Every Instagram feed about the digital nomad life looks the same. Laptop. Beach. Golden hour. Someone who looks approximately 28 years old gazing thoughtfully at their screen while the waves do something photogenic in the background.
The reality is a bit different. I'm 59, I've been doing this for twelve years, and while I wouldn't trade it for anything, I want to give you an honest account of what it's actually like — including the bits that don't make the photos.
The admin is relentless
Visas. Travel insurance. Tax. Accommodation. Connectivity. Health. These things don't go away when you're travelling — they multiply. Every new country is a new set of rules, a new set of things to figure out. In the early years I underestimated this massively. Now I budget time for it just like I budget time for client work. It's part of the job.
The WiFi problem is real
I've had calls drop at critical moments. I've submitted work a day late because my connection died during a file upload. I've sat in a hotel room at 11pm trying to find a signal strong enough to send a video file. None of this has ever been catastrophic, but it is wearing. The solution I've landed on: always have a local SIM with data as a backup, always download offline versions of anything important, and build a little extra time into deadlines when I'm moving around.
The loneliness nobody talks about
I've mentioned this before and I'll mention it again because it's the thing people are least prepared for. Solo travel is wonderful. It's also, periodically, quite lonely. You can be in the most beautiful city in the world and feel disconnected from everything that matters to you. This gets better with experience — you learn to build temporary community, to say yes to things, to reach out rather than waiting. But it doesn't go away entirely, and I'd be lying if I said it did.
Your body takes a beating
I'm a morning person by nature, but even I find the first few days in a new timezone difficult. Long-haul flights aren't kind. The food, which is often brilliant, is also often very different from what your stomach is used to. I've worked through more than one bout of food poisoning, and not gracefully. Take this seriously — sleep, hydration, and not trying to push through illness the way you might at home. It's not worth it.
And the good stuff?
I don't want to end on that note, because the honest truth also includes this: it's extraordinary. Working from a terrace in Vietnam while the city comes to life around you. A call with a client on a Wednesday afternoon in Lisbon, when the light is doing something remarkable through the windows. The feeling, twelve years in, that you have genuinely expanded your sense of what work and life can look like.
I started doing this in my mid-forties. It is absolutely not a young person's game. If anything, I think it suits later life better — you have the experience to manage the complications, the perspective not to catastrophise when things go wrong, and hopefully the sense to value what's actually happening around you.
Just don't try to work from the beach. The glare is terrible.