Mobility guilt: digital nomads and COVID-19

Abstract

This article examines how digital nomads (generally defined here as those from the Global North working remotely without a permanent home) reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using social media data and 37 in-depth interviews with digital nomads from 16 countries, it argues that many in this group continued traveling to maintain their identity and avoid border closures and lockdowns. The article explores how they rationalized their mobility while navigating feelings of guilt, avoidance of shame, and deflecting accusations of geographical and epidemiological selfishness. New geopolitical conditions created both barriers and travel loopholes, with participants therefore attempting to maintain their group identity through movement while also limiting their social media participation to avoid moral sanction. Drawing on Mimi Sheller’s work on mobility justice, the article closes by demonstrating how mobility guilt may be a phenomenon that outlasts the pandemic.

Keywords:

• Mobility
• digital nomads
• COVID-19
• tourism
• inequality

The coronavirus pandemic resulted in the single greatest reduction in mobility since World War Two: international borders shut, the airline industry hemorrhaged money, and regional borders were closed in an effort to contain the virus. Travel was often forbidden by law and looked upon with suspicion in many communities. Personal mobility, once the mark of success and independence, was seen as selfish by communities not yet hit with COVID-19, who worried about outsiders acting as human vectors (Cresswell, 2021). On social media, travel that was once celebrated by networks of friends and followers was condemned as irresponsible and unneeded. Many governments told their citizens: the patriotic thing to do was to ‘stay home and stop the spread.’

One group of people who were particularly challenged by the sudden contraction in global mobility—and sometimes sought to bend new border and quarantine rules to their own advantage—were digital nomads. While ‘digital nomads’ is a broad term, this article is particularly interested in travelers who practice ‘geoarbitrage’ to achieve low costs of living in the Global South while working, often as freelancers, for companies based in high-income regions; like Europe, North America, and Australasia. They are remote workers constantly on the move: regularly changing countries to meet new people, have unique travel experiences, and realize lower costs of living. Until their lives were complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, their mobility often tracked onto tourism-lifestyle destinations (Hannonen, 2020). Even more so, they were often located in places where residential tourists live: demonstrating a new facet of the tourism industry that relied on longer stays and remote work rather than holidaymakers alone.

This article, based on 830 social media observations from Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and Facebook and 37 in-depth interviews with participants (from 16 Global North countries), seeks to understand how digital nomads reacted to the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. It argues that many digital nomads contested new restrictions on global mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic by finding creative means to continue practicing geoarbitrage. It also contends that they found creative ways to deflect accusations of selfishness and avoid feelings of guilt for their actions.

The article firstly discusses how the new geopolitical conditions created by border control and restrictions on movement challenged the prevailing ‘global citizen’ mentality of nomads and forced them to confront their subjectivities and identities as hypermobile ‘borderless’ subjects. Nomads therefore had to decide whether to return to their home countries or to stay abroad during the pandemic by attempting to find locations with lower rates of infection as well as fewer restrictions on movement. Their decisions were often impacted by logistical and ethical concerns of individual risk management, economic choices, and fears about the opprobrium they would suffer from locals or their friends and followers on social media. Drawing from Mimi Sheller’s work on mobility justice, the article then illustrates how mobility guilt played out empirically for digital nomads who were forced to navigate feelings of guilt over their continued travel, while also deflecting accusations of irresponsibility and selfishness.

Last, the article shows that guilt over hypermobility may not fade with the pandemic but could be a lasting reconceptualization of international travel due to concern for the large amount of carbon emitted during air travel as well as the inequality inherent in who gets to live hypermobile lives (Crossley, 2020). Indeed, it takes up Cresswell’s contention that COVID-19 encouraged new political rhetoric around localism that, on some level, is blatantly nativist but also challenges mobility more broadly (Cresswell, 2021). After nearly half a century of celebrating mobility as an archetypal form of freedom for elites from the Global North that helps in their accumulation of social capital (Bauman, 2000), the pandemic may represent a breaking point. It could recast hypermobility, particularly of highly visible and ‘online’ communities like digital nomads, as irresponsible and something that should cause guilt.

