Digital Nomadism: Is this a pandemic fad or an enduring shift? A data-driven exploration
Leveraging social data from over 600,000 online conversations, we dissect what it means to be a Digital Nomad in the post-pandemic era.
Digital Nomads are a subset of remote workers associated with location independence, a global footprint and lifestyle flexibility. Enabled by technology that allows them to be online 24/7, report to their employers and work from their city and country of choice, the concept of digital nomadism is often lusted after and has become increasingly popular following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ever since the pandemic started, remote working and location independence have become a focal point for human resource management and a topic of contention. Tight labour markets and increased demand from employees, mean that an employer's stance on remote versus office working can impact their productivity and retention rates.
Most recently, alternative styles of remote working like Digital Nomadism have stimulated debate from authors like Malcolm Gladwell who questioned its benefits and remained skeptical about out-of-office productivity, lauding that it is not in people's best interests due to the lack of connection experienced within teams. Gladwell’s comments such as “If we don't feel like we're part of something important, what's the point?” prompted backlash, with many feeling his views were oversimplistic, coming from a place of privilege and incorrect given that research has found eliminating the daily commute saved workers in the US around 89 million hours each week.
In this study, we dissect what it actually means to be a Digital Nomad in the post-pandemic era. Leveraging social data from over 600,000 online conversations, we evaluate the lived experiences and geographic dispersal of Digital Nomads with the aim to unravel the perceptions, both negative and positive, about this remote lifestyle. We review how it ties into broader work cultural shifts related to trust and risk-taking.
Continue reading to discover what we found.
Digital Nomads - A history
The construct of Digital Nomads is by no means new. Throughout the last century, the birth of the internet, increased digitisation and ease of online communications have made prime conditions to cultivate a new style of remote working. Intellectuals like Arthur C. Clarke, a scientist and writer, predicted technology would encourage this shift as early as 1964, noting “perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.”
The concept has been popularised by literature too. With books including “Digital Nomad’ written by Japanese technologist Tsugio Makimoto published in 1997, as well as Tim Ferris’s best-selling 2007 book, “4-Hour Work Week”. In this, Ferris popularised the notion of unorthodox work schedules and shared tips on how readers can forgo the office 9-5 by optimising and outsourcing their work to focus on living and projects that provide them with higher income and purpose.
Source: James Vaughan via Flickr
The outbreak of COVID-19 proved to be an inflection point for the future of remote working and has caused an uptick in the interest in digital nomad lifestyles. When offices and workplaces shut in early 2020 to contain the spread of the virus, many were confined to social isolation, and unable to travel on holiday. This gave workers time to reassess their professional priorities.
Working from home and hybrid working has been normalised during these periods of social distancing. This boosted perceptions from employers that remote working can in fact be productive whilst simultaneously promoting a healthier work-life balance. This has had a lasting impact - for example, the BBC reported in the UK that on average, workers go into the office for 1.5 days in 2022 versus 3.8 before the pandemic began.
What’s more, shifts sparked by the global pandemic also saw the Great Resignation, wherein a single month of April 2021 over 4 million US workers quit their jobs. The cumulative impact of these events has created a context which has contributed to the rise in popularity of discussions about Digital Nomads and location independence.
The rise of Digital Nomads
It is hard to pinpoint an exact number of ‘Digital Nomads’ that exist today through reliable data sources due to the frequent cross-border movement of this remote global workforce. However, according to a 2020 study by MBO Partners, nearly 11 million American workers considered themselves Digital Nomads, a sharp increase from 4.8 million in 2018. Some reports claim there are even up to 35 million Digital Nomads currently travelling, living and working around the world.
Online conversations about Digital Nomads have grown consistently over the last two years, highlighting that the appetite for location independence amongst workers is rising. An analysis of the subreddit r/digitalnomad provides evidence of this, where total subscribers have rapidly grown to over 1.5 million as of July 2022 and is likely to exceed over 2 million by the end of the year as illustrated in Exhibit 1. This expansion of membership has caused the average number of daily comments on the sub to steadily rise to 235 as showcased in Exhibit 2.
Exhibit 1 - The rapid increase of subscribers to subreddit r/digitalnomad is telling about the popularity of Digital Nomadism as a remote-working concept
Exhibit 2 - Expansion of membership to r/digitalnomad has led to an increase in the average daily number of comments
Beyond Reddit, we looked at social media platforms and other open data sources like news channels and blogs to review the rise in popularity of conversations relating to Digital Nomads, highlighted in Exhibit 3.
