30-second summary: I seriously planned and tried living as a digital nomad, only to find that frequent movement itself constantly ate up attention and digital-world overhead โ leaving me with less capacity to actually perceive reality. In the end I went home: not giving up on faraway places, but realizing that movement isn’t the goal, experience is. Home can be a low-friction base that lets my attention go to whatever world is actually worth exploring, physical or digital/intellectual.
I once seriously considered becoming a digital nomad.
Taking my laptop and leaving familiar places, switching cities every few days, working from cafรฉs during the day, exploring local food and streets at night. Work no longer tied to one office, life no longer tied to one place.
It sounded free.
But once I actually started planning and trying it for real, I ended up going home anyway.
That’s not because I found that living nomadically was pointless. Quite the opposite โ I became more and more certain of why I wanted to go to different places. And it was precisely because I finally understood that, that I realized I didn’t actually need to turn “constant movement” into a way of life itself.
Why I Wanted to Live Nomadically Link to heading
I’ve always felt that the richness of a life comes largely from the richness of its experiences.
If you imagine life as a holographic film that only runs twenty-four hours a day, then the same day, in a different place, plays out as completely different footage.
Unfamiliar streets, buildings, food, weather, and relationships between people โ even just the street you see stepping out of a hotel โ all feed the brain input it’s never had before.
And new input doesn’t only make you happy.
It changes how you think.
Someone who’s lived in a familiar environment for a long time easily slips into a kind of autopilot: the familiar room, the familiar route, the familiar restaurant, the familiar people, the familiar work. Life can be very efficient this way, but it also runs into fewer and fewer genuinely new things.
An unfamiliar environment interrupts that autopilot.
New experiences produce new associations, new associations can produce new ideas, and creativity is, I believe, an indispensable part of self-actualization.
So wanting to go to different places was never just because “traveling is fun.”
I genuinely believe:
A life should have access to more than one environment.
But Being a Nomad and Traveling Aren’t the Same Thing Link to heading
I later realized that what I used to imagine as “nomadic living” was actually closer to an extreme form of “movement.”
Changing location every three to five days.
Shenzhen, then Guangzhou, then Guilin, Guiyang, Kunming… arriving in each city meant starting over โ finding lodging, cafรฉs, restaurants, and figuring out the next stop.
At first, it looked completely free.
But once I actually started planning it out, I found that the number of things I had to deal with every day suddenly ballooned.
Where’s the next stop?
Where should I stay?
How do I get there?
Where will I work once I arrive?
Is there reliable Wi-Fi and power?
Where’s a safe place to leave my laptop?
Should I keep moving tomorrow?
Should I stay a few more days?
None of these questions is individually difficult, but they persistently eat up your attention.
And, ironically, most of this happens in the digital world.
Maps, travel booking apps, train apps, food delivery apps, chat windows, browser tabs…
My body was traveling, but my consciousness stayed trapped in my phone and laptop.
Eventually I realized that the biggest problem with frequent movement isn’t even the exhaustion.
It’s that it leaves you with no bandwidth left to actually experience reality.
I had set out to enter a new physical world, but instead I was constantly processing information about that world.
Which produced a strange result:
In trying to get more real-world experience, I actually depleted my capacity to perceive it.
The Travel I Actually Enjoy Isn’t About “Movement” Link to heading
I once had a very different kind of travel experience.
Before going to Japan last year, I spent a month and a half preparing for a two-week trip.
I knew in advance where I’d be staying, where I’d go, and roughly what was worth doing each day.
So once I actually got to Japan, I hardly had to make any decisions at all.
I knew where the next stop was, and roughly what I was going to see.
The rest of my attention could finally stay with the present moment.
Japan itself was also unfamiliar enough.
A lot of the time I didn’t even need to go to famous sights. Getting off the train and just wandering โ the streets, the buildings, the convenience stores, the residential neighborhoods, the rural scenery โ was already interesting enough on its own.
This was very different from what I’d later imagined as “switching cities every three to five days within China.”
I started to realize:
The value of travel isn’t movement โ it’s entering a different world.
If a place is genuinely worth exploring, staying there for a month, or half a year, is perfectly fine.
If a place doesn’t have enough novelty, even three days might be too long.
So I no longer think nomadic living has to mean moving frequently.
If anything, I’ve increasingly come to think that what actually suits me might look like:
- Staying in one place for a week or two, or even longer;
- Considering whether to move to somewhere else after about half a month;
- If I really like a place, staying a month, or half a year, is completely fine;
- Working a fixed 4โ6 hours a day;
- Genuinely leaving the rest of the time for local life;
- Not chasing a checklist of attractions, but looking for an environment worth wandering through.
The key here isn’t “how long you stay.”
It’s:
Don’t let movement itself become the goal.
What Kind of Place Is Worth Staying In? Link to heading
I later realized I don’t particularly need a place with “lots of sights.”
What I need more is a place worth wandering through.
Chiang Rai’s Black, Blue, and White Temples are certainly worth a dedicated visit, but they’re not really what interests me most.
What I like more is:
Not knowing what I’ll come across once I go downstairs โ but even without a clear purpose, walking for an hour never feels like a waste.
That requires a city to be different enough, and also walkable.
A car-dependent city, even one packed with attractions, rarely gives me that experience.
If getting from one place to another always requires driving, then “going out for a walk” becomes a pointless thing to do.
But in a city with the right scale, built for walking, life itself is exploration.
You don’t need to schedule ten sights a day.
