Monday 16 July 2018

the opposite of digital nomad?

This came in my inbox today.


I've read enough articles about digital nomads in my time. (That amounts to two articles, I think.) but I had to skim this one enough to find out what the opposite was. And the answer is (according to this author): digital settler. That is, an entrepreneur who stops traveling:

I’m digital without the nomad. What does that make me? A settler? Whether saying no to travel is mad or wise, I don’t know. But I can wholeheartedly say: Most of the happiness you gain from working for yourself comes from having a choice, much more so than from whatever choice in particular you make.
Of course, another possibility is that the opposite of a digital nomad is a non-digital nomad. But I suppose that's just a nomad. And the thing about opposites is that they have to be minimally different. A nomad, especially the prototypical nomad, traveling on foot or animal through desolate landscapes, is different in many ways from a young person who works on a laptop in cafés around the world. A person staying in one place working on a laptop is closer to a person who jets around and works on a laptop.

So, the author has gone from traveling to not-traveling, and this is for him enough to make him the opposite of his former identity.