Digital Nomads

 There was a time not long ago when I had four houses. I don't mean that literally, of course. I am not now and have never been a billionaire. But it was indeed my privilege to have, for a brief point in time, no fewer than four different places in my life where I could crash on any given night and expect to find a welcome. There was my usual place in Boston. There was my sister and brother-in-law's place, where I had mostly been staying since the start of the pandemic lock-down. There was my parent's home. And there was also a family place in Wyoming. And since I was working from home during the pandemic, I could complete my job from anywhere with a WiFi connection. So you better believe I took advantage of my mobility, hopping from one location to another and back again, until I had completed the full circuit multiple times. 

Looking back on it, this sounds awesome and enviable to me, as it does perhaps to you too. I sometimes wonder why I ever gave it up. After all, what I am describing is nothing other than the "digital nomad" lifestyle, which came into vogue during the pandemic and was often depicted as the most desirable of possible existences. After all, since so many of our jobs had gone remote, we could theoretically do them from anywhere. So why not move around? Why not take that next Zoom meeting from Iceland, if we were so inclined? 

And to be sure, I look back on the period fondly; but, if I am being honest in my recollections, I have to note that I was not actually very happy during that time. The truth was that I felt my career had stagnated. I was not learning anything new; I was repeating myself; and—worst of all—I had no significant future milestone to look forward to. I was pretty content with my work—it suited me well—but for that very reason I had nothing to look forward to. There was no next level to advance to; I had achieved an adequate adult existence, by my own limited standards. 

And so, my constant horizontal mobility between residences became a kind of substitute for my lack of vertical mobility in my career. And as such, it could only prove effective in comforting me for so long. I would stay for a few weeks in one place, but then quickly felt I had to keep moving, because if I remained stationary too long at any one location, the ennui would catch up with me. And this is indeed precisely what happened. I recall one breathtaking trip I took in August of 2021, during which I stayed with a friend in Utah; then rented an Airbnb for two weeks in the same state; then stayed for a time at my family's place in Wyoming, where my dad eventually met up with me and we went to Yellowstone. And I was able to do my job the whole time from my computer. It's hard to beat that for an embodiment of the idyllic digital nomad lifestyle. 

It sounds amazing; and yet, I was miserable. I was literally and figuratively going around in circles; spinning my wheels. And that misery caught up with me royal when I got home to Boston. 

I remember that I had been reading John Williams's revisionist Western Butcher's Crossing on the trip. I had started it, fittingly enough, in Yellowstone, on a late night when I was camped out in an SUV listening to the indescribably eerie lowing of the elks. This would have been perfect enough, since the novel is about hunting in the Wyoming wilderness. But I didn't finish the novel until the afternoon when I finally got home to Boston, and was washing off the accumulated sweat of a day's worth of travel. And, in one of those synchronicities that happen a few precious times in an eclectic reading life, I happened to read that same afternoon the passage where Williams's protagonist returns from his hunt through the wilds of Wyoming, washes off the accumulated grime from his travels—and then is forced to confront that he has returned a changed man to a world that will never be the same. 

"It's not the same, is it." the protagonist asks another character, upon his return. "No, it isn't," she replies—or something to that effect. "But I'm glad you came back." 

Like Williams's character, I was not able from that day on to enjoy being a digital nomad. Trapped back in my Boston condo, I fell into a deep depression. I realized I needed a change—and a bigger change than could be provided by mere horizontal mobility. I needed a vertical dimension to my life again. It was around that time that I began to plot my exit from my full-time job and a return to school. 

I am not the first to find something fundamentally unsatisfying in the life of the digital nomad. In my reading since, indeed, I have found that this dissatisfaction is something of a trope. Even before people could be digital nomads, that is to say, they were already complaining about the ennui that comes from excessive horizontal mobility. 

Of course, before the era of widespread remote work due to the pandemic, this was a problem largely confined to aristocrats who could afford multiple residences and had no day jobs that required them to be reliably in one location all the time. But, those who found themselves in such a privileged position managed to complain about it for exactly the same reason that I discovered from my own experience as a traveler. 

I was reading Thomas Bernhard's novel Wittgenstein's Nephew, for instance (wait, is it a novel? or more of an autobiographical screed? Unclear—maybe both). And while the Bernhard character spends much of his time moving from the city to his second home in the countryside and back again, he notes that he can never stay in one place for long without growing intensely dissatisfied. In describing this condition, Bernhard penned a passage that profoundly resonated with my years of pandemic living as a digital nomad: "Basically [...] I always want to be somewhere else, in the place I have just fled from. [....] The truth is that I am happy only when I am sitting in the car, between the place I have just left and the place I am driving to. [.... W]hen I arrive, I am suddenly the unhappiest person imaginable. Basically, I am one of those people who cannot bear to be anywhere and are happy only in between places." (McLintock trans.)

And reaching much further back in history, one finds that the ancients were acquainted with the phenomenon of the ennui of the digital nomad as well. I was reading Lucretius the other week, and in one passage, in an attempt to describe the emptiness and vanity of a life lived without the philosophical insights of his master Epicurus, Lucretius describes the characteristic plight of the aristocrats of his time who owned multiple houses—one in Rome and one in the countryside. 

It is the same plight that Thomas Bernhard describes—the plight of the digital nomad: "Often a man leaves his spacious mansion, because he is utterly bored with being at home, and then suddenly returns on finding that he is no better off when he is out. He races out to his country villa [....] But the moment he sets foot on the threshold, he gives a yawn or falls heavily asleep in search of oblivion or even dashes back to the city. In this way people endeavor to run away from themselves." (Ferguson Smith trans.)

What is it that they are running away from? What was it that I was hoping I could escape—or at least outpace—by traveling from one location to the next in an endless cycle? Maybe fate itself. Mortality. Melancholia. Defeat. Failure. Whatever it was, it was the same spectral pursuer that Stephen Dobyns describes in a poem on this theme, "The Pursuit," from his collection Cemetery Nights. "Each thing I do I rush through," he writes, "so I can do/ something else." Why? Because there is something behind him, he writes. Something breathing down his neck. What is it? Does he know? Did Bernhard? Did Lucretius's aristocrats? Did I? 

And have I escaped it since? Or have I merely outpaced it for a time?