Literature review

This article is situated within the literature on digital nomads, geoarbitrage and ‘everyday geopolitics,’ and draws from the theoretical claims of mobility guilt and mobility justice. Makimoto and Manners (1997) text theorized the future of work and imagined a figure who could work from anywhere in the world due to technological advancements, using the term ‘digital nomad’ to describe the phenomenon. Since then, the ‘digital nomad’ has been further theoretically solidified as a sociological category, as distinct from other ‘traveler’ figures like the mass tourist, volunteer tourist, or flashpacker (Hannonen, 2020). The conceptions that are of particular interest to this article are the construction of digital nomad as both stigmatized outsider and idealized metaphor for freedom (Mancinelli, 2020) the preoccupation with boundaries and exploitation of mobility pathways (Green, 2020) and leveraging ‘strong’ passports and privileged nationalities (Rowen, 2016, Thompson, 2019). This form of ‘network capital’ is often called ‘motility:’ the ability to travel which is highly correlated with socioeconomic status (Sheller, 2018). Many nomads sampled in this study demonstrated this both overtly and covertly, bending the rules and leveraging status to increase and maintain their mobility.

While some nomads come from middle income countries or even the Global South, our sample comes from wealthy countries. Many seek to use comparative salary advantages to practice geoarbitrage (Woldoff & Litchfield, 2021), seeking out cheaper places to work for short amounts of time (Green, 2020) with the intention to keep traveling. These modalities illustrate how digital nomads impact and are influenced by broader state-scale geopolitics, and how the everyday practice of geoarbitrage makes visible the geopolitical and socio-cultural nexus of mobility and remote work, as well as strong global inequalities and asymmetries (Sheller, 2018). The extent to which these inequalities are recognized within the digital nomad community are unclear with some researchers showing a pronounced lack of awareness (McElroy, 2020) while others have located significant embarrassment and a sense of responsibility arising from privilege (Sin & Minca, 2014).

Mostafanezhad et al. (2020) state that geopolitical anxieties have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, often connected to socioeconomic status: ‘Airports, borders, and checkpoints provoke anxious biopolitical responses as they sort, categorize, and contain tourist bodies while social categories such as race, class, gender, and citizenship are operationalized as gatekeeping mechanisms’ (Mostafanezhad et al., 2020, 183). Unlike the citizens of the countries they visit, nomads often maintain the option to return home to receive the benefits of subsidized healthcare and welfare state provisions. Mimi Sheller (2018) urges us to think about elite mobility using a distributive justice lens that asks who is given the right to move and how their mobility is then judged by others. This decenters the logistics of movement alone, zooming out on the discourses and practices of mobility showing how they help to shape cities and towns.

Recent scholarship on ‘everyday geopolitics’ parallels research on the ‘everyday encounter’ within tourism studies: both fields discuss how these encounters unfold outside of official governmental policy-making and academic debates but can work to highlight the political dimensions of everyday practice. In this sense, tourism (and mobility more broadly) ‘is mediated by and co-produces geopolitical outcomes’ (Gillen & Mostafanezhad, 2019). Similarly, through the embodied, everyday encounter of traveling while working remotely, digital nomads entangle themselves with state-scale geoeconomics. Through their small acts of geoarbitrage, they illuminate some of the geopolitical dimensions of mobilities, borders, and the nation-state (Hannonen, 2020), particularly in moments of systemic shock: such as the coronavirus pandemic.

Rowen (2016) suggests that normative conceptions of national territory are inscribed in ‘mobility regulation devices’ such as passports and visas and would likely now include mechanisms such as vaccination certificates. Digital nomads exploit the effects of travel available to them as citizens of privileged nations, and shrewdly navigate geopolitical boundaries through leveraging these apparatuses to their advantage. Distinguishing digital nomads from other forms of travelers, however, is their utilization of technology and work, constituting ‘serious leisure’ (Thompson, 2019). In order for digital nomads to exist effectively in a state of serious leisure (i.e. prioritizing leisure over employment-based location), they must navigate regulations (e.g. visa requirements, PCR testing) while ensuring they can continue to earn a remote income via technology in their chosen destination. While many digital nomads consider themselves to be ‘global citizens,’ their ability to traverse international borders freely and easily is contingent on a range of assemblages, including a powerful passport, knowledge of visa loopholes, and access to infrastructure that can support remote work.

