Goodbye to All That: Escape Stories

Place matters—so much so that some successful people are willing to abandon their established lives to change it. Creative class professionals who leave behind their conventional lives and employment report that life in creative class cities is expensive and demanding. Moreover, their so-called creative jobs are often routine and disappointing, failing to offer a career track or promise of wage growth that will outpace the rising cost of living in these prime locations. This chapter examines digital nomads’ narratives of the push factors that drove them from their home countries into the digital nomad lifestyle abroad, detailing the factors that triggered their decisions to flee unfulfilling jobs, unsatisfying relationships, and unsustainable lifestyles. It explains why people with initiative and skills are increasingly considering new paths that allow them to retain control over their location, lifestyle, and employment options.

Not on Holiday: Making Money and Building Dreams

Digital nomads have come to Bali to work. Chapter 4 unpacks nomads’ sources of earned income through entrepreneurship, freelancing, and full-time employment. It also details their occupations, which tend to cluster in marketing, e-commerce, coaching, and technology. It then explains the role of coworking spaces in the digital nomad ecosystem and the processes through which digital nomads build and sustain their work-centric community. Many of the more successful nomads continue to work side-by-side with those who are just starting out in this lifestyle. The informal social environment of coworking is supplemented by formal skill share events on topics like quitting one’s job, blogging, coding, podcasting, social media, outsourcing, team-building, partnering, getting investors, and finance that give nascent entrepreneurs opportunities to learn from the community. Bali is a place where people easily find cheerleaders, advisors, and helpers as they pursue their professional dreams.

Conclusion

Disillusioned knowledge workers move around the world to get away from places they find toxic. However, they find that place matters. Even these digital nomads, who value freedom and mobility above nearly all else, seek places where they can build face-to-face community with like-minded others. Digital nomads reject the bargain offered to today’s creative professionals in world class cities, believing it to be too damaging to the values they hold dear. They have created a community where they believe they can reach their full human potential. This chapter summarizes findings, discusses their relevance for theories about community and the creative class, and offers insights about the future of work and cities.

Stages of Nomadism: Honeymooners, Visa Runners, and Resident Nomads

Chapter 5 describes the stages of digital nomadism through the lens of three vignettes. The first, focused on honeymooners testing out the location-independent lifestyle, features Pauline, a twenty-eight-year-old who arrived in Bali two months after quitting a high-pressure Manhattan job in the music industry. The second vignette illustrates visa runners, who “run” to another country to receive an entry stamp before returning in order to extend their stay past the sixty days allowed on a typical visit visa. It profiles Lucy, a media content creator, who left her job in London to work as a freelancer based in Bali. The final vignette illuminates the lives of resident nomads who have been in Bali for over a year and have no immediate plans to leave. This vignette tells the story of Lorelei and Norman, a couple who moved to Bali in 2014 and have reinvented their lives through online entrepreneurship.

Practical Magic: Welcome to Silicon Bali

Bali is known as an exotic paradise, full of novel influences that Westerners are eager to experience. This chapter describes the pull factors that attract digital nomads to Bali. It uses the lens of place branding to break down the social and cultural construction of Bali as a remote working mecca, and it introduces the concept of work tourism, a new niche market of place branding aimed at consumers who want to reimagine their work and work identities in the context of a leisure travel experience. The chapter also describes digital nomads and explains how their sense of magic and practicality influenced them to move to Bali, transforming Bali into one of the world’s foremost digital nomad destinations. It also notes the drawbacks of Bali as a nomad site and draws attention to some of the more general negative aspects of tourism’s impact on the island.

Introduction

This chapter outlines the book’s objectives, conceptual framework, and organization, and it introduces the voices of several digital nomads from our sample. It begins with some illustrative quotations from informants and then describes our main arguments about work and community, providing a rationale for studying this subject. Specifically, it asserts that digital nomads are united by an intense, shared commitment to personal reinvention, are creating new paths to meaningful work, and surprisingly, they are also pioneering a new type of place-based community. Next, the chapter defines and introduces readers to the concept of a digital nomad and provides an overview of digital nomad hubs (i.e., places that attract large numbers of digital nomads, who then form communities that cater to their own needs). It also introduces Bali, the site of the study. Finally, it describes the research methods, sample, and plan of the book.

Paradise Paradox: Constructing a Digital Nomad Community

This chapter addresses the paradox of self-initiated “location-independent” nomads in search of a face-to-face community but also a community with minimal obligations. Research has examined how technology has transformed work and social relationships in physical and virtual communities. The chapter reviews this literature and adds to it by explaining how digital nomads construct place-based communities. Though specialized online networks can provide access to like-minded individuals, it is lonely to work on a laptop in physical isolation. Digital nomads respond to the shortcomings of both traditional and online communities by living in digital nomad hubs characterized by both fluidity and intimacy. These two characteristics of nomad hubs make this a new type of place-based community that violates many traditional views found in the sociological literature, which tend to emphasize kin networks, permanent residency, and social contracts and obligations tied to various institutions.