Exhibit 3 - Online conversation volume surrounding Digital Nomads from July 2020 - July 2022
Analysis of Google search trends has reinforced the popularity of Digital Nomads as a topic. Across a five-year period, there has been over a 5000% increase for associated terms to Digital Nomads including remote jobs, remote work and co-living. Topics complementary to Digital Nomads which featured in the Google search trend research demonstrated interests in visas and work permits, cost of travelling, health insurance, and languages that are spoken.
Which locations are most popular amongst Digital Nomads?
Travel is a key tenet of being a digital nomad. So where do they travel to?
Our data in Exhibit 4 reveals that online posts and conversations about Digital Nomads were occurring predominantly in the USA, significantly higher than in other locations. This corresponds with the phenomenon of the aforementioned Great Resignation that took place in the country.
Western nations like the United Kingdom also incurred a high incidence of online volume conversation, followed by India.
Exhibit 4 - Geographical analysis of online conversations about Digital Nomads reveal these are mostly coming from Western countries including the US and UK
Tracing where these conversations are taking place versus which destinations people are talking about provides a clear picture of where people want to leave and travel to. The locations featured in our social data in Exhibit 5 include popular Digital Nomad hubs such as Portugal, Thailand, Bali and Mexico.
Exhibit 5 - Conversations surrounding Digital Nomads most frequently mention the US and Europe
Countries that have upgraded their visa policies to attract Digital Nomads and remote workers to boost economic growth after the fallout in waning tourism from COVID-19, have become popular topics of conversation. For example, Barbados’s 12-month Welcome Stamp Visa, which launched in July 2020 allowed remote workers to relocate to the Caribbean island for one year, as well as Greece’s Visa which offered a 50% tax break to users for the first seven years.
The locations revealed in our data are similar to the Google search trends on locations too. For example, mentions for specific geographies like Madeira, Greece and Lisbon increased by over 5000% over a five-year period.
The most popular places searched for over the last five years in relation to Digital Nomads can be seen below in Exhibit 6 whereby Portugal, Greece and Croatia feature prominently.
Exhibit 6 - Analysis from the last five years reveals that Portugal, Greece and Croatia are the most popular locations for web searches made in conjunction with Digital Nomads
It is likely that the ranking of popularity of these destinations will be ever-evolving. A review of platforms like Nomad List provides further insight into perceptions of the best cities for Digital Nomads with filters based on weather, the monthly cost of living, the strength of Wi-Fi or the popularity of dating apps like Tinder. These shed light on priorities for Digital Nomads when picking a location.
What are Digital Nomads talking about?
Related topics associated with Digital Nomad conversations in Exhibit 7 demonstrate a strong link with travel, remote working culture, freelancing and entrepreneurship. There is also a strong current of daily motivation rhetoric.
The rise in prominence of discussions related to #remotejobs, #jobs and #newjobs is correlated to the rapid increase in the availability of remote jobs, as research has found that remote opportunities have risen from 9% of all professional jobs in North America at the end of 2020 to 25% by the end of 2022.
Exhibit 7 - Our topic analysis reveals that remote working and remote job opportunities are popular in relation to conversations on digital nomads
These topics correlated to our findings on subreddits related to Digital Nomads shown in Exhibit 8 and Exhibit 10. Analysing a user overlap of r/digitalnomad indicated that members also participate in similar subreddits on solo travel, location-specific information, personal finance, crypto and Ethereum.
Exhibit 8 - A breakdown of the interests and affiliations of Digital Nomads, as revealed from internal analysis of the subreddit r/digitalnomad
Topics like #vanlife capture a specific type of digital nomad lifestyle, where people travel and work remotely in their vans. This hashtag has amassed over 13 million trending posts on Instagram. It matches research that tracks the rise in popularity of van life whereby in the USA, 140,000 vans and RVs were counted as housing units in 2019 according to the Census Bureau, an increase from 102,000 in 2016.
Exhibit 9 - Trending topics of conversation related to Digital Nomads
Exhibit 9 indicates that crypto, Bitcoin, ETH (Ethereum) and NFTs are trending topics related to Digital Nomads. This could be explained by the rise in popularity in specific locations for Digital Nomad ‘crypto bros’ including Portugal, which has been deemed as a crypto tax haven as well as the endorsement of a digital nomad lifestyle by Crypto billionaire Vitalik Buterin.