In large part, it is due to this privileged mode of moving through the world that scholars also argue that while digital nomads project an ‘alternative lifestyle aura’ they do not, in fact, disrupt any institutional structures nor meaningfully challenge the status quo (Hermann & Paris 2020; Mancinelli, 2020). This also points to the core ethos of self-actualization and self-realization held by many digital nomads (Ehn et al., 2022; Richards, 2015), which influenced their decisions when faced with border closures through the pandemic. Ehn et al. (2022) found that digital nomads who chose to stay abroad during the pandemic were driven by a desire to retain freedom and chose to focus on individual risk management strategies. Green suggests that borders pertaining to lifestyle and identity were a ‘salient preoccupation’ for digital nomads even pre-pandemic (Green, 2020), which became increasingly meaningful for digital nomads in the face of border closures and reduced mobility.

Nomads, like other groups existing in areas where tourism is a main facet of the economy, also frequently deal with narratives of guilt, shame, and embarrassment because of their economic and mobility privileges in comparison to the places they visit. Work on volunteer tourism contends that Western visitors to impoverished communities engage with poverty by ‘neutralizing’ the threat and transforming it into something to be romanticized (Crossley, 2012), while others show how these visitors feel concern or guilt when confronted with poverty, but rather expressed how ‘lucky’ they felt in contrast (Simpson, 2004). Still others participating in tourist contact zones manifest their feelings of discomfort through a process of distancing and rationalization of privilege (Sin & Minca, 2014), something found in the nomad community where many are resolved to project an image of being mobile yet without assets but, in contrast to many countries they visit, this is a choice.

Methods

The study was conducted using a randomized sample of social media observations and semi-structured interviews. Social media observations were collected through searching platforms for hashtags relating to both digital nomads and the Coronavirus pandemic and were copied and collated in spreadsheets for analysis. All social media posts were sampled between April and July of 2021. This approach took into account recent methodological considerations concerning social media data (Quan-Haase & Sloan, 2016), in order to guarantee that the internal algorithm produced a randomized sample based on hashtags including #covid, #pandemic #digitalnomad. When only one hashtag was available responses were sorted by their content using only ‘nomad’ related words. Social media data collection is not yet a well-defined discipline (Mayr & Weller, 2016) and there is little consensus on effective sampling approaches, however, methodologies such as a human coding approach have been put forward (Kim et al., 2018). This study therefore drew from a manual human coding approach to classify and interpret the selection of social media posts, and to generate relevant insights.

Social media accounts were chosen from Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and Facebook, totaling 830 observations during this period. Posts that were not in English (or partially in English) were excluded. Other posts were excluded based on irrelevance or coming from accounts that were marketing products (although we did use nomad accounts that were partially monetized). This sample was used both to recruit informants but also to structure the interview script and determine what concerns were most relevant for nomads during the pandemic. Interview participants were then recruited through contacting these users and a snowball sampling method. Over 100 users were contacted, and interviews were conducted with 37 people within this group. Leighton et al. (2021) exploration of snowball sampling methods via social media found that it was an effective and efficient recruitment approach: sampling bias remains a potential limitation but they found that snowball recruitment through social media was a viable method to access a broad sample of study participants.

37 interviews were conducted on the telephone, Zoom, Skype, or WhatsApp calling service lasting between 30 min and one hour. Participants were from: Germany, France, Spain, Estonia, Italy, Portugal, Russia, US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, and Czechia. Within the sample, it was attempted to select participants who both sought to monetize their online presence with as many followers as possible as well as those who had smaller numbers of followers and posted mainly for friends and family. Participants were told that interviews were anonymous (although many wanted their online accounts linked) which helped to solicit truthful answers even when the discussion pertained to legal grey areas regarding travel during COVID-19 based on local regulations. When selecting participants, 75% were from accounts with less than a thousand followers in order to exclude ‘influencers’ from the sample and concentrate on personal experiences rather than people who regard their social media as primarily a business (even if that business is often highly personal). Interviewees were slightly skewed in favor of women (54%). While the mean age was late 30s, less than 30% of participants had children and only one interviewee was traveling with their child.

