In your travels, you meet new people, form a bond and a connection that you'll never forget, become friends, sometimes lovers, and then just as it's getting really good, you're gone (or they're gone), and you start all over. You keep a graveyard of friendships in the back of your head that haunt you most when you're alone in strange lands without a soul to talk to that shares your language, much less your culture. You're open to learning, but it would take years, and you'll be gone tomorrow.
You try to keep these friendships on life support over the phone, but without being physically present and in close proximity, they fade quick, at no fault of either party, it's just hard. For the people I've made friends with in Thailand and Serbia I've slowly stopped talking to, I'm sorry, and if you're feeling guilt for not talking to me, I forgive you.
You get to the next country, you open social media and try to find the expat community in town, go to a language exchange, but picking up that phone gets just a bit heavier every time. Soon you realize you're exerting effort to get out of your hole and meet people, soon a gnawing despair and dread for what's inevitably coming, seeps in like a miasma from the periphery, tainting even the most fun and interesting interactions.
I met you, I like you, I could love you, but I will be gone, and I will miss you.
This is a problem only people of a very rare (but increasingly more common) kind of lifestyle tend to have, and that is people that have a nomadic lifestyle in lands where they don't speak the language or share its culture.
No the 'military brat' and traveling consultant, still tend to live in a country where it's easy to communicate. A 'digital nomad' (as much as this term icks me out, I haven't found much of a better one, you're not an immigrant, you're not an expat, you're something elses) suffers uniquely.
It takes a lot of effort and even more luck, to find a nice community of people in a country that makes you want to stick around. If you do happen to wander down the right street, at the right time, and meet the right people, in the right place, you'll have to do it all over again when your visa runs out.
I can already hear it.
'Oh woe is me, I'm traveling the world without anything to tie me down, people dream to be in your position dude'
You're not completely wrong for saying that.
But I wouldn't be here if I could afford a house, and had a family and kids. Not because they would hold me back, but because I'd be enjoying that life. I'd have lineage, a future to prepare and a new life to nurture and teach, and people to take care of me when I'm sick and old.
I do this because I can't do that. I satisfy my senses and curiousity. Always a new food to try, a new history to learn, a new sight to see, my life is a treadmill of novelty ideal for a mind that thrives on it.
I am by all accounts, stimulated. Sometimes I even catch a fleeting moment of bliss when I stare at a beautiful vista, or walking home tipsy after a great night out with new friends, or when tearing into a plate of pad kra pao moo krob the next morning (with egg, of course). I try to savor every moment I can, and to my delight, my perception of time has stretched. I used to worry that time just kept moving faster and faster with age, but I think that only happens when you don't have much difference between your days and your brain tends to file everything under 'rerun' and condenses it all into one block.
Those moments matter, and they make it all worth it. But they can be exhausting to chase.
I find the best thing to do is to just reflect and think about where you came from, those deeper reasons you started traveling.
I remember how miserable I was in my overpriced-but-too-small apartment in America. Too numb to feel lonely, but I was lonely. I went nowhere, I did nothing. Just worked remotely. Any time I'd try to leave the house and go do something, I'd be doing it alone, and spending $50 dollars to do it at a minimum.
The food made me tired. I had no community, I did not know my neighbors' names. Dating was a soul-destroying parade of bot accounts, iced over hearts and bad faith. I felt like the only sane man in a land where everyone had lost their minds and their ability to communicate.
I remember the pressure. The constant struggle and long hours to keep above the poverty line and keep myself housed, clothed, and fed (with a little bit of comfort on the side). The damocles sword of being laid off because of some market fluctuation always swaying overhead. Every time I'd climb up another rung in my career, everything would get two rungs more expensive, the city 3 rungs more dangerous. I watched neighborhoods I remember feeling alive and vigorous become depressing hell holes of addiction and despair. Everything was rotting. Everything was getting worse.
So was I.
I had no time for art, no energy to create, no space to think, and no one to confide in that was not already compromised by the insanity of American politics and discourse.
After I got laid off from my remote job I decided it was time to escape. I needed to see the world outside of the American bubble. Get away from the insanity for a while. I needed to be challenged in ways I couldn't be at home. I needed to be somewhere, anywhere, outside of the West.
I needed to go.
After reflection, despite my loneliness here, it is better to be away. Travel (and a nomadic lifestyle) does not solve your problems. Whatever issues you had at home you will bring with you. But it can relieve the pressure. Get you out of an environment that created the problems to begin with. Get away from the food, the insanity, the pressure, the obnoxious requirement to have and maintain a motor vehicle all the time.
You can breathe. (Unless you're in Chiang Mai during burning season then you can choke)
Lonely at home, lonely abroad. But the loneliness makes sense here. It's an obvious mechanical thing, a result of my choice of lifestyle, not a result of societal sickness. I could after all, decide to settle down in those places where I do make friends. That's certainly what everyone wants me to do that I form connections with. It's my fault, it's a problem I can actually do something about.
I could settle somewhere, and I think I will (or at least, a few somewheres). Just not yet. I need to see more.
There is a trap I've seen people fall into, and I've felt its pull myself. The toll of making friends and losing them, over and over, wears you down until the idea of starting again feels like more than you can bear.
So you stop.
You keep yourself a bit guarded in the next city. Conversations stay on the surface, you don't open up to the deeper ones. You make an effort to go out but you go home before the after-hours drinks and adventures. You start dreading the 'who are you, where are you from, what do you do's and find any excuse to avoid them. 'Too repetetive and annoying' you say to yourself, not realizing that it's the conversational equivalent of turning a doorknob.
I get it. But I think it's the wrong response.
Because isn't this just how it goes anyways? Most friendships have a quiet expiration date whether you're moving countries or not. People take new jobs, have kids, drift apart, die. The difference with this is that you can see the expiration date stamped in your passport.
Maybe that's actually a gift, if you can stand to look at it that way.
When you know the time limit, you can spend your moments with people with more intention. You know to savor rather than take for granted. You say yes to more things, and suggest some adventures you wouldn't dare risk with people back home you couldn't simply jump on a plane to escape from the embarassment of it going south.
They could die tomorrow. You could die tomorrow.
And they don't always have to end. You can come back. You can show up again a year later, or if they're another nomad, you can even meet them in some city sometime down the line, already knowing that you'll get along.
The graveyard is still there. I still feels that way on the quieter nights. But I'm starting to instead see it as a map of everywhere I've been and everyone who made it matter.
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