What is a Digital Nomad?

Back in simpler times, if you were on a computer most of what you'd do would require opening a program. One such program would be a browser and on this browser, you could view websites, and on these websites you could play games. All the different software you used had distinctive names that made it clear what you were doing.

Then the iPhone came along and became the cool new thing in the world, and with its AppStore, everything you did on an iPhone involved an app.

Because everyone wanted their product to be as closely associated to the iPhone as possible, people stopped writing programs, and started creating apps. Games were now apps, browsers were now apps, websites were now apps. Where as before you would play a game on a website in a browser, now you were playing an app on an app in an app.

A similar fate befell the digital nomad. Where as once it was a distinctive term to describe a specific type of lifestyle, people started to view it as 'cool' and wanted to associate themselves with it. A few years ago, you had people who were backpacking, people who were living abroad, people on working holidays, people volunteering abroad. Now they're all digital nomads.

I once heard someone say "I'm going to France for a couple of weeks to be a digital nomad."

No, you're just going on holiday.

"I've bought a house overseas, so I'm moving there to be a digital nomad."

No, that's just moving house.

Backpacking while keeping a video blog used to be backpacking while keeping a video blog. Now, with your fifteen followers, you're a digital nomad influencer, or a "content creator" (which is possibly a euphemism for doing porn, I've never known for sure).

And while I don't begrudge people taking a shot and trying to have experiences and create lifestyles of which they are happy, I do resent how they've hijacked the term digital nomad to do it.

I have a particular dislike of social media, especially the culture of being an 'influencer', which from what I can tell means attempting to elevate yourself above others by only showing the good bits of your otherwise unremarkable life. To the point so many influencers refer to themselves as digital nomads, that I have begrudgingly diassociated myself from the term.

Now when I meet people in a foreign country and they ask me what I'm doing there, I simply say that I work remotely. I used to say that I was a digital nomad, but to many people that now connotes this influencer culture, and I just don't want people to look at me that way. I don't want those to be my peers.

I'll hasten to add, this does slightly annoy me. Perhaps demostrating I've ascended to the stage of life where I'm out-of-touch with today's youth, I long for things to go back to how they once were and for a digital nomad to actually be a literal digital nomad once more.

What is a nomad?

The nomad part is pretty easy to clarify, and according to the dictionary is "a member of a people that travels from place to place to find fresh pasture for its animals and has no permanent home."

Ok, not that literally, but apart from the animals, a nomad is someone who has no permanent home, and who moves to new places with regularity.

This is key for me. To qualify for the official Jethro definition of a digital nomad, you have no permanent home. I see a lot of people refer to themselves as things like 'short-term digital nomads', or where they say they're going to be a digital nomad for six months but don't give-up their home in their own country.

That's not being a nomad then. If you have a home to return to and a date when you plan to go back, then you're just taking a long holiday.

On the other side of the coin, I see people who describe themselves as digital nomads staying for a year or even multiple years in the same location.

That's just living abroad, there's nothing nomadic about signing a twelve-month lease on a condo, just because it's in a different country.

As this is little more than me being pedantic about the semantics, there's no explicit moment when you move from being a visitor somewhere, to living there, but for me if you stay in the same place upwards of six months, that's just living there.

The digital divide

My definition of the term nomad already excludes the majority of people who call themselves digital nomads because it gets them extra likes on Instagram. 'Digital' is a little harder to qualify, because who on earth makes money nowadays that doesn't involve a computer? But for me what it means, is someone who makes a sufficient income to fund their nomadic lifestyle, in a manner that's fully-remote.

I'll reluctantly admit that if your YouTube channel generates enough income that you can be nomadic and break-even every month, then you do qualify as a digital nomad, even though I hate you. More traditionally though, it would be someone who does any role, either employed or freelance, which they can do from anywhere in the world. In my case, that's software development, but it could equally be graphic design, digital marketing and SEO, product management, or dozens of others.

What doesn't qualify is someone with an Instagram account and fifteen followers who once made 5¢ in a month so claims to have a digital income. If you don't make enough to support your lifestyle, or at least close to it, then you're not a digital nomad, you're just someone travelling with a lot of savings, you lucky bastard.

A bitter pill

When you bring the two together, a digital nomad is someone who has nothing that could constitute a permanent home, and who is able to fund their lifestyle completely online, with the freedom to work from anywhere in the world without it affecting that income.

So there you have it. You're not reading this on an app, it's on a website, and a digital nomad is not someone who's taken their laptop and gone on holiday for two weeks, they've just gone on holiday for two weeks.

How do those lemons taste?