Participants had to be from a high or middle-income country and to have spent time in low income or middle-income countries for over one year. While there are nomads from the Global South, we chose to focus on those actively practicing geoarbitrage. Those interviewed also had to have travel experience (or intent to travel) in more than one place in order to separate them from expatriates. All participants subscribed to the term nomad to some extent although a small number of the sample (three) felt that the phrase had too many negative connotations to be valuable. All of those interviewed were asked to describe their lives before and during the coronavirus pandemic, including: the countries they had visited, whether they traveled for cost of living or experiences, what their work was and how they maintained relationships with people from their home countries, and how the pandemic impacted them in terms of physical limitations on travel as well as new social standards. They were asked to describe guilt in the context of: not following medical orders, exposing others to COVID-19, traveling during a crisis, economic inequality, and environmental impact. Interviews were recorded and then thematically coded by the authors. Participants’ names are pseudonyms.

COVID-19 and the geopolitics of border control

COVID-19 forced many study participants to reconsider their ‘global citizen’ mentality, as the realities of border closures and travel restrictions both reinforced and challenged the ways they viewed themselves and their vulnerabilities to broader structures of state control. As one participant said: ‘[The pandemic] put us on edge and most of us were frightened we would have to completely give up being nomads. When that didn’t happen, most people became more creative’. This meant new methods of applying for emergency visas, housing arrangements that avoided closed hotels, or switching countries when lockdown restrictions were imposed, amongst other measures. COVID-19 prompted a moment of reckoning for many digital nomads, through rendering visible the geopolitical structures that were previously concealed, or that had not always impacted them. While previously they were well-equipped with the assemblages of mobility that allowed them to move between and within systems (Rowen, 2016, Thompson, 2019), the pandemic and its associated impacts on travel forced nomads to confront their subjectivities as both localized and globalized subjects.

In the past, digital nomads exposed the fluid and invented nature of geopolitical boundaries through their simultaneous rejection of the constraints of capitalist societies, while leveraging the privileges that membership to those nation-states afforded them. As one participant said: ‘visa free travel no longer meant anything after COVID, there was a whole new set of rules we had to check’. Previously borders meant things for other (less-advantaged) people but now participants were forced to contend with them in new ways. In this manner, many nomads chose to continue practicing geoarbitrage, however some returned to their home countries while doing so. These nomads worked to maintain their identity as autonomous ‘untethered’ travelers through remaining mobile in their home country (for instance, traveling through the US in a campervan, or through a series of house-sits), while still ensuring they had access to healthcare (including vaccinations and respirators) and welfare state provisions. A digital nomad from Australia noted that these new considerations would likely impact his decisions even after the pandemic:

I think from now on, we’ll definitely be putting more thought into the ‘what ifs’, you know, if we are flying to South Africa, for a job or to travel, what will be our options in case things get shut down? You know, is it going to be a place that we would feel comfortable being stuck if borders closed? Or if there’s an outbreak, you know, we would probably start looking at more options for hospitals and medical situations whereas [before] that’s never been a concern for us.

Nomads therefore increasingly activated their dual-modality of deploying the privileges inherent with their nationality, while simultaneously working to maintain their condition of statelessness (Hannonen, 2020) as much as possible. Instead of continuing to exploit a nomadic lifestyle while relying on the benefits of privileged citizenship and protection, the material realities of geopolitical boundaries were made clear to nomads during the pandemic.

Geopolitical boundaries were often regarded by nomads as imagined, just as scholars of nationalism show the cultural work needed to maintain the idea of the state as a timeless entity rather than a recent invention (Anderson, 2016). While nomads recognized borders, passports, and visas as real, they often saw them as unnecessary and viewed state enforcement as an injustice: a sentiment that was rekindled for many during the pandemic. Digital nomadism produces discursive spaces online and in person that contest and perpetuate ideals of individualism, national identity, and ‘global citizenship,’ despite claims to the contrary. This illustrates, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, how nomads constitute their biopolitical relationship with their home state. The body acts as a key site in tourism encounters where geopolitical practices and discourses are enacted. COVID-19 meant that the body became even more political, as travel restrictions were focused on reducing the impact of biosecurity concerns, and to avoid transmission of the virus across borders. The site of state intervention became not just where one’s body was in space but what substances were inside the body (Mostafanezhad et al., 2020). While this has always been the case for those migrating from the Global South to the Global North, the state’s use of biopolitical controls was often a shock for nomads used to an experience of seamless, and elite, cosmopolitanism (Calhoun, 2002).

