Digital Nomads Aren’t The Future – They Aren’t Even Present

A polemic on why I recoil at the term "digital nomad"

On a cool and overcast day at a beach club in Da Nang, Vietnam, someone asked a question that made me sad for everyone there, myself included.

“What’s your app idea?”

The person asking was naïve, having just stepped off a plane and into this strange world of infinite feedback loops and permanently blocked negative energy flows only a few days prior. The man she asked was a consummate operator in this space: early 30s, no discernable employment or source of income, visible at every booze-soaked event in town, conventionally handsome and draped in pastels. He had been baiting all of us to ask the question and now, thanks to this innocent soul, we had to listen to its answer.

I’ll spare you the details – the speech went on for many minutes none of us present will ever gain back. The app concept was essentially the same as any of a dozen or so social networking apps that were already on decline on the App Store rankings – something I’m sure he never researched, as doing so would have been ‘too negative’. He capped off his elevator pitch to Mars by lamenting that he could ‘change the world’ if only his father would believe in him enough to invest in his idea.

I didn’t make a habit of being around these types. However, I had just come off a multi-week work sprint and I knew I needed time around other humans, regardless of context. This guy was buying drinks, and although I don’t really drink anymore, it provided a convenient enough convergence point.

By now, my emotional wellbeing hinged entirely on an abrupt end to this self-indulgent and rambling monologue. I sat waiting for the man to tire himself out and take a long sip of his gin and tonic. When the moment came, I interjected with my own app idea:

“I call it PIA. The Piss Intelligence App. Submerge your phone in any liquid and it’ll tell you if it’s piss”.

The laughter was minimal and nervous at best. I didn’t even come up with the joke – I adapted it from a throwaway line in a comedy podcast. Nevertheless, it stopped this poor drunk from detailing his 30+ year history with a father who presumably didn’t love him enough.

“You don’t like my idea?” he asked me with the innocence of a child who had just fallen off a bicycle.

“Of course I do. Just trying to add a bit of levity because you’ve blown our minds,” I said, gently patting him on the shoulder while staring off at grey ocean waves.

This incident was far from isolated. From Chiang Mai to Bali and Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur, I had met many versions of the same kind of person. Young, but not that young. Edgy, but not in any kind of intellectual sense. Each had a vacancy to their eyes, as if the act of seeing had been severed from listening and speech.

One woman told me she was an SEO consultant in an age where an AI chatbot can optimize search engine results in seconds for just $20 a month. Another told me she was a therapist - without a psychology degree or any real credentials – focused exclusively on past life trauma. A man in a wellness spa hot tub once said he was a ‘sports psychology coach’ – again, no credentials – focused on professional pickleball players.

In 2022, I left Shanghai with a regular paycheck from my newly remote job and a hope of finding what the future of Western society might become in utopian dreamscapes of Southeast Asia. The landscapes were indeed utopian: smoky volcanos amid pink sunsets viewed from white sand shores. Endless rice fields in entirely novel shades of green. Cool breezes and otherworldly rock formations in the hill country of northern Thailand. Cities like Hanoi and Bangkok abound with rich cultural experiences and aromas and everyone should see Angkor Watt at sunrise at least once. But I’m talking about a different kind of landscape. Flatter, uglier, and more uniform than anything I’ve ever witnessed: that of the digital nomad expat scene.

A utopian vision

“It will be possible in that age, perhaps only fifty years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.”

- Arthur C. Clarke, 1964

When COVID struck and many started working remotely for extended periods, it dawned on many of us that there was a better way out there. We hated the fluorescent lighting, disruptive noises, and performative gesturing of the contemporary office–and I still do, for that matter.