Exhibit 10 - A thematic breakdown of our analysis of the interests of 1.7 million members of the subreddit r/digitalnomad reveals strong interests in travel, personal finance and tech skill acquisition
What are the perceptions around this lifestyle?
The allure of the Digital Nomad lifestyle drives largely positive sentiment and emotions of joy when discussed online, illustrated in Exhibit 11. This can be delineated by its association with freedom, location independence and the sense of happiness that is often experienced when travelling across the world.
Exhibit 11 - Mapping the emotions related to conversations about Digital Nomads reveal that Joy is the dominant emotion felt.
However, there are negative perceptions around stigma related to ‘overnomadism’. The spike in online conversations in January 2021 in Exhibit 3 is evidence of this. This incident, which generated nearly 12,000 mentions, was a result of large-scale backlash to an online post created by a US digital nomad documenting life in Bali who received mounting criticism for glamourising gentrification as well as embodying foreign privilege and racism.
Digital Nomads have garnered damaging reputations for overtourism, an overbearing western influence, moulding the places they go to around them and driving the cultural demise of foreign locations in pursuit of ‘doing it for the ‘gram’. A knock-on effect is also the gentrification of areas, particularly in the Global South, with the influx of short-term rentals facilitated by Airbnb that push up the price of rent for local communities.
The lived experiences of Digital Nomads recounted online are telling about a darker side to this style of working and living. Anecdotes on forums describe isolation, homesickness, struggles to build long-lasting connections and the challenge of cultural adaptation. Loneliness is one contributing factor to mental health challenges associated with a digial nomadic lifestyle, another is toxic positivity. Excessive forced happiness and the pressure to appear to be enjoying the Instagram-worthy lifestyle could be contributing to isolation and negative emotions in the long term.
One account is particularly discerning of Digital Nomads:
“What many people do is travel then think "this is it, I want to do this forever", then travel, isolate themselves from their home communities, live in cheap places, make some money, share cocktail by the pool photos on Instagram with a hashtag #nomadlife and then get clinically depressed. Then they return to their home countries after 3 years, but they've lost touch with their old communities. And everything is expensive. And it's cold. Now they're worse off than before they left! That's not the way to go.”
Another states “The price of overwhelming freedom is often my isolation.”. This brings to the forefront the mental health implications that some Digital Nomads may struggle with and is identified as a common topic in Exhibits 5 and 6.
Digital Nomads are here to stay until travel is curbed by another pandemic or the climate crisis
The rise in digital nomadism offers valuable insights into the future of work culture.
It indicates that people are willing to take higher levels of risk to pursue a location-independent lifestyle. There are many anecdotes of secret Digital Nomads who do not disclose to their bosses where in the world they are working from. Access to VPNs to fool their employers and the trending mouse mover phenomenon has become a popular area of online discussion and brings into consideration wider issues of employee surveillance as well as eroding levels of trust held between employers and employees in the era of remote working.
The ability to pursue a Digital Nomad lifestyle remains exclusive to those with a certain level of financial privilege, employee flexibility and civil liberties. The sustained rise in popularity in conversations on Digital Nomads demonstrated from our research and discussions on platforms like Reddit indicate this is more than a fad or post-pandemic short-term trend. The evolution of technology could facilitate this further as internet 4.0 and the integration of the metaverse and virtual reality render the disparity between physical and online presence in a working environment marginal.
The ability of Digital Nomads to remain location-independent in the long-term will be reliant on external environmental factors that may curb the ability to travel in the future. This includes the likely occurrence of another global pandemic or worsening climate-induced extreme weather and environmental disasters which will render many popular Digital Nomad locations in the Global South uninhabitable.
Our approach - A social analysis of Digital Nomads
For this study, we collected and analysed data from nearly 630,000 online conversations and 180,000 authors across the two-year period of July 2020 to July 2022. We also evaluated data on the interests and affiliations of 1.7 million members of the subreddit r/digitalnomad.
With this data, we identified the dominant emotions characterising online conversations about Digital Nomads, tracing the events that cause a surge in positive and negative sentiment about the concept.
Through a geographic lens, we used our active listening data alongside evidence from Google search trends to investigate where conversations about Digital Nomads are taking place to compare this to the destinations that continue to appear as desirable for Digital Nomads to inhabit.
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