Are we headed towards a digital nomadic future?
Have the pandemic pushed remote-working contributed to a step-up for digital nomads
Everyone dream for a job that does not require your presence every day at 8:00 am, where your boss give you the work to be done with the deadline for it and it’s up to you when you will do it and where.
After the covid-19 vaccines have started rolling out, the people are starting to adjust to post-pandemic reality. The humanity will most surely get rid of the virus in 2 to 3 years but the impact of the pandemic and the ways it changed normal routines will always remain.
No one can argue that a remote-work life style is only for certain individuals whose occupations do not require their presence physically and they have the necessary means to travel across the countryside. Before the pandemic this little community primarily consisted of freelancers, youtuber, bloggers or forex traders, who chose to travel locally or abroad and settle on beaches, rainforests, valleys or any place with wifi network, but away from the expensive city centers.
The pandemic forced every business to shift as much business activity they could to online portals, and the revolution which otherwise would have taken another decade came rather swiftly with big companies acknowledging that many tasks could be performed online and will also provide with equal the results.
The nomadic life style is in demand more than ever, out of the many workers who have experienced a taste of the freestyle surfing, some are hoping to continue the trend, it is always better to have a room to roam, and most of them have the ability to do so.
Some of the notable ventures undertaken by major travel-industry players have added fuel to the spreading fire, looking into the post-pandemic future; Airbnb is targeting accommodations to long-term rentals, in the name of workcations. This shift from short-stay tourist pads to month long rentals is a follow up to the inevitable change in the office model.
But what is the nature of this revolution; will in the next decade most of the office workers will work remotely. There is a group of experts who believe that should be the case, it will not only be more acceptable to the employees but will also reduce the costs for the employers. The majority of the experts however, believe that the pandemic has surely given a rise to the number of digital nomads but there will be no massive transition in the office work-life.
The post pandemic work-life
There is more interest in digital nomadism than ever before, the term offers a utopia for anyone who desperately craves for more space, but as more and more people are getting familiar with this term it is becoming more and more expensive, a notable modification, an update to the increasingly demanded culture. And nobody is handing out money for free. It doesn’t seem very comforting, people who work full time from 9-to-5 at big firms just at another place and probably with low salary.
However, throughout the pandemic more and more people from the US and Europe have already begun moving into digitally nomadic set-ups. People have flocked to Wi-Fi equipped cabins and cottages to work remotely in a lockdown friendly ‘quarantine apartment’, to have more space for some weeks or a few months, travel firms reported that the number of long-term stays is doubling year-on-year. Numerous studies highlight that the population that regard themselves as digital nomads have increased up to 50% in the US.
Telling your company that you want to work remotely might have raised some eyes before the pandemic, but this request doesn’t seem far-fetched anymore, now that more and more companies are increasingly allowing their staff to move around while working, and assuring full job security. Surveys around the globe have shown that most people want to continue working remotely, whether be at their homes, at a sea side, a cheap ranch house in the countryside or a different country altogether.
Some experts believe that this transition towards nomadism would be in line with trends that emerged long before the epidemic; in 2017 a survey of 15,000 American showed that 43% of them were working remotely, at least for some of time.
But not everyone can be a digital nomad,
Despite the skyrocketing interest, and many workers trying the nomadic lifestyle, majority of the experts are skeptical. Even if there is a huge shift in work-life it wouldn’t be demographically similar, considering that nomadic lifestyle is expensive to some extent because it involves accommodations and traveling costs, there are many workers who find it difficult to stay in their home country, so they move to cheap countries in South America and Pacific, and for that you need a strong passport, but the real problem is that this causes an outflow of money from their home country to the country they are staying in, which is not what any country wants. As of now this issue is not a problem because digital nomads are very few in number, but as the trend attracts more people, it will be discouraged by the Western countries, from where most of the digital nomads come from.
And of course, there is a big educational gap, remote working is only for those who can trade their skills online, and such skills come from proper education, that’s why one in three workers with bachelor’s degree were able to work remotely, but only one in twenty with secondary-school education could find an online job, in the lockdown era.
These systematic inequalities, which coexist from centuries, have led to poor people and immigrants, being put to poor education which results in less paying job, and in result they might not find a single job that allows them to work remotely, let alone give them permission to live far away and travel while they work. That is why experts believe that in some way or another the nomadic culture will contribute in reinforcing such inequalities.
In addition, if it comes out that remote-working result in less productivity due to less regulation then big companies might also install barriers to halt digital nomadism.
A more pragmatic foresight
Undoubtedly there will be some industries that will have more digital nomads amongst their staff after the pandemic, but a huge shift towards digital nomadism across the board is a farfetched argument.
It is possible, that some workers might be able to work remotely but would be required to show their presence time often, for that reason they will have to relocate accordingly and for sure this will restrict their stay in another country.
The privilege to live indefinitely in a Lisbon Airbnb for months is still associated with a tiny group of people who have favorable occupations, and at gross digital nomadism is not going to be a common practice.