Eventually, I stopped going into the office every day, opting for only three days per week. Some weeks, I only went in two days. Some days, I smoked cigars and worked from bed in a bathrobe. Why wouldn’t I? I could communicate with my team from anywhere in real time, just as Clarke had predicted. When the Chinese government instituted a COVID lockdown in Shanghai that simulated life in a North Korean prison camp, I asked myself what I was doing in that country at all. Given my established track record of remote work, my company gave me permission to go anywhere I wanted, as long as it was within one hour of my current time zone.

Before COVID, I had travelled extensively through Southeast Asia and it seemed a natural choice for me to set up my remote operation. I figured I’d find a community of people like myself, possibly with whom I could bounce ideas on how to make exciting new lives out of our emerging technological paradigm. Not quite.

Performative Colonies of Altered Reality

In my earliest fantasies, I imagined these digital enclaves would be filled with militant seekers, creative monks, and ascetic mystics — people building new forms of life with discipline and spiritual clarity. Instead, I found profligate and decadent beach clubs periodically closed for biohazards, “resets” at luxury gyms after blackout nights, and endless talk of “aesthetics” among people chemically sculpting their bodies with steroids and surgery. They also used the word “aesthetic” incorrectly – saying things like “so aesthetic” as an adjective for beauty, stripping it of any philosophical depth.

These weren’t intentional communities of evolving minds but accidental congregations of atomized drifters — people orbiting illusions, never quite touching grass. They moved from beach to club to jungle retreat, chasing temporary highs and algorithmic affirmations, many convinced they were on the brink of transcendence. But under the sun-bleached tattoos and cosmic slogans, there was no center, no rhythm, no real frontier — just an endless rehearsal for a future that would never arrive.

The pictures of these places look amazing for a reason. Everywhere these foreigners go are designated places to take photos, out of view of the trash, traffic, and general erosion brought both directly and indirectly by their presence. Every beach lined with TikTok dance performances, every café filled with fitfluencers on laptops peddling courses. You can tell how long they’ve been there by how miserable they look when not performing. Of course, they’d never admit to genuine misery as that would be negativity, the only true cardinal sin. The one thing keeping it all together is the unspoken mutual agreement to provide positive feedback loops: no idea too stupid, no journey too pointless.

One time, I received an invitation to an entrepreneur’s gathering at a high-end glamping site in Balian, about an hour up the coast from Canggu, Bali. A stunning vista with azure skies, immaculate grass, and gently swaying palms next to a pristine black sand beach. All around me these entrepreneurs appeared different from what I expected. Women in almost non-existent bikinis, covered in neon and sparkly paints, donning costume jewelry and even angel wings. Shirtless men in elaborate pantaloons with top hats or bowlers, many wearing heavy mascara. One guy bragged about an initial public offering (IPO) for his metaverse company—a claim that evaporated from my mind as quickly as it probably did in the markets. Fire dancers performed as the sun went down. Think Burning Man meets Jackie Treehorn’s mansion in The Big Lebowski. I felt very out of place because I was.

I struck up a conversation with a tan, dark-haired French woman in a macramé dress. She smiled a lot and was very complimentary of my mediocre French. Quite different from another French woman I’d known in Shanghai, who, often with hands pressed firmly on hips, would scornfully tell me “your French is sheet” and ended conversations with “you are so stoo-peed”. This one was a far cry from the strong personalities of my partially Gallic roots, almost as if she had spent too much time in the sun or at a West Coast farmer’s market. She told me she was a lifestyle and crypto coach, insisting that crypto was the only way to “escape the matrix.” When I asked whether relying on a digital currency to do the same things she’d do with dollar-backed money might be just another layer of the matrix, she simply said “no” and walked away — it was probably the most authentic thing she’d done all week.

People in these spaces live in their own reality. When you challenge it, they don’t argue or reflect — they just drift away, like dancers leaving a stage before the lights come up. Everywhere you go, you hear tales from the wreckage of their mistakes: motorbikes crashed, romantic partners abandoned, friends cheated out of money. Accountability is negativity. I didn’t belong there, and deep down, I was relieved to know it.

