One day my friend Josh messaged me. Wait, you don’t know who Josh is. Let me back up.
I had met Josh in Wilmington when we both work for a company called The Gig Bureau. We had gotten along well and managed to keep in touch even as we had moved on to other jobs. I was working as a web developer in Charlotte and Josh had landed a gig as a Python dev in the Seattle area.
Both of us had kept tabs on a new type of worker called a digital nomad; someone who has a job in the United States, but has the flexibility to perform all of their work remotely. Digital nomads often travel to different countries and take advantage of the fact that the American dollar goes a long way in many exotic locales.
So one day Josh sent me a message. He was excited. He had figured out a way to do his job remotely and travel. Josh is sort of a go-big-or-go-home kind of person; anything worth doing is often worth overdoing. Not only was Josh planning to travel, he was putting a trip together that would take him around the world over the course of a year.
I was excited for him; it was a cool idea. Then he asked me to join him.
For a split second, I considered it. It would be really fun to drop everything and travel for a year, seeing the world. Unfortunately, I had some obligations coming up. I was finishing up my final year of grad school, and I only had a six-month grace period after graduating with an MBA before my massive student loan payments began. The kind of companies where I’d be putting my MBA to work are not the sort of companies that would let you work remotely 100% of the time.
Then I had a thought. What if I only joined him for part of the trip? I glanced at the tentative schedule he had sent me; around the time I graduated he would be traveling through South America.
The idea of going to South America appealed to me. I’d been attending school full time and working full time for a year at that point; by the time I graduated, it would have been two years. Two years of continual obligations of one sort or another. My weekends were usually consumed with homework and group projects. By the time I got everything wrapped up for school it was time to go back to work again on Monday. It was exhausting.
I deserved a break. I deserved to take some time for myself. The trip Josh was proposing was more than a year away; I had plenty of time to save up for it. This would let me take some time to recover from working so hard for such an extended period of time.
I pulled up the instant messenger and wrote to Josh again:
Can’t do a year. But I think I can join you for three months when you get to South America.