You may never get a chance to take that dream vacation if you’re always shackled to some hum-drum desk job. Even if it’s the job you’ve always dreamed of, eventually it’s going to become commonplace, and you will find yourself restless. Vacation time helps, but it can’t beat location independent living.
Something else to consider is that humanity wasn’t designed to perpetually pilot a desk somewhere. People want to explore. They want to see the world. They want to swim in clear cool waters of mountain climes, they want to surf green ocean waves and hike through rain forest trails.
You just can’t get the kind of adventurous experience you should on a regular basis if you allow yourself to “settle” at some job which depends on local residency. Look, wherever you live, you’re going to be shackled by your occupation.
Living a nomadic lifestyle on the road doesn’t necessarily mean you will escape the daily grind – how big is your tax debt, repaying your student loans, bills, family issues – but, you can take a discretionary day off every now and again to visit places to unwind and take the blow more easily.
Getting A Sense Of Foreign Places
Investigating such attractions can’t really be done in a few days. You really want a few weeks or months to get a feel for such a place. You want to make friendships, get to know the locals, and experience the “truth” of the place.
Now imagine being able to do that not just in the OC, or in New York, or Miami, or Chicago, or Denver—but in Toronto, and Tie Juana, and London, and Paris, and the various picturesque villages of Ireland—anywhere you want to go. This is the implication of location independent living, and it’s something that can be done very affordably today. As a matter of fact, you could quit your job, sell your belongings, and become a nomad in just a few weeks.
This is just what I did. Well, to a degree. I actually phased out my day job. First I found an occupation that I could work at my discretion. I substitute taught for about three years—this allowed me to take “gigs” on the road; I’m an entertainer, you see. After three years of that, I found something groundbreaking online.
If you’ve never heard of content writing, blog-writing, freelance writing, or online editing, it’s time to educate yourself—should you have the travel bug, that is. There are literally hundreds of ways for you to make a decent living online that is entirely location independent. This trend is increasing, not decreasing. Online writing is changing business.
Something For Everyone
Even if you’re not a good writer, you can find location-independent jobs. BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, is a new infrastructural practice utilizing cloud computing to “float” an office platform on the web such that no physical office is necessary, and workers can “digitally” commute from wherever they have an internet connection.
Find what fits you. Writing is what fit me. I spent several months ensuring I could make my baseline budget through writing blogs and content. When it turned out I could, I turned my savings into a cheap old RV and lived in that for a year, rather than an apartment. By the time a year was up, I had saved enough to buy a more dependable motorhome.
Now I live where I want to live. I use a Verizon MiFi device for the internet, a gym for showers (though I’ve got one in the RV; it just uses too much water to be reasonable in the long term), and unrestricted streets to moor my land-yacht at night. Sometimes it can be difficult, but more than anything it’s mind-opening. And you can do the same—all you’ve got to do is take that first step.