Digital Nomad
K is a young woman at her twenties who works as a product designer in New York. She is a global citizen who lives wherever she travels, settling her unsettled self from London to New York to community houses in South Africa and to unnamed towns in Peru. Despite sitting in front of her laptop she loves nature and animals, and she learns to pack light from her countless lessons on travel. She felt shy in front of others and now becomes open to talk with random new people. She is often said by her travel companions to have a PRE-travel-self and a POST-travel-self.
It's EST in the afternoon right now. K is zooming with me on her laptop in her bedroom. She works in a software startup as a product designer, and instead of writing code from day to day, her task is to design the interface and user experience of software building platforms.
She graduated from college three years ago, at which time she started this job. She did not start her college straight off from design: she wanted to become a software engineer. Her decision of taking the first design class merged her interest with randomness: she had considered design as a synonym to interior design and everything that was colored, but soon discovered the similarity between the design thinking process and the entrepreneurial thinking process—both request one to find opportunities, develop ideas, and create solutions. “This was way more creative and fun than coding. I wanted to build my own startup, and being a designer felt closer to that dream.” She shifted to find design-related internships, and here she is.
As part of her job, K interacts a lot with colleagues from different departments—remote, though. She sketched me a pipeline. At first, she would design and sketch on Figma, a collaborative design tool for building digital products. Then, she would receive feedback from users, engineers, designers, product managers, etc. When contradictory feedback arose, as was often the case, she would organize cross-department workshops where people would define new terminologies for the product, examine the pain points, and brainstorm solutions. After these workshops, she would create some design and share it again, with the whole process going back and forth for a while. The company would try to release some version of the product.
***While the company owns a physical office in New York, only a few people work in-person. “Most employees are ten years elder than I am. Once people have family, kids, dogs, they tend to stay at home. For them, remote work means working from home with their family. For me, remote means I can work from anywhere. I work from coffee shops or different spots around the country or abroad. Almost no one else works in public places.”
She traveled not for work but for her own pleasure. She started from a solo trip three years ago—a week and a half in London with random people. It was funny how flexible she became with packing. Initially, she thought she could not go anywhere without her monitor, a second monitor that she used for work. But she found that she had to take an entire suitcase to bring it and ended up traveling without a monitor.
The solo trip did not satiate her, and K joined in community travel programs in various countries, traveling with a group of people and immersing in local cultures. Peru was one of her favorites. She lived with her travel companions in a single house. People moved in and out every month, which pushed her to engage with people with different personalities in a small amount of time, removing from her personality the ingredient of a timid girl. They went to see nature and animals such as monkeys and llamas—these were gentle monkeys who welcomed her touch, and she coined this as “a spiritual experience.” They also walked to an unnamed town, where fireworks and parades were mixed with crowds of strangers. People only spoke Spanish in that town, so she had to use Google Translate as well as sign languages to communicate with others.
Her personality has changed a lot through the Peru experience. Initially, she was very shy in Spanish. However, a pivotal moment came when someone asked her, “imagine someone speaks English with an accent, would you judge them?” The question made her realize she would not judge others and thus should not feel so scared of making mistakes herself. She started speaking Spanish, embracing imperfection as part of her learning process.
In the travel group, she stood out as the youngest among people aged from thirty to fifty. Despite the age gap, she built friendships with each one of them through time. She shared, “I used to be scared to talk, but now I feel comfortable talking to random new people. I had been very picky even for myself, and I realized it was just me who did not see the best of people. I had lost trust in people and friends due to college and stuff, but there are lots of great people in the world. The change grew from a gradual process—through my whole journey.”
***I asked her whether she liked her college or her job, which I brought up as a select-all-that-apply question. “I am grateful for my college, but it was stressful. I became a tougher person, and now my job feels much easier to me. I don’t have a liking relationship with my college. I still like my job, but now I may want something that allows me to form an in-person community. I love the real world more than the digital world, and I hate being on my laptop all the time. I need more stability, and I want some new friends in one place.”
K is currently living in New York and will set out in a month for another travel. She said she would like to try some physical design, such as background acting and theme park design. She has acted as a person who died from drowning, and she also enjoys visiting Disney Parks, for which she can design a live show that uses the aroma of food to make the guests feel hungry. It seems that every time her interests, appearing random at the beginning, helps her design her life in a more colorful manner.
“Being away from a normal life makes me unsatisfied with normal, which does not feel easy. Because I have experienced such an unconventional and unstable life, living and working wherever I have traveled, it’s hard for a stable life to ever meet that (standard). I am trying to lower my standards now, trying to go back to normal.”
Sometimes it’s not the expectations of living a better life that kills one’s hope, but the frustration of going back to normal that hurts the most. Regularity functions as a necessary break for those in love with adventure and challenges, while also a looming threat that casts doubt on the unconventionality of their life. As K prepares to start a new chapter, it serves as a reminder that life is always in motion, urging us to find harmony with its ever-changing rhythm.