Koh Phangan

We stayed a week at Koh Phangan’s Beachub, a beach front coworking space with rental cabanas and good wifi. We didn’t explore the island. We had come here to focus. We barely stopped working, unless it was to overeat cheap, delicious food, to feed, pet, and play with the dogs I’m so deeply in love with, or to drink boxed wine. 

I finally got Nick to sit down and write. Here’s his take on the digital nomad life.

OMG That Sounds SO PERFECT!

Our lives should be perfect. We travel the world, eat great food, and go on amazing adventures. All while I work remotely. It sounds like nothing could bring you down and that every moment is perfect bliss.

When we tell people about this insane adventure, they immediately think it goes something like this:

1. Wake up around noon. Roll out of bed and grab a coffee with a shot of whiskey.
2. Reply to some emails on my iPhone while I make my way to the beach.
3. Grab a lounge chair under a palm tree while I sink my feet into soft, white sand.
4. Order myself a coconut with a splash of rum.
5. Finally, open my ultra-light laptop and get a few hours of stress-free work in until the sun sets.
6. Eat a five-course meal overlooking a gorgeous cliff while enjoying a bottle of reserve wine.
7. Dream sweet dreams and repeat all over again.

And yes – we do many of these things on a weekly basis, And yes—we are truly fortunate and grateful to be on this trip. But living and working while traveling isn’t always this perfect. WIFI Password? Do you have good internet? What’s your download speed? My internet just cut out, did you internet cut out? Dropped lines and static while you’re on a conference call with your boss. All the international sockets. Why do we need to many sockets!  Blahhhh, screwed by timezones again 12pm meeting EST = midnight for me. 

While the world continues to modernize rapidly, there is one thing that continues to haunt us – the internet. We are on a constant quest to find a faster connection, a more stable stream. We find ourselves planning hotels, hostels, Airbnbs, and even our cities around the sole fact of whether we can have DECENT internet or not. Nomadlist is basically my bible.

If you would have told us that this would be our biggest issue before we started, I would have laughed in your face. But little did we know how slow internet would affect us. Not only does work take ~29% longer for me to work (and yes, I time myself), but it also destroys the simple luxuries of life we depend on—Netflix, Amazon Video, Instagram, etc. are all unbearably slow. The number of times you must pause Game of Thrones, the number of stories that take hours to load, and the drain that it does on your phones battery life.…and your connection to our normal lives back home. 

And while these truly are problems of the privileged, they impact your day-to-day life. Work that should take you an hour can end up taking three—and you can’t bill those hours that you are patiently waiting for your email to load or for that query to run. Your plans get canceled up when you can’t finish your work in time or and if you can’t make that important phone call. Countless hours are spent hunting down a good wifi connection. More than once, I have ordered five different cups of coffee just to try our five different wifi connections before settling down in a place that closes just an hour later. 

Perfect is not always PERFECT.

While I could go into more details and write more boring banter about how my life isn’t “perfect” as a digital nomad traveling the world with the love of my life, I think it can sum up into this:

While I am put into near-perfect settings with near-perfect job and a near-perfect wife, happiness is truly a state of mind. We still find ourselves lonely, we still find ourselves frustrated and overwhelmed, and we still have days of sadness and anger. Even when everything around is set up to be an absolute state of bliss, it doesn’t always mean that you will feel that way.

While this journey and unique lifestyle will likely be the best times of our lives, nothing is ever “perfect” —but it is pretty damn close. Except for the wifi.