It's not generational

The delusional rot I’m describing here is not just the perspective some millennial hurtling toward 40. It is systemic and cross generational.

At one point, I attended a writers’ workshop—a gathering mostly made up of Boomers and a few Gen Xers. Most were there to workshop unpublishable autobiographical novels. One had published a book before about how she rescued Southeast Asian gang members by teaching them to dance. Another spoke of finding enlightenment by living with tribal elders for a few weeks. One guy ran a digital marketing agency focused on making content to promote the nomad lifestyle to others back in Europe. One Dutch woman was sweet: she wanted to write of her ageing grandmother’s time in the war. Most had presumably cashed out their homes or 401(k)s - flush with COVID inflation - to fund spiritual retirements in Southeast Asia, searching for meaning in yoga studios, aromatherapy seminars, and writers workshops. By and large, they were innocent and nice enough, but I also didn’t feel I was getting much out of the experience.

At a café after the workshop, I sat with a group of the attendees as the rain fell hard outside, leaving me stranded. They discussed US politics ad-nauseum as many were American and the 2024 election was underway. Consensus? Orange man = bad–enough said. Then one fedora-sporting Boomer, in the spirit of “openness,” decided to berate a 30-something Chinese attendee, pushing him to publicly denounce his government for its human rights abuses — no awareness of the real risks, no understanding that such a statement could endanger the man’s whole family back home. I, someone who had lived in China and actually criticized China in the media - at some personal risk - while living in Southeast Asia, found myself forced to step in and protect this poor guy from the Boomer’s moral cosplay.

So many of these self-proclaimed seekers and artists were as untethered and performative as the metaverse IPO guys and the crypto bros—different costumes, different hashtags, but the same spiritual emptiness, same untethering from reality underpinning it all.

A Slim Hope in the Youth

I have no illusions about most of the people I describe. Their collapse feels terminal — an aesthetic death spiral beyond salvage. But across the West and even among some tourists, I’ve seen glimmers of something different among a certain kind of young person. Not all, certainly not most, but a small, emerging subset. They listen — truly listen — rather than just perform agreement or dissent. They carry a deeper historical sense; they read more, ask where ideas come from, and contextualize instead of parroting slogans. They seem more open-minded, less rigidly moralizing, more willing to hold contradictory truths without shrieking for purity. They have moral convictions that are better formed and grounded in reality. Even their drug use is different: more selective, almost ritualistic, and far less anchored in the alcoholic self-destruction that marked my generation. They aren’t perfect — and they may yet be devoured by the same performative machine. But in them, I catch the faint outline of a new moral architecture, something sturdier, something still alive.

And of course, not all expats in Southeast Asia are like these hollow drifters and grifters. There are people of all ages quietly doing honest work, enjoying retirement, raising families, learning languages, building true connections to the places they inhabit. But they are invisible by design — they aren’t selling enlightenment or hocking crypto investments in beach bars. They don’t dominate the image, so they vanish from the story. My critique isn’t aimed at them; it’s aimed at the loud, performative parasites who shape the cultural face of these enclaves.

The Scam Convergence

Criminality is a necessary part of life for many who wish to embody this kind of lifestyle – especially those with no real skills or means back home. There were the micro-scams: life coaches charging $1,500 a month to “hold space” for mushroom microdosing (i.e.: foreigners embedded in local drug trafficking rings); fake therapists inducing breakdowns so they can “guide you through the rebuild” (I met a lovely licensed psychotherapist who picks up the pieces from these horrific tales); fitness gurus who never show up, vanishing after the deposit hits their crypto wallet. These weren’t bold heists or elaborate cons—just small, endless parasitic siphons on the already fragile spirits of their clients. In this ecosystem, credibility doesn’t matter, just vibes. Outcomes don’t matter either. Only the performance of transformation—and the ability to monetize it before the next retreat, the next visa run, the next collapse.

