite time on earth.

Long before I was a digital nomad, I went on a backpacking trip that lasted arguably more than ten years. Whether you include the time I was settled and teaching English abroad as part of the same trip is debatable. The motivation for that trip though, which started right after my graduation from university, was that there's a big world out there, and I don't want to spend the next forty years of my short life sitting in an office in London. So I left.

With very little money in my pocket I went to cheap countries and learned to exist on the bare minimum, going to richer places with higher salaries when I needed to top it up.

Ten years later, still abroad but a little older and a little wiser, I accepted that while still enjoying the lifestyle, there was no future and no retirement in just making what I needed to get by each month. So I asked myself, how exactly can I build my perfect life?

I've never been a believer in hard work. You do it when you have to, but if the opportunity is there to earn more money for less work, then you take it every time. If I can get by on four, or three, or even two days work per week, then why work five? Life is too short and there is no pride in working hard for no reason. I want to enjoy my time, not spend it working.

The other side of that, is if I can reduce how much I spend, then I won't need to earn so much to begin with.

Ten years backpacking hadn't satiated my hunger to go to different places. Looking forward to a two-week vacation every year just wasn't going to cut it for me. And in living in Thailand while teaching English, I'd learned how much happier I am in warmer climates.

So I wanted a life that allowed me to earn the most money for the least work, with the freedom to do it from the cheapest places and the best climates.

At this point, aged around 32, I'd never written a line of code in my life. Yet when I pondered this riddle, software development was an industry known for high salaries and remote work. And so just like that (it took a bit longer) I decided - I'm going to be a software developer.

At that point I'd describe myself as a motivated idiot, but sometimes motivation is all you need.

To cut a long and painful story very short, I learned to code, moved back to London and worked as a software developer at a couple of start-ups for three years until I had the experience I needed to go it alone and start freelancing. Within a matter of days I had my first, and to this point only client, who needed me to work for two days per week, earning me enough that, from the right places in the world, I could live comfortably and even save a little on the side.

So I gave up my flat in London, booked a flight to Thailand, and in the time since I haven't looked back.

I'm yet to go anywhere I've had to wear more than a t-shirt and shorts. And with the blessing of being a dual-national with two of the best passports you can have for travelling, it took four very hard and stressful years, but I turned my dream into a reality.

I now work two days per week, and live very comfortably doing so, even saving a bit for my eventual retirement. I scoff at the idea of ever again working more. I have the ultimate freedom to travel anywhere in the world I want to at a moment's notice, and I live a sometimes lonely, but ultimately fun and rewarding lifestyle

Slowmadding, this website, is one of my hobby projects for my five-day weekends. Partly it's a place that I can write code. Partly it's a way to pass on what I've learned to people that live, or that want to live a similar lifestyle. And partly it's just a record for my own sake - something to look back on about the places I've been.

Hopefully if you've made it here, then it gives some value to you. Ultimately all I'll say, is make sure to forge your own path. I built my life this way because it's the way that I want to live, but don't try and copy it. You have to find what you want to do.