I’m reading an article by Lorraine Brown at the moment on the potential of tourism to act as a catalyst for existential authenticity. In brief, she argues that tourism offers us a break from routine and consequently a reprieve from the everydayness of life that can often feel stifling. Tourism can literally give people the time and space to reflect on where they’ve come from, where they currently are, and where they want to go.

Of course, tourism doesn’t necessarily provoke individuals into contemplating their existence, but it does take them beyond the confines and responsibilities of everyday life and grants them the opportunity to consider their lives and their future, and the direction they’d like to take. If nothing else, travel is attractive because it gives us a means of escape from everyday routine and ritual, and it is precisely this emancipatory potential that makes it so attractive to most of us stuck in nine-to-fives and enmeshed in the responsibilities of normal life. For Brown, individuals in the space of tourism can take these existential insights back into regular life and redirect their lives from inauthentic living (living in opposition to one’s heart-felt values, interests and beliefs) to lives of authenticity.

What I think is interesting to consider, though, is that whilst travel/tourism is usually understood as a liminal space (a temporary space that we move through) in the popular imaginary and academic discourse, from a digital nomad perspective, it is not. For those lucky enough to travel for leisure, we usually live in a place, go travel somewhere, and then return home. Digital nomads, however, don’t return home, but exist perpetually in this space. For nomads, tourism isn’t a temporary reprieve from everyday life, but the existential space in which a life is built and experienced every day. As such, digital nomads subvert this conceptual understanding of tourism by building routine and ritual in a space where it didn’t traditionally belong.

This demonstrates that the very concept of tourism is built upon sedentarist principles (which implies the moral imperative to live in one place and settle) which digital nomads either implicitly or explicitly reject in favour of a more fluid existence built upon nomadic principles: that movement, mobility and an untethered existence is normal and the “right” way to live.

This demonstrates the radical nature of this lifestyle. Whilst on the surface digital nomadism may appear as a lifestyle built upon hedonism, geoarbitrage and economic exploitation, from another perspective, it subverts many of the concepts and principles we take for granted and have hitherto lived our lives in accordance to. For digital nomads, tourism – as traditionally understood – doesn’t really exist…