The street is the sight.
The restaurant is the sight.
The neighborhood is the sight.
Even just sitting down for a cup of coffee can become a complete and satisfying part of the day.
But Free Exploration Shouldn’t Be Romanticized Either Link to heading
There’s another problem that’s easy to overlook while traveling:
If you don’t know what to do that day, there’s a real chance you’ll end up doing nothing at all.
“I’ll figure it out once I get there,” “just wander around, maybe something great will happen” โ it sounds romantic.
But the reality can also be:
Wake up, scroll your phone.
Think about where to go today.
Look up some guides for a while.
Still not sure where to go.
Eat.
Scroll the phone some more.
The day is gone.
So now I lean toward something in between “a detailed itinerary” and “total spontaneity.”
Know in advance why you came to this place.
Have a few clear expectations.
It could be a specific place, a type of food, a hike, a certain street โ or simply wanting to live for a while in a completely different environment.
But you don’t need to turn every single day into a checklist of tasks.
Set expectations for your trip, not a task list.
That’s what actually lets you experience real freedom once you get there.
In the End, I Went Home Anyway Link to heading
After all this thinking, I ended up making a decision that was the exact opposite of where I started.
Going home.
Not because I suddenly found home more interesting than the world out there.
Quite the opposite โ home might be one of the least interesting places in the physical world.
But I suddenly realized something:
The dullness of the physical world can sometimes be exactly a form of freedom.
At home, I don’t have to solve, every single day:
Where to stay, where to work, what to eat next, how to get around, where to put my luggage, how’s the Wi-Fi, is my laptop safe…
All of that has already been solved.
I have a stable space where I can work, cook, make coffee, read, write, run code, and think.
And behind this seemingly “boring” repetitive life is actually a huge amount of friction that’s already been eliminated.
So I started rethinking what world I actually want to explore.
I realized that, for me right now, besides the physical world, there’s another world just as vast โ maybe even more compelling:
The digital world, and the world of knowledge.
A book can take me somewhere that has never existed on any real-world map.
A new research question can keep me thinking for days on end.
A code experiment can produce a result I never expected.
A single conversation with someone can also change how I understand something.
These are experiences too.
And these experiences are just as capable of bringing novelty, association, and creativity.
So I no longer believe:
Staying home = no experiences.
I’d rather put it this way:
Minimize the complexity of the physical world, and give your attention to whatever world you actually want to explore.
Home Can Be a Base, Not a Cage Link to heading
I used to easily equate “staying home” with “being trapped at home.”
If life repeats itself for too long, I’d feel like I should leave.
But now I’ve started to think the problem might not be with “home” itself.
If the environment at home is comfortable enough, it can actually become an excellent base.
The problems that really need solving are specific, concrete problems.
For instance, part of why I initially didn’t want to go home this time wasn’t that I disliked home โ it was an unbearable low-frequency hum from a standing fan that a neighbor upstairs kept running constantly.
That alone was enough to make me want to flee.
But now I’m more inclined to fix the actual problem, rather than just enduring it indefinitely.
For example, using the sixty-square-meter living room as my main space, running the air conditioner, and heading out to work when I need to; switching to a different room for sleep, and using earplugs.
That might sound almost trivially small.
But behind it is a fairly important shift:
I don’t necessarily need to flee an imperfect environment โ I can also redesign how I relate to it.
Life doesn’t need to be optimized into a perfect state.
It just needs to be sustainable enough.
So, Will I Still Live Nomadically? Link to heading
Yes.
And now I actually think that if I ever find a place I truly want to go to in the future, I might stay there even longer.
Two weeks is fine.
A month is fine.
Half a year is fine too.
As long as I genuinely want to live there โ not because “well, since I’m already out here, I should keep moving.”
I also won’t define myself as a “digital nomad” anymore.
I prefer a different state:
A low-friction home base, while keeping the ability to step into another world whenever I want.
If I want to go to Japan, I’ll go to Japan.
If I want to live in Chiang Mai for a few months, I’ll go to Chiang Mai.
If I want to experience a completely different city, I’ll live there for a while.
But if there’s no particular place I want to be on a given day, I’ll just stay home.
Reading, working, researching, writing, running experiments.
Not moving constantly just to prove that I’m a “free person.”
The Freedom I Ended Up Finding Link to heading
This attempt at nomadic living didn’t turn me into a nomad in the end.
But it made me much clearer on why I want to travel, and much clearer on when I shouldn’t.
I used to think:
Freedom means being able to leave at any time.
Now I think that’s not quite enough.
Real freedom might actually be:
I can leave, but I can also stay.
I don’t need to be perpetually on the road to have a rich life.
I don’t need to stay in one place forever to have a stable life either.
I can live in one place for half a year, or set out on a whim.
I can spend an entire day wandering aimlessly through an unfamiliar city, or stay in for days on end reading just one book.
I can go looking for novelty in the physical world, or throw myself into the world of knowledge and the digital.
Movement isn’t the goal โ experience is.
And experience doesn’t come in only one form.
For me, what matters now probably isn’t making life constantly change, but genuinely directing my attention toward whatever is actually worth exploring.
Sometimes that’s on a street in an unfamiliar city.
Sometimes it’s in a book, a piece of code, a research question, or a thought I haven’t quite worked out yet.
So this time, I went home after all.
Not because I gave up on faraway places.
But because I finally understood:
The distance should be a place I go to because I want to โ not a place I have to go to in order to escape the present.