After leaving home, family, and friends, many full-time travel bloggers begin to feel lonely and isolated.
Lauren Juliff, after quitting her part-time job at a supermarket in England in 2011, began to realize her dream of traveling around the world and becoming a digital nomad.
The term digital nomad first became widely known in 1997 when two authors Makimoto and Manners wrote a book about how life would change thanks to the internet. Today, the above term refers to people who often move around, have no fixed residence and make money by working online. Full-time travel blogger is one of those digital nomads.
Juliff’s intention was initially successful. She has a travel blog and makes money recounting her adventure experiences. Exploring new lands makes British female tourists feel like life is lively and learn many things every day. During a trip, Lauren met her boyfriend, also a digital nomad, and began to explore the world together. In 5 years, the two people visited 75 countries, some places they stayed for a few months but some places they left very quickly.
But after those 5 years, Lauren began to suffer serious mental crises and they repeated many times. Despite changing her diet and practicing meditation, Lauren realized the only way to stop the crises in her mind was to “think about home”, where her parents and friends were.
Every time Lauren is in crisis, she immediately thinks about “finding a house” and her worries quickly disappear. The female tourist suspects that her emotional instability comes from a lack of stability due to frequent travel. Every few weeks, she changes residence to a new country, meets new people, changes her daily food, and has to get used to a new language. Those things changed constantly, making Lauren flinch.
Staying in different houses also forced Lauren to get used to many different types of kitchen equipment. She often had to eat out, and Lauren’s body became weaker.
After psychological changes, Lauren decided to move to Lisbon, Portugal to stabilize her life. She noticed a significant improvement in her mental and physical health.
Because she lives permanently in one place, Lauren has time to get acquainted and make friends, learn to cook and have more hobbies not related to travel. Sitting in one place to work also helps Lauren spend more time at work, thus tripling her income.
The trend of becoming a digital nomad in recent years has been exploding strongly in the world. In 2023, more than 17 million Americans will describe themselves as digital nomads, double the number in 2019.
Beverly Thompson, a sociologist at Siena University in New York, USA, writes that digital nomads often have difficulty communicating with people of the opposite sex (who do not do the same job). Digital nomads often don’t know the culture or language of the countries they constantly visit, so they have to look for people like them to make friends. Beverly said her family and friends are often “shocked and confused” when they learn she has chosen this lifestyle.
Lauren also admitted limitations in building relationships. She has friends all over the world and often sees each other when they are in the same city. But after a few years, she realized how “shallow” most of these relationships were.
Most of the digital nomads Lauren met and knew retired after 5 years because they wanted to stabilize their lives and create long-term and sustainable relationships. Lauren revealed these dark sides that few people know about because digital nomads rarely share them publicly.
Lauren speaks out to warn others about the life and dark side of a full-time travel blogger with the hope that everyone will avoid experiencing the same mental crisis as her.
“Partly because your followers love your travel lifestyle. When I announced I was ending my full-time travel lifestyle, many of them expressed anger,” Lauren said.
Lauren currently lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband but still wants to travel three months every year.