Remote work and geoarbitrage

Interview participants often discussed their hypermobility as both a lifestyle choice as well as a canny economic strategy, although they were more hesitant to explicitly name their economic motivations. In doing so, they preempt criticisms of elitism or frivolity, insisting that when they travel they do real work, contribute to local economies, and also lower their own living costs. However, this does not satisfy many critics who note that their constant movement is often a problematic mimicry of groups like Roma, Bedouins, or other nomadic peoples (and sometimes their descriptions of their lifestyle borders on fetishization [McElroy, 2020]).

An Estonian interviewee commented that the pandemic had, in some ways, allowed her friends and family to better understand the digital nomad lifestyle because many people were also working remotely: ‘I feel now people are starting to understand [nomads are] sitting in front of their computer and working like anyone else…before that, I think there was a level of like, oh well, these people are…fake, what they’re doing’. Other participants also stated that before the pandemic their activities were seen as mainly experiential rather than part of structural economic choices (and perhaps judged more harshly). This tended to emphasize movement as primarily cultural and often an unburnished form of elitism hiding behind an ascetic facade of giving up one’s home and car. Yet, many nomads contested this view and backed it up with examples of macroeconomic changes that encouraged outsourcing, gig work, and remote work before the coronavirus pandemic. Katia, a former corporate manager from Poland, who now lives in Thailand, stated that digital nomadism is often encouraged by companies seeking to casualize labor or cut down on overhead:

Employers, they will see that they have big economic advantages for working remotely… I know how expensive place of work is. It means your desk, your space, you’re using toilet, you’re using water and the place of work, your presence costs your employer. Now it costs nothing.

In this sense, digital nomadism can, in the future, be seen as a natural extension of working from home but it replaces a stable single place of residence with a constant search for new experiences as well as cheaper living costs. This displaces employer-worker contestation away from wages to maximizing income.

Multiple authors studying nomads have shown that choices often viewed as individual are frequently due to larger economic changes in firms (often due to international competition) as well as stagnant levels of compensation in the Global North (Mancinelli, 2020). Yet, this information is often not processed within the wider debate about nomads who are frequently depicted as fickle, hedonistic, and immature: adding to a sense of moral opprobrium directed at them and, potentially, an internalized feeling of lifestyle guilt. Part of this is their rejection of communal bonds and longer place-based relationships as well as middle class consumer habits (mortgaged homes and cars primarily). Another aspect is the sense that this group is somehow ‘gaming the system’ through an unfair use of Global North geoarbitrage or tax avoidance.

Some of the criticism of digital nomads is that their mobility is at the expense of locals who live permanently in the places they visit: their presence raises accommodation costs (particularly through short term rentals like Airbnb leading to international gentrification [Sigler and Wachsmuth, 2016]); they potentially crowd out local competitors who could perform the same outsourced labor they are paid for (particularly IT work); and their cultural interactions with locals are minimal and usually based around the fleeting interactions in the service economy. In this telling of the movement, nomads make a base in places like Thailand, Mexico, or Bali without truly considering where they are in the world, except for an interchangeable cheaper destination with good weather.

Digital nomads often rely on social media to keep in touch with friends from their home country as well as to solicit work, suggesting they are particularly attuned to behavioral sanctions that occur on these platforms. While many participants were previously aware that their lifestyle provoked a certain amount of skepticism or jealousy, they did little to mitigate these reactions by editing their social media feeds. Yet, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the outward display of mobility was managed and curated much more thoroughly. While they stated that before 2020, some friends had expressed surprise at their lifestyles, the responses had generally been positive. After the coronavirus began to spread in late 2019, interviewees reported feeling criticized for their unwillingness to return home; their search for mobility loopholes; and their potential to bring the virus to poorer countries with less resourced hospitals. As one American woman (originally from El Salvador) said of her travels during the pandemic:

When I was travelling through Peru and Bolivia, you know, I have a lot of friends that are involved in social justice and they were like: ‘well try not to get sick when you’re there, because you could take a hospital bed from a local’, and medicinal bias is real, they’re going to give you the bed and not a local.

While economic privilege was always a source of tension within the nomad movement, the pandemic made this a much thornier question of risk mitigation (Beck, 1992). This was particularly true in the context of the prioritization, and potential rationing, of medical care. No longer was visiting a lower income country a question of cultural disruption but also of health and safety.

