What Being a Digital Nomad Taught Me About the Real World
Reflections on moving from New York to Kyrgyzstan.
About three years ago I pulled up stakes and moved to the far side of the world. My reasons for this were so personal and idiosyncratic that I don’t talk about this all that much—largely because I don’t feel that there’s much about this decision that would be particularly applicable to anybody else.
But one thing you learn in journalism is that you should never let an opportunity to opine go to waste, and having made a really significant, life-changing decision like this one—moving from New York City to, of all the world’s unexpected places, Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan—it seems like sooner or later I should see if I’ve learned anything from it.
So what have I learned?
Well, first of all that a decision like this one was, maybe above all else, practical. The great theme of my life up to that point had been about keeping pace with the cost of living in New York and Los Angeles, and, essentially, the only way to do that was to do work that I didn’t really want to do, to be part of some “industry” or other of which the iron law was to take all your time and all your energy in exchange for just getting you over the threshold of covering rent and living expenses. Moving to a second- (or maybe third-) world country dramatically changes that equation—suddenly it becomes possible to live on a Western salary, assuming that you are fortunate enough to have one, while the cost of living goes way down.
I have enough of a wandering disposition that, way back in the 2000s, I’d been toying with the idea of doing something like this, but at that point—the era of Lonely Planets and airport SIM cards—moving abroad had a very different disposition to it. Then it was being an “ex-pat” and it meant either that you were a foreign correspondent or some kind of low-grade spy or, almost certainly, that you were running away from something at home. It had a tawdry glamor to it and a very real implication of breaking ties with everything you knew.
Reliable WiFi, smartphones, and Zoom have really changed the equation. Now, in millennial speak, it’s being a “digital nomad,” and what it basically means is that you live exactly in the same way that you would at home in the West—pretty much just as isolated and device-dependent as you would be in any Western city—but with a price arbitrage in your favor, and for me that means on a daily basis having the freedom to do the kind of work that I actually want to do. I’m really surprised that I haven’t seen the “digital nomad” lifestyle discussed more—for a while now, there’s been a trickle of people doing it, and then there was a bit of an exodus from the United States after the 2024 election. If you can bear to break some emotional attachments to your home country, and don’t especially mind the inevitable culture clashes of being abroad, then it really is a perfectly rational way to live.
The second thing I’ve learned is the world really has gotten very small and, in many ways, very homogenous. Kyrgyzstan is about as far away geographically and culturally from the United States as it’s possible to get, and even here my daily life basically feels very familiar. Everybody is tucked into their smartphone the same way they would be in New York. The bane of my existence is the tacky American pop music in all the café shops, and many of my days are spent wandering to the coffee shops that play old jazz standards (“Moon River,” that sort of thing) as opposed to the ones that are more full-on pop. Meanwhile, the younger urban generation speaks good English and is plugged into the world of international consumerism, maybe more than I am. My students (I teach journalism and marketing at Ala-Too University) were a bit shocked at how little I was following the Puff Daddy trial and had to explain to me why Charli xcx is famous.
The third thing I’ve learned is that this cultural homogenization has limits. It sounds weird to say, but I think about Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis basically every day while I’m here, and it somehow feels like a pressing concern for me to work out how accurate it is. On the one hand, it definitely feels like Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan is as much in the Land of the Last Man as anywhere in the West—the way that whenever I peer over the shoulder of someone they seem to be on the infinite scroll on their phones, or the way that my marketing students are so vastly more engaged and enthused than the journalism students.
On the other hand, there seems to be some critical threshold that Westernization does not cross. This threshold exists in the domain of “mentality,” and I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about it if I hadn’t lived here for as long as I have. Essentially, it’s very difficult to get things done here, and the challenges are at the level of organizational psychology. Meetings have a way of breaking up into mutual recrimination. Budgets are very difficult to keep. Hiring seems always to be done through personal connection. A certain suspicion runs through any business contact. There are many theories as to why this is the case—people here, by the way, talk entirely openly about the difficulties with “mentality,” as if they were discussing the weather. The most obvious interpretation is that Kyrgyzstan was part of the Soviet Union for 75 years. The Soviet influence is very much still there among the older generation and is basically perfectly preserved in any government office, and there would be reason to think that younger people, with their more international and consumerist outlook, are different. But somehow I think the barrier goes beyond that.
Since I have been here, I have become a bit of a disciple of the theory that Joseph Henrich lays out in his 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World—that the West, for reasons having to do with marriage and family practices initially instituted by the medieval Catholic Church, is a real anomaly. At a molecular level, Westerners are used to thinking administratively—to having small nuclear families that tend not to extend out into public life. Public entities are run by collections of strangers—“nepotism” is very much frowned upon—and these strangers are in provisional relationships to one another in order to accomplish a given task. A degree of trust is established between different entities that are similarly configured, and all individuals involved have an ingrained need to be acquiescent to the entity they are part of or risk being fired.
In a country like Kyrgyzstan, which is far outside the ambit of the Catholic Church’s “marriage and family plan,” none of that quite seems to apply. Jobs tend to be obtained through family or personal ties. Anyone who has a job like that is unlikely to leave it or be fired from it. Loyalty is extended not so much to the task that the administrative entity is meant to carry out as to the family or personal network that overlaps with it. Trust with other entities that are not part of the same network is fairly low. And intra-entity quarrels feel like family disputes more than anything—the impression is of an entire office of George Costanzas that leave a meeting shouting at each other and then return the next day as if nothing has happened, but with the underlying reasons for the quarrel unaddressed.
Accept that as an analysis and it’s clear that universalization has its limits: no matter how addicted people are to their iPhones and how much they might enjoy their shopping malls, the basic structure of the society is very different and unlikely to change unless the glue of kinship gives way to the administrative model.
The fourth thing I’ve learned is the exact obverse of the point above. It’s the immense value of strong family structures, and the great sorrow of how that has passed away from the West. That was my initial impression of Kyrgyzstan when I first came here as a college student. The family I was staying with was large and multi-generational. The older people had their place of honor at the table, packing away meat and pounding back vodka shots. As insufferable as they could be, there was absolutely no possibility of their family getting rid of them—and that struck me as being profoundly different from American society where older people seemed to be packed away to retirement homes at the earliest possible opportunity. If anything, that basic integrity of the family unit has only gotten stronger—in the 2000s, a midriff-exposing hedonism, common to the post-Soviet world, seemed to be winning the day. Twenty years on, there’s little sign of it—a social conservatism aided by, although not exclusive to the spread of Islam, has fairly clearly prevailed.
But the main impression I have of Kyrgyzstan is a feeling that family is the priority in a way that it simply isn’t in the urbane West. When we talk about the decline of the birth rate among millennials and Gen Z, what we are really talking about is a sense that the important things in life are elsewhere—in career, in meaningful relationships, in “self-fulfillment.” For most of my adult life, marriage and childbirth seemed like something that was infinitely postponable—what you did when you had all your other ducks in a row. That whole sensibility strikes me now like a bad dream. Somehow or other, it became really taboo to have children in one’s twenties (at least in my circles), and parenting came to seem like a lesser activity, with motherhood in particular viewed as a sort of betrayal of feminism. What I find in having a family all the way on the far side of the world is that it’s just much easier to do here—there are playgrounds everywhere, I wouldn’t think twice about bringing kids to a restaurant in a way that I probably would in the United States (many restaurants, incidentally, are outfitted with playgrounds of their own). “Everything for children” is a common expression over here. And there is just a sense that that’s what matters in a way that I’ve come to wholeheartedly agree with but which isn’t the case in the cosmopolitan West.
The fifth thing I’ve learned is that if my life on the far side of the world is, for pretty obvious reasons—language and culture—very isolated, it’s actually not so different from what my life was like in America. Whether we like it or not, the heart of people’s lives, family excepted, has moved online. When I was in the United States, the sense was of trying to fight that—of moving to neighborhoods that used to have these rich urban scenes, only to find that the scenes had long ago disappeared, that the neighborhoods were being kept up as kind of overpriced tourist traps to honor the scene that used to be there. Living abroad, I have fewer illusions of meeting “my people” in the wild, and the sense is that if I want to have community—and I do—then I need to be proactive about it, which means creating it in online spaces.
There’s a real cognitive adjustment to that—the internet is still largely structured around individual scrolling and posting—but Zoom, and some of the newer tools, makes things different. It’s not community in the way that community was presented in sitcoms when I was growing up—about having a charming local watering-hole or a fun group of going-out friends, anymore than it’s about goofy neighbors wandering into your apartment at just the funniest possible moment. But if we’re serious about finding community in our 21st century lives, then this probably is what we have to embrace, looking for people with shared affinities and using online tools to connect with them. That’s maybe an obvious enough point—but sometimes you have to move to the other side of the world to learn something as straightforward as that.
Sam Kahn is staff editor at Persuasion, writes the Substack Castalia, and is editor-in-chief of The Republic of Letters.
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Yes, in much of the world the old people stay in the family, and the women of the family are supposed to take care of them on top of other responsibilities like caring for children, cooking, and often a full-time job. More likely than not, they also served you food while you held interesting conversations with the men of the family. I'm not saying multigenerational families aren't great, I'm saying that Western people, especially men, are quite often have very idealistic views of non-Western families.
Always enjoy how you write and think - it was one of the many push factors that made me subscribe. I so enjoyed this . Your para that begins 'on the other hand' could be a 'copy and paste' of my thoughts of my time in the Pacific islands. Thanks!