💻 On digital nomadism & leaving home (again)
Plus three links worth sharing on AI filmmaking, minting as a business model, and my favorite app to learn Spanish
Hi friends 👋
Welcome to the Baer Necessities, a newsletter where I share my thoughts on long-term travel, freelance marketing, and living a good life — only the Necessities.
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This essay is a little more personal than usual… if you don’t want that, feel free to skip to the next section on some quotes and links I’m sharing!
It was my senior year of college when I first heard the term… digital nomad.
In 2018, a guy in his late 20s showed up at my internship at The FSU Innovation Hub. He was dating my coworker and came in town to visit her.
We got to know each other pretty quickly.
I learned he’s a digital nomad, essentially a freelance marketer who works from anywhere – Bali, Southeast Asia, Caribbean islands — you name it, it seemed like he had been there.
It sounded like a dream, an unrealistic fantasy even… how could I make that happen after I graduate in 6 months?
The idea of working from anywhere sounded exotic and appealing to 21 year-old me.
It was a return to our natural inclinations as hunter-gatherers to roam the world by foot in order find our next meal or home (or how some groups like the Bedouins still live today).
But today, instead of traveling in order to survive, we’re working in order to travel (a privilege that is not lost on me).
As someone who loved to travel to new countries (a year earlier in 2017, I spent 3 months living and working in Israel), I was obsessed with this idea of a digital nomadic life. An opportunity to travel long-term, truly get to know a place, live in a more affordable place, and make money while you’re doing it? Sign me up.
But at this point in 2018, remote jobs weren’t much of a thing yet.
If you had a remote job then, you were either self-employed or one of the lucky ones who stumbled across a remote tech job ahead of its time.
(Side note: later on, I learned that digital nomadism got its start in the 1980s when the first laptops showed up. But I’ll save the history of digital nomadism for another day.)
A couple years passed after meeting that digital nomad, and then the pandemic changed our lives and how we worked forever. My in-person sales job selling office spaces was suddenly remote (and no one wanted an office anymore).
So with the first chance I could to travel during COVID, I spent three weeks living and working with a bunch of friends in Kauai, Hawaii, in Spring 2021.
In Summer 2022, I traveled across Europe for three months – a month in Portugal, three weeks in Italy, and a month traveling across four countries in Eastern Europe. Working the whole time while getting to explore these countries and their cultures.
Slow and purposeful travel, just the way I liked it.
But like everything in life, long-term travel comes with its downsides.
“What if you’re throwing everything away at home for travel?” I tell myself in a sweat in the wee hours of the morning before a trip. “What if you hate the country? What if you don’t meet anyone you like? What if. what if. what if…”
This feeling of angst I know too well. The feeling of insecurity, loss, and the opportunity costs — like life back home, your (now) ex-girlfriend, and your close friends — that come with the territory of picking up your backpack and leaving on an open-ended solo trip.
But while the comforts of being home are easy and familiar, I don’t want easy and familiar at this stage in my life. I want to challenge myself with uncomfortable adventures, meeting new people from across the world, and immersing myself in foreign cultures — while mastering my craft of writing and marketing.
Last February, I was let go from my job of 2.5 years, alongside many of my coworkers. Instead of scrambling for the next remote job, I decided it was time to give myself some slack for the first time in many years… to deeply explore the ideas I find most interesting, to travel without working remote, to study languages, to meet a girl – but most importantly, to not jump back into “work” for work’s sake.
So I started working in catering at a restaurant to earn my travels, studied Spanish everyday, wrote a lot of (unshared) personal essays, went to the gym a lot, started dating a beautiful woman (inside and out), and embraced life at home for the first time in a while with her.
But the urge to travel came back again. I suppose it never really left.
I embarked on my first month-long backpacking trip to Guatemala and Belize in November 2023.
I trekked 5 volcano peaks in 7 days, enrolled in a Spanish school and local homestay at Lake Atitlan, backpacked across the Guatemalan mountains and jungle towns for ten days, ending in a week-long stay on an island in Belize.
A trip of a lifetime, stretching my mind and body in ways I’ve never done before.
However, during this trip, I realized I prefer purposeful travel — a goal or a quest to chase after while you’re traveling, whether it’s learning and immersing yourself in the language, hiking up a 13,000-foot volcano, writing about your travels, or even something as oddly specific as searching for the best bakery in every town you visit and learning their craft (I heard of someone doing this).
For me, backpacking for months on end with nothing to work towards except seeing new sights everyday eventually feels pointless. We as humans naturally need productivity, whether it’s pure survival or a goal to work towards.
Travel is about seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. But when you are constantly on the move while backpacking, it’s hard to appreciate these little things. Watching things as simple as kids playing basketball in the local park is a window into their world that’s not so different than ours.
But I digress…
In a couple days, I leave on a one-way flight bound for Bogota, Colombia.
I leave behind a city I love but not where I need to be (for now). Friends and family who mean the world to me. And a relationship I deeply care about but whose ideal lifestyles are growing apart.
I’m spending a minimum of 1 month in Colombia (possibly longer) — this time working remote for my marketing clients, writing this newsletter here and there, and immersing myself in Colombian culture and language — and then after that… well, who knows.
This year is about taking leaps of faith. The leap to work for myself as a freelance writer, embrace my nomadic dreams, and to see this big, beautiful world.
It’s not always easy to take these leaps, but who said it would be?
Two Quotes I’m Pondering
Travel writer Rolf Potts on long-term, slow travel:
“The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”
Philosopher Anthony de Mello on happiness:
“Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don't have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don't you experience it? Because you've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!”
Three Links Worth Sharing
Essay I’m reading: Sora and the Future of Filmmaking by Dan Shipper —
An absolute must-read for those who saw Open AI’s latest release, Sora, which is the most advanced AI video generator. This essay gives amazing context for what this means for the future of the film industry, and how it actually works.
Also, if you want to be blown away, check out this trailer he shared for an AI-generated film called Borrowing Time. I was almost brought to tears, for the story itself, not even the fact that a guy used A.I. to create the whole thing.Another essay I’m reading: Minting is the Native Business Model for Web3 (and maybe AI too) by AVC —
A good reframe on why NFTs aren’t going anywhere in our content-driven world. In an age of A.I. generated deep fakes, NFTs give provable authenticity to an artist’s work.App I used to learn Spanish: Pimsleur
The best app I’ve used by far to learn languages. Pimsleur is an audio-based app that teaches you the language through 30-minute audio lessons. Leading up to my trip to Guatemala, I was doing anywhere from two to four lessons a day (yes, I had a lot of time on my hands). By the time I got to Guatemala, I was having very basic conversations with locals. I highly recommend doing the first 90 lessons or so.
Thanks for reading today! Feel free to send it to someone who loves buying one-way flights.
And if you’re going to be in Colombia soon (or have any recommendations!), please let me know by replying to the email.
Until next time,
Jonah Baer
P.S. - Check out my portfolio if you want to see more of what I’m up to.