‘Where is there no lockdown?’ digital nomads and gaming the geopolitical system

When we interviewed Alberto, a Spanish digital nomad who was based in São Paulo at the start of the pandemic, he told us that his main goal was not the maintenance of his health but the preservation of his mobility. He ‘was trying to travel as much as possible within, you know, the constraints and trying to optimize my freedom’. To that end, he rented a car and drove 16 h to Bahia where he leased a large house with friends and enjoyed far fewer regulations on movement. However, six months in, he ‘was getting bored. And I saw that, in Sweden, there was no restrictions…I was like: “I can get there [and] have a normal life”.’ So, Alberto, using his EU passport, went to Stockholm, a city where citizens were allowed considerable freedom in deciding what regulations they would follow.

Alberto’s travel is illustrative of the frenetic pace of movement within the nomad community: going to new locations is a form of social capital. At times, this social capital is also converted to actual money through endorsements, freelance writing, consulting, or lifestyle branding (Woldoff & Litchfield, 2021). Because many nomads are defined by geoarbitrage, it follows that getting the best deal, seeing the newest place, and exploiting niche travel opportunities that others are unaware of, made the pandemic a barrier rather than an end-point. Indeed, on digital nomad forums, where thousands of members are active each day, the conversations were rarely focused on protecting oneself (and others) from coronavirus and much more focused on ‘where was still open’. One participant noted that this meant that they did not always move through the system in straight-forward ways, particularly during the pandemic:

For example, some friends went to Morocco for a month, all they had to do was to book a hotel…and that was it. So that was like their border control. For example, some friends went back to Bali or Thailand, they had to quarantine, and they had to get business visas. So that means it’s not super, not super legal, but not super illegal basically.

This also posits an expectation that nomads are young and healthy and have little worry about their bodies, or indeed the bodies of others. While those in this sample had an average age in their late 30s, there are nomads who are older (Thompson, 2019), particularly those who have chosen early retirement to travel. This same attitude of assuming that nomads were healthy posited an idea of COVID-19 risk as minimal within the community of travelers: often influencing lower risk perceptions for everyone, including residents of host communities.

Continued mobility was not anxiety free: Nomads worried that their work would cease if the pandemic led to a wider global financial crisis, they were concerned that they would be denied visa extensions, and they had apprehensions about how they would be perceived. ‘You need to think twice before posting [online] now’, one American nomad commented, saying that he was mostly concerned about the jealousy and judgment of his friends but, in a worst-case scenario, the posts could be used by his host country as evidence for charges of breaking COVID-19 travel rules. Like other participants, reputational damage was often conflated with guilt: getting caught breaking COVID-19 rules was as severe as one’s own remorse for flouting social norms or breaking health codes.

For many digital nomads, social networks were already stretched thin: before the pandemic, family was indignant that their loved ones had expatriated and had no fixed address, friends fell out of touch, and professional networks based in hub cities (Sassen, 2006) grew more distant as all communication occurred online. Participants who briefly or permanently returned to their home countries often stayed with family and said the experience was both awkward and a letdown from their previously lifestyle: ‘I spend a lot of time just looking out the window and wanting to be somewhere else’, a German woman said. An American nomad couple said their friends expected them to stop traveling: ‘when the pandemic hit, everybody was like, Oh, you guys are gonna stop and get an apartment, buy a house, or go bunk with somebody, maybe turn to a van dwelling situation’, however they kept traveling despite restrictions. Like many nomads, they did visit their home country at some point. This was often to take advantage of high-quality hospitals or being prioritized for vaccinations. After a very brief time, most nomads saw the pandemic as an opportunity to continue traveling with lower prices. Government barriers to mobility were not an annoyance as much as an interesting challenge: a way of proving one’s status as a true nomad rather than a fair-weather traveler.

Marek, a Czech IT worker, also did not wish to stay in Prague during the pandemic and slowly began to explore where he could travel. Croatia, he learned, had lax policies around visitors due to their ailing tourism industry and he and his wife began to tour the Dalmatian Coast while taking Zoom video conferences from a succession of hotel rooms. ‘I was not telling everyone at the time that we are traveling’, he said. But colleagues began asking about the changing decor in his background and ‘some of them were not really happy that I travel’, he said. Most nomads, including Marek, chalked this displeasure up to jealousy and said they wished everyone could be bolder and see