It would be comforting to think this entire criminal menagerie is confined to the lower tiers—cheap gurus and mushroom coaches grifting for scraps. But the rot runs higher.

I remember sitting in a high-end restaurant one night in Bali when a man walked in with a stunning Indonesian woman on his arm. He wore a crisp white dress shirt, unbuttoned halfway down his chest, under a linen khaki suit—the unofficial uniform of the ‘global spiritual investor.’ Around his wrist, a string of immaculate Buddhist prayer beads dangled, a thin, borrowed spiritual veneer draped over raw opportunism. The woman wore a long, vaguely see-through coconut white satin evening gown with some serious looking, but tasteful jewelry—elegant and statuesque, equal parts ornament and soft diplomatic signal.

The man, a Brit, walked over and greeted my friend, who introduced both of them to me. After some polite conversation and their departure, my friend leaned over and asked if I knew who he was. Then he showed me a photo on his phone: the same man, smiling next to a sanctioned Russian oligarch you’d almost certainly recognize. Apparently, he was living there on permanent assignment, speculating on real estate on the oligarch’s behalf. My friend added, almost as an afterthought, that he believed the woman was a general’s daughter—a subtle nod to local power brokering woven into the performance. There it was: the same shallow spiritual architecture, the same moral vacuum—just gilded. The same colony of graft, upgraded from bamboo bungalows to private villas, from crypto retreats to offshore asset flips.

Then there are the macro-scams unseen by most Westerners: Chinese capital outflows hidden in luxury condos, pig-butchering crypto schemes draining life savings, casino laundering operations that move billions under the illusion of harmless entertainment. These flows range from quiet investments in empty condos in cities like Bangkok to off-grid scam settlements in destabilized war zones. They aren’t isolated side hustles; they share the same delusional and parasitic DNA as an economy selling shitcoins and personal development courses by roid-heads hustling to pay rent on a villa they share with five other guys. The convergence is inevitable: the soul scams and the industrial-scale financial scams could and likely will merge into one continuous, self-justifying machine. When it finally collapses, it won’t be quiet or dignified — it will be loud, humiliating, and total.

Kurtz’s Lament

I once imagined myself going upriver, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness.

I thought I might dissolve into some distant jungle, tear away every illusion, confront the horror face to face. I thought perhaps in these far-off enclaves — Da Nang, Bali, Chiang Mai, Pai, the last outposts of so-called global tribes—I might find others on the same grim pilgrimage.

But what I found was not a legion of seekers looking for a terrible new clarity. I found no raw loyalty, no shared terror, no willingness to kneel before something larger than themselves—even if it meant annihilation.

Instead, I found accidental congregations of atomized drifters. Performers too lost to follow, too fragile to be led, too addicted to micro-clout to obey any call deeper than the next dopamine hit. They do not worship; they monetize. They do not kneel; they pose. They do not build altars; they build brands.

Kurtz’s horror was a mirror—an invitation to confront the abyss and step through it. But these wanderers cannot even hold the mirror. They have been everywhere, but they have gone nowhere. Their passports filled with stamps; their souls vapid. They are too lost to be led, too hollow to ever become dangerous, too soft to ever become truly free.

A rare indulgence

Like I said before, I don’t drink, aside from the occasional glass of red wine. But I did allow myself rare indulgences of another variety in that strangely beautiful space. One time at a Da Nang dive bar, I danced to outdated pop mainstays with a group of strangers while doing whippets – that’s balloons filled with nitrous oxide gas for the uninitiated. Tastes a lot like bubblegum.

On my final huff, I saw my vision condense into a singular ball of light. That light drifted further into the horizon, a single celestial force on a clear night. Then it went out and there was nothing.

I woke up on my ass, people surrounding me asking if I was ok. I felt a fleeting clarity in that moment — like I had touched the edge of something vast and immediately recoiled, the bass now pounding with growing intensity. “I need to get out of here,” I said.