Newsletter › #10
Not Everyone Is Cut Out to Be a Digital Nomad, but Everyone Should Have a Way Out
【What I've been up to】
Ohayō — good morning, Reader.
It's Monday; I hope your week is off to a good start.
This is part two of my digital nomad story.
On this trip
I got a close look at a group of people
whose lives aren't easier,
but more “adjustable.”
They didn't suddenly stop going to work;
step by step,
they shaped their skills, work and life
into something they could sustain.
In this letter
I'll share a few people who made an impression on me,
and the abilities and traits I saw in them
that digital nomads really need.
Their stories
aren't meant to tell you that you must become a digital nomad.
They made me surer of one thing:
when your life becomes more flexible,
freedom is often just a by-product.
Let's read on.
---
【Stories from the group】
1. Yuki | traveler and artist, 28, from Japan
Our calligraphy teacher, who speaks fluent English
with no Japanese accent — she sounds like she grew up abroad.
A minimalist,
a bit of a hippie, a very special person.
I was curious: she doesn't have a job,
so where does the money for all her travel come from?
When I asked,
she told me she worked for two years after college, then quit,
took 6,000 yen and went to Europe,
where she lived for four months by selling calligraphy on the street.
She's been living abroad for the past few years.
She's published a travel book, so she earns royalties,
plus a few other kinds of income:
- Memberships:
each month she mails subscribers handmade landscape and calligraphy postcards,
for US$10 to US$50.
She has more than a hundred subscribers.
- Calligraphy conversations:
a paid one-on-one chat, after which she writes a character for you.
- Teaching: she was paid for teaching us calligraphy too.
I asked, “How did you come up with this way of earning money?”
She said, “The path is made by walking, not by thinking.”
“Imagine there's a wall in front of you, and break through it.”
(She made a fist and punched the air in front of me a few times.)
She'd studied calligraphy for ten years,
but only in the last two
had she discovered she could make a living from it.
She has no full-time job; this income
is enough to cover her travel and living costs.
Her Instagram has 56,000 followers,
but she doesn't make money from it.
No sponsorships, no affiliate marketing.
She finds that too tiring;
she just wants to do what she loves — calligraphy.
What I learned from Yuki:
do what you love and bring value to others,
add English,
and you can become a digital nomad.
---
2. Amanda & Andre | from Taiwan
A Taiwanese couple in the rental property management business,
managing more than a dozen properties between them — a big operation.
They were the only other Taiwanese on the program.
I was lucky to have them; they often carried me.
When I looked puzzled during a conversation,
they'd explain what had just been said.
I asked them, “Property management means dealing with tenants' problems —
how can you travel for so long?”
They used to do everything themselves,
handling every tenant issue, big or small.
Later they outsourced some of the work
and found helpers, which made things much easier.
When they're abroad, they direct their helpers remotely,
which is how they can stay away for two months.
It reminded me of the book Buy Back Your Time.
If you can hand something to someone else
at a lower cost,
you're not really spending money —
you're buying back your time.
What I saw in Amanda and Andre:
if part of your work can be outsourced,
and the cost is lower than your hourly wage,
you should consider buying your time back.
---
3. Severin | from Switzerland
He once had his own company in Switzerland,
later closed it and became an employee.
But his boss lets him work remotely.
For him, the hardest part of digital nomading is the time difference:
Switzerland is eight hours behind Japan.
Swiss working hours are Japanese evening hours,
so he has to work after dinner.
He's a foodie.
In Japan, a sashimi rice bowl
covered in prawns, scallops and sea urchin costs 5,000–6,000 yen.
In Switzerland it would cost three times as much and not taste as good,
so he finds life in Japan very comfortable.
The average salary in Switzerland is over US$6,000 a month;
in Japan it's a little over US$2,000.
He earns a Swiss salary and lives in Japan,
so life is comfortable — that's “geographic arbitrage.”
Speaking of geo-arbitrage,
I have to mention Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek.
He described this idea long ago:
you don't have to spend your whole life
under pressure in a high-cost place.
Sometimes just changing where you live
makes life a whole level easier.
If you earn a Taiwanese salary
and live in Thailand, Vietnam or Malaysia,
you can live very comfortably too.
Severin helped me understand one thing:
if your work can be done remotely,
use geo-arbitrage
and choose a country or city with a lower cost of living,
and you may live like a king.
---
Those are the people I met
during my time as a digital nomad.
Next, I want to share
the three abilities and traits
I think digital nomads need.
---
【The abilities and traits of digital nomads】
1. English
English is almost the most important foundation for a digital nomad,
especially speaking.
The whole program was in English —
the teachers' sessions, conversations among the group,
and group discussions and teamwork.
There were people from Japan, Spain, Bulgaria and Switzerland.
English wasn't a way
for anyone to show off;
it was a common tool that let us work together.
You notice something very clearly:
people with good English
join discussions more easily,
and are more easily trusted and connected with.
Honestly, my own spoken English isn't great.
Often
I couldn't quite follow what people said;
my brain took ages
to squeeze out an incomplete sentence.
But I still spoke up.
When I couldn't say something,
I'd tell them directly:
I don't know how to say this,
let me try another way.
If they still didn't understand,
I'd act it out,
and then ask:
what's the natural way to say it?
The process was a bit awkward
and not very dignified.
But I found that even when my English wasn't good,
as long as I was willing to speak,
they were happy to listen.
And if your English is good enough,
it can directly become a way to earn.
When you add English
to a skill you already have,
the people you can serve
are no longer limited to Taiwan.
You won't necessarily earn more,
but the markets you can choose from
become much bigger.
If you're a web designer
who speaks English, you can take projects from Europe and the US.
The prices and options
are completely different.
That's why I say:
English isn't just a language skill;
it's leverage that amplifies your expertise.
---
2. Living minimally, and being able to accept uncertainty
I noticed that all these digital nomads
lived minimally.
Yuki can live alone in the mountains with almost nothing.
Amanda and Andre cook for themselves.
They're very conscious of living costs,
buy cheap ingredients to cook,
and wear no designer labels.
This lifestyle keeps spending down
and gives them more financial breathing room.
It reminded me of an idea from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant:
“What really limits your freedom
is often not what you lack,
but what you already have and must keep maintaining.”
When your living costs are low,
irregular income, moving and changing plans
stop being so frightening.
Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX,
did an unusual experiment when he was young.
He deliberately lived on one dollar a day,
eating the cheapest food — pasta, hot dogs —
to test how little he needed to survive.
He found that even living very simply, he could cope.
The experiment showed him his “survival baseline.”
Once you know the worst life you could live with,
you're far less afraid of taking risks.
Seen this way,
minimalism isn't a lifestyle aesthetic;
it's an ability to face uncertainty.
They choose to trade certainty
for more flexibility and possibility.
---
3. Being willing to leave society's default path
During the whole program,
no one asked me about my income,
or about buying a home, getting married or having children.
Not until the last day
did anyone even ask my age.
That surprised me, because in Taiwan
those questions that define “success”
are often less about caring
and more of an invisible progress check.
Settle down by thirty,
establish your career by forty —
life seems to come with a timetable you mustn't fall behind.
But in this digital nomad community,
no one cared which square you'd reached.
Not because they don't care about life,
but because they'd long since stopped
scoring themselves by society's standards.
Most digital nomads
don't treat career success, owning a home and car, or marriage and children
as requirements for success.
They chose something harder: defining success for themselves.
It reminded me of The Pathless Path.
The book says
the hard part isn't that there's no path,
but letting go of the one
society has already paved for you.
What I saw in these people
wasn't that they were braver,
but that they'd grown used to
living without a standard answer.
But leaving the default path
doesn't make life easier.
On the contrary,
you face more doubt, more misunderstanding,
and the loneliness of “no one approves of you.”
Giving up society's default path
means putting up with sideways looks.
That's why
for digital nomads,
finding a community that understands you
isn't a bonus —
it's a basic condition for being able to keep going.
So finding a community that supports them
matters especially to them.
---
【Conclusion】
After writing these two issues, my view of digital nomading is much clearer.
It was never “traveling while working,”
nor a lifestyle to show off,
but a very practical question:
“Does your life have room to adjust?”
None of the people I met in Kanazawa
became digital nomads overnight.
Some first sharpened their skills until they could support themselves;
some first made their work remote;
some first learned to outsource and buy back their time bit by bit.
They didn't make every choice right;
they just left room, at every step, for the next one.
So what really matters
was never whether you work abroad,
but whether you can answer these questions:
- If you had to live in a different city tomorrow, could you accept it?
- If your income became unstable for a while, would you fall apart straight away?
- Take away your company and your title — what abilities could you take with you?
If you're an employee working for someone else,
please don't rush to write yourself off.
Being a digital nomad isn't the goal;
it's simply where many people naturally end up
after taking back their choices.
You don't have to become a digital nomad.
But once you start giving your work, life and money
a bit more flexibility and a bit less constraint,
you're already
on the same road.
---
P.S. Last time I forgot to mention the cost of the program:
about 78,000 yen (about NT$16,000),
including accommodation and activities — I had a double room to myself.
---
This week's episode
#57 | Digital nomadism is more than working while traveling: co-living in Kanazawa, Japan
Eight days in an urban-retreat program in Kanazawa. Three realizations: being a digital nomad is about the freedom to choose, not the work; why I loved co-living; and traveling without shopping. Plus why Kanazawa is a wonderful slow city.
Read the full show notes in English › (the episode is in Mandarin Chinese)
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That's it for this issue of the FIRE Life Weekly.
If you have any questions about the show or the newsletter,
just write to me at doug@firetw.com.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Have a lovely week,
and see you next week.
Doug