Never Retire: I Don’t Want the Digital Nomad Life

I’m not looking to escape—I’m building a life I want to come back to

Before we get to the difference between me and digital nomads—and the ingredients that make Spain feel like home—a quick note:

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We’re back from our month-long trip to Barcelona (two days) San Francisco (two weeks), quick return to Valencia (four days), Paris (5 days), Amsterdam (3 days), Barcelona (one day).

Going into this trip, I had competing thoughts—

• Excitement around my daughter’s graduation, wanting to be part of it (it went super well), then taking the aforementioned trip with her and my wife’s daughter.

• The sense that we were thwarting the momentum we had built building our lives in Valencia… in our neighborhood, Russafa.

You can hold competing thoughts simultaneously. Even if they make you uncomfortable. Or you worry how others will react.

My job here is to express that dissonance so you can see, through me, what it’s like to move across the world on the verge of turning 50, and maybe it can help inform your own.

Along somewhat similar lines, generally I love to travel, however there comes a point when I want to go home. And I think it has a lot to do with how I view traveling.

I don't view it as hitting all of the landmarks, a chance to go shopping (at the same stores you can find in hundreds of cities), or the opportunity to splurge on—as they say—fancy hotels and expensive meals.

People often emphatically say—you’re on vacation when you hesitate to spend on something, eat a sweet, or have another beer. Since I was a kid—hearing my Mom characterize vacations as times to eat, drink, and spend differently (more excessively) than you do at home, I never quite understood why.

This move helped close quite a few open thoughts about life—about living life in the day to day—for me. Having found my place more than I even ever imagined I could in Spain, I have come to a concrete conclusion.

Vacation is a dumb word. As I see and like to experience it, you don't go away to get away. You go away to live life in a different setting. To see how it feels to be part of San Francisco, Paris, Amsterdam, and Barcelona. To conclude that San Francisco no longer does it for you, that you want to spend weeks at a time in Paris sometime soon, that Amsterdam is beautiful but kind of boring and that you made the right choice picking Valencia over Barcelona.

You go to other places to think new thoughts, develop long-standing ones, and come to conclusions on others. You travel to turn this thinking into sparks, into ideas you can take back home to where the inspiration happens.

That’s the difference between me and a digital nomad. I admire the lifestyle some of them live.

But I don’t want to live out of a suitcase, chasing novelty just to say I’ve been somewhere (which is not what the digital nomads I really love do).

I want roots. A rhythm. A life I actually live—not just pass through. I don’t want to show up at the local market for two months straight only to never be seen or heard from again.

I want a home base that inspires me to leave—and excites me even more to return. That’s what Valencia is. That’s what Spain is.

It’s the place where I wake up wanting to write. The place I feel sharp, loose, curious, and alive. The place that makes me want to keep going—physically, mentally, emotionally.

So yeah, we’re home. And now, we can really Never Retire—writing and living with no distractions.

Don’t tell anyone, but this might be the best view of Amsterdam.