The digital nomad lifestyle: what it's actually like after 3 years of living it
Mika Soren
My mum asks me every three months whether I’m ready to “come home yet.”
I’ve been nomadic since 2019. I don’t have a home to come home to. This is both the point and the thing that takes the longest to explain to people who haven’t done it.
The digital nomad lifestyle looks, from the outside, like a permanent holiday. Instagram told everyone that. What it is, actually, is a different way of organizing a life, with different advantages and different costs, and it’s neither the paradise the content creators sell nor the irresponsible chaos the skeptics assume.
Here’s what it’s actually like.
The daily reality
The average Tuesday of my nomad life looks like this:
Wake up somewhere between 7:30 and 8:30. Make coffee (I travel with a small Aeropress because filter coffee from a drip machine tastes like regret and I’ve been in enough countries to have strong opinions about this). Spend the first hour reading and not looking at work email, which is a discipline that took two years to develop and is genuinely one of the best decisions I’ve made.
Work from about 9am until early afternoon, usually from my accommodation or a nearby cafe I’ve scoped out. The location changes every few weeks but the routine doesn’t. Routine is what makes this sustainable. The nomads who burn out tend to be the ones who tried to make every day an adventure and ended up with no structure at all.
Afternoon is for the place I’m in. Walking, markets, something cultural, or just wandering without a plan. This is the part the Instagram photos show. It’s real. It’s also maybe 3 hours of the day.
Evening: cook in the apartment, or eat out, or meet people if I’ve been somewhere long enough to have a social network starting to form.
That’s a good day. Not every day is a good day.
The finances
Here’s the version I wish I’d found when I was starting.
The income side: I write this blog, do freelance content work, and earn from affiliate partnerships I’ve built over the years. The income is real but it took time to build: the first year was financially stressful, the second more stable, the third genuinely comfortable. There’s no magic. It’s a business, not a lifestyle hack.
Remote employment is more accessible now. Plenty of nomads work full-time remote jobs, especially in tech, marketing, design, and customer success. The salary is a salary. The freedom is in the location.
The spending side: Cost of living is wildly variable by location and that variation is the nomad’s greatest financial advantage. A month in Chiang Mai costs me around 800-1000 EUR including accommodation, food, and transport. A month in Lisbon costs 1,800-2,200. A month in Tokyo lands somewhere in between. Choosing where to base yourself is a genuine financial decision, not just an aesthetic one.
The costs people underestimate:
Accommodation premium. When you’re not paying rent on a yearly lease, you’re paying nightly or monthly rates that are structurally more expensive. A 500 EUR/month apartment on a 12-month lease becomes 700-900 EUR/month when rented on a monthly basis. This is real and it adds up.
Health insurance. You need it. International health insurance costs anywhere from 80-200 EUR/month depending on your age, coverage, and deductible. It’s not optional, it’s a cost of the life.
The flight budget. You move. Moving costs money. I budget around 150-200 EUR per month averaged across the year for flights, even in slow months when I’m not moving much, to account for the heavy travel months.
Admin and subscriptions. VPN, cloud storage, accounting software, productivity tools. Small individually, real collectively.
The social reality
This is the thing the lifestyle content almost never addresses honestly.
The social infrastructure of a fixed life is enormous and invisible until you don’t have it. The colleagues you see every day. The friends who live nearby. The family dinners. The social calendar that fills itself because you’re embedded in a community.
Nomad life means rebuilding all of that from scratch every few weeks. Some people are genuinely energized by this. I’m one of them, mostly. But there are evenings, particularly on Sunday nights in cities I’ve only been in for a week, where the absence of all of it is genuinely felt.
What I’ve found that helps:
Staying somewhere for at least a month. Two to three months is better. The difference between knowing nobody and having a small local social network is mostly just time. You can’t build anything real in five days.
Coworking spaces. Not for productivity reasons (though the wifi is better). For the social infrastructure they provide. You see the same people, you get coffee with people, you end up at a work drinks thing and meet someone interesting. The community forms faster than it would otherwise.
Other nomads understand the life in a way that friends back home don’t. There are communities online and in nomad hubs (Chiang Mai, Bali, Medellín, Lisbon) that are genuinely worth engaging with. Not for the business networking performance of it all, but because people who understand your life are easier to be around.
The relationship question: Long-term nomadic life and romantic relationships coexist with varying levels of difficulty. Couples who travel together report that it’s both the best and worst thing for a relationship (high proximity, high adventure, high stress). Meeting and maintaining a relationship while nomadic is possible but the logistics add complexity that doesn’t exist in a fixed life. I’m not going to tell you it’s simple.
The practicalities everyone asks about
Where to base yourself: Anywhere with reliable fast internet and reasonable cost of living. The established hubs exist for good reasons. Chiang Mai, Bali (specifically Canggu/Ubud), Medellín, Lisbon, Tbilisi (Georgia), and Mexico City have been popular for years because the infrastructure, community, and cost structure are all good. For a first base, I’d pick one of these.
Visas: The legal complexity of working remotely across countries is real. Many people operate on tourist visas in a technical grey area. Digital nomad visas now exist in many countries and offer a legal path. If you’re staying somewhere more than 90 days, look into the proper visa.
Connectivity: Having reliable data is not optional, it’s infrastructure. I use eSIMply as my primary data source across most destinations. It activates before I land, works the moment I arrive, and covers most of the countries I move between without requiring me to find and queue at a phone shop. For the specific countries I’m visiting, I check my phone abroad guide.
Banking: Wise card. Revolut as backup. A home country account for income to land in. This setup handles most scenarios.
Tax: Get advice for your specific situation. This is not a “google it” problem. A tax professional who handles digital nomads is a worthwhile investment.
What I’d tell myself at the start
It’s better than it looks in some ways and harder in others, in ways that balance out differently than you expect.
The freedom is real. Being able to book a flight to somewhere you’ve wanted to go and actually go, without taking annual leave or explaining yourself to a manager, is a thing that never loses its novelty. The flexibility is genuine.
The difficulty is also real. The loneliness, the financial uncertainty in the early stages, the admin overhead of a life without fixed infrastructure, the periodic exhaustion of constant novelty.
The people who make it long-term (I’ve now met many, this is a statistically observable pattern) share some traits: they’re genuinely self-directed workers who don’t need external structure to be productive. They’ve found income that’s sustainable and not just a sprint. They build routines rather than constant spontaneity. And they’ve mostly stopped trying to live the Instagram version of the life.
My mum will ask again in three months.
I’ll say the same thing I always say.
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