I suspect the lifestyle would be hard if you have other interests that require equipment.
While my DW and I both love traveling, seeing new places and meeting new people it would be difficult to completely give up our other passions.
I had to read this a couple of times to figure out that the question you're really asking is "Why Nomad?"
Why full-time travel? Why not keep the home and all the toys? Travel extensively for a few months, then come back to pursue all your hobbies that require equipment, a larger chunk of time and other people to do it with? Then continue traveling again in installments?
I think the answer is going to vary by individual. But I think for a lot of nomads, the answer might be something like, "I just want to
xxx all the time" (get your mind out of the gutter! :) )
For us, the one grand passion we have is motorcycling. I'm not sure if you know any motorcyclists, but if you do, you may know a few of them who have said, "I just want to ride all the time. Every day". Or, I'd love to ride from the top of Alaska, to the bottom of Argentina".
Bonneville Salt Flats, UtahSo some nomadic journeys are quests. Especially the overlanders who measure their progress with squiggly, red continuous lines beginning from the last place they ever called "home", through all the points where they've since laid their head to rest for a single night, a week or a month. But it's never those points that are the
raison d'etre for the journey. Instead, it's about all those experiences that happen in between those points.
Those kinds of quests take time. And if you're not independently wealthy, it's cost-prohibitive to maintain a permanent residence waiting for you for the months or years it takes for you to complete the journey.
But that's overlanders, which is a very niche segment of nomads. Back in our old life, we'd go out to Whistler to snowboard at least once in the season. On the slopes, we'd meet so many young people who abandoned a stationary life to chase the endless winter. They'd do this for many years - migrating from one hemisphere to another, Switzerland to New Zealand to Canada. They'd find a job teaching skiing or snowboarding or working for minimum wage in the chalet in return for a free lift pass. Living with six other people in a cramped apartment because: "I just want to ski all the time. Every day".
And then the rest of the world looks at that kind of lifestyle and thinks, "Yeah, I like skiing/motorcycling/travel as much as the next guy. But not *THAT* much!"
Snorkeling with giant turtles in San Pedro, BelizeChoosing nomadism to pursue motorcycling, snowboarding or full-time travel for the sake of travel itself is a fringe lifestyle. Not many people pursue a passion with such single-mindedness, especially to the exclusion of other hobbies that require a more settled life. But we weighed it out and came to the conclusion that it was worth it. Not everyone reaches the same conclusion.
It's an interesting process, selling, giving away or throwing out all your possessions except for what you can fit in your backpack, or the panniers on your motorcycle, or the back of your van. I'm a packrat, and I wanted to keep everything. I wanted to rent a storage locker, have my old life waiting for me when we finished traveling. But due to finances, we couldn't afford a storage locker that big (it would have had to be basically the size of our home), so we went through the (painful for me) exercise of sell/donate/toss.
Everything that passed though my hands during that process, I thought, "I don't want to get rid of this. I'm going to really miss this". But it didn't take very long on the road to realize that I didn't miss 99% of my old possessions. They were just distractions; stuff I filled my life and closets with just because I had the money and storage space.
Hiking in the Tatacoa Desert, ColombiaBut back to your question, what about the hobbies and activities we used to do? We discovered we only went snowboarding because there's very little else to do during the harsh Canadian winters. Once we were on the road chasing our own endless summer on motorcycles, we found that we didn't miss our snowboards at all. Nor our rollerblades, or ice skates, or mountain bikes, or the 20-piece crock set. Those things weren't as important to us as we thought they were. And the hobbies that we wanted to continue pursuing turned out to be very portable and mobile.
Neda loves yoga. Her yoga mat rolls up real small on the bike and she's able to find drop-in yoga classes anywhere that we anchor down for a while. She loves hiking and we make sure we hit all the exotic hiking destinations all over the world, national parks in Southwest USA, deserts of Africa, jungles of South America, the jagged fjordlands of Norway, etc. We both love motorsports, and traveling around the world has given us the opportunity to catch international motorcycle races live that previously we could only have watched on TV. I just picked up tickets for the World Superbike races in Buriram, Thailand next month!!!! Very excited! We've played beach volleyball on three different continents. I've rented a guitar when we've stayed for longer than a month in some places. There is no shortage of ways you can fill your time with entertainment and leisure.
View from the grandstands, World Superbike Race, Assen, HollandGene, you touched on this briefly in an early blog post where you talked about Neda taking up cross stitch because it gave her something to do during down times.
Yes, but this is something entirely different. As you can see from above, it's dead easy to fill our lives with entertainment and recreation. What I was trying to convey earlier, by referencing some on MMM exclaiming that they were bored of their post-FIRE life, is that some people are so driven that they need a past-time that's competitive, or stimulating and satisfying on a physical or creative level. An activity that develops a quantitative skill so that you can measure yourself getting better at it with each passing day. Or a project that has an end-goal, that becomes something tangible that you can admire with self-satisfaction, as opposed to just filling in the hours with unchallenging, yet still pleasurable activities between travel.
Yoga retreat, Vilcabamba, EcuadorFor me, it's writing and taking pictures. It stimulates my brain and having the last decade of our travels on record, I can see the progression in my writing and photography. Neda gets excited every time she comes back from yoga classes and she's mastered a new pose. And she *loves* cross-stitching, sometimes I think more to admire the progress than the actual process...
The bottom line is that you don't have to have a permanent address to enjoy most of the things you did when you had a home. There are some things that do require specialized equipment and a place to store it, rigidly scheduled time and a fixed community to participate with (I miss the regular Thursday night jam sessions with my old band), but as you yourself said:
I guess everyone needs to find their own balance and while one lifestyle may be alluring it may not fit when balanced against other passions or commitments.
Right now, this is the balance. This makes sense to us.
Nomads represent such a minuscule segment of the population. The sustainability of this kind of existence is fragile, apt to be disrupted by lack of funds, boredom and wavering dedication or just plain loneliness.
And it's probably not forever. It's rare to see people on the road for longer than a year. I only know a handful of overlanders who have been out for over a decade. Nomadism for most is merely a brief episode in their life, but one that has provided the most intense experiences, fraught with the kind of adventure and discovery that can only be experienced without the safety net of a full-time job or a permanent address.
Road never ends, even when it does. Outside Panajachel, GuatemalaNomadism is a perpetual free-fall through the world, as opposed to jumping down to the next ledge below, going home for a while, stocking up on more climbing supplies then coming back later to rappel down to the next ledge. Instead, it's unbroken inertia, ceaseless velocity, it's improvising on a budget, thinking on your feet, changing plans at a moment's notice, then getting those plans smashed to bits and having to discover new ways of doing things in new places, as opposed to always doing things the old way but in new places.
It's not for everyone, but for some, it's the dream of a lifetime.
(I wrote a lot again, so added more pictures for illustration)