Digital Nomad

Your Unsettled is My Settled

I was coming down the steps of the Merchant Hotel, a five star hotel in the Cathedral Quarter of Belfast and a great spot for a Bramble (gin cocktail), when I ran into an old friend. “Och well” he said, “where are you living now?”. He was doing great in his career with a nice house and a husband and here was I appearing to float around between cities and countries and sounding unfixed, unsettled.

Don’t get me wrong, I tried a settled existence. I bought a house that I kept for 10 years, although I didn’t stay in it too much, except during Covid. When I was a corporate worker bee, I could explain staying in a city like London, Dublin or Brighton for six months or a year, because those were the lengths of typical contracts. Even then, I needed travel kicks on long weekends or in between work gigs when I could get away for a few weeks. Travel is my life’s oxygen.

Travel is my life’s oxygen.

It wasn’t until I went to a gathering of travel writers that something fell into place; that starts to describe my wanderlust. I can’t be sure who said it, or their gender, but they said something like “your unsettled is my settled”. That phrase had become their stock response to friends or family who seemed pissed off that they were still not settled down.

…a thread of inner stillness runs through the constancy of my movement…

Perhaps travel writing, travel photography and travel film-making find us. We see beauty in difference, we capture an angle, we share the flavour, tingle your senses. We burn to share our curiosity, my nosiness about the world, watching people take coffee on the Rive Gauche, the smell of ozone when hiking the Snæfellsnes, in the tilt of the language of my homeland of Ireland. For lots of people, maybe even most people, their sense of home is fulfilled by the stillness of a settled location. But for me, a thread of inner stillness runs through the constancy of my movement, of travel.

I hadn’t thought that this was a thing, a passion that could be named… and, actually, if I’m being hard on myself, I might have developed an idea that desiring full-time travel was problematic. A wise therapist told me that a behaviour isn’t problematic unless it is problematic. And, I came to know that, for me at least, travel is unproblematic.

Life as a Digital Nomad

I had heard the term ‘digital nomad’ somewhere. I associated it with Instagrammers kickstarting a modelling career in Dubai (lol, now I’m all about the ‘Gram). But my attitude was lazy and I sharpened it. I like this definition:

Decoupling Corporate & Location

It turns out that I AM a Digital Nomad.

When I was Mr Corporate, the Job was intertwined with the Location, being present in the client’s office. Hence contract terms spent in Dublin, London and elsewhere (side eyes 🙄 at you, Worthing).

Now I’ve decoupled Corporate & Location. In 2021, I started to travel full-time and in 2022, I sold my house once and for all. I’ve not bought a new one. I write and edit Planet Patrick, run a bunch of social media accounts and photograph and make travel videos for YouTube. I dip back into the corporate world as a consultant, but I am now driving the location where I choose to live and selling my skillset as a portable service to industry.

Articles in this Section

In this section of Planet Patrick, you’ll find any article that relates to my experience as a Digital Nomad. Yes, I have burned out doing full-time travel. I’m also a huge advocate for following this as your path as a way to get off the treadmill and live your life differently. Plus you’ll find Gear Recommendations (and Fails), accounts of major cities as Digital Nomad Hubs and insight into meet-ups, office spaces and long-term rentals.

DIGITAL NOMAD ARTICLES

Towards the end of my stay in Buenos Aires, I kept walking past Quotidiano, a charming mid-range Italian restaurant chain set up for quick lunches and longer dinners. One Tuesday…

Burger 54 in Buenos Aires is a popular premium burger joint open until 12am every day. But something isn’t quite right: disappointing quality and poor service. DetailsRestaurant: Burger 54Location: Av….

Traveling alone can be a thrilling and life-changing experience, but it can come with its own set of challenges. I write from the perspective of a solo male traveler, but…

Eating Out Alone Can Be a Fun and Rewarding Experience Eating out alone may be a matter of choice or circumstance. In either scenario, it’s an opportunity to treat yourself,…

Traveling alone can be an exciting and rewarding experience for solo male travelers. But a lot depends on the person: solo travel will feel natural for some guys but give…

Solo travel continues to dominate the travel industry, empowering individuals to embark on personal journeys of self-discovery and exploration. While it has been perceived as a predominantly female pursuit, the…

With nearly 30 years of international travel under my belt, I’ve been in more than one sticky situation where I didn’t know how to read the signals. These 10 Crucial…

Traveling alone comes with a wide range of potential issues for anybody.  The problem with the travel ‘niche’ of Solo Male Travel is that is it ill-defined. In this article, I’ve…

There were some warning signals when I walked into Gustatio, just off the main market square in central Groningen, Netherlands.  An empty restaurant At 1pm, I was the first customer…

Travel Market Niches  As a travel writer and film maker, I’ve become increasingly familiar with the “niches” that travel creators use to define themselves, also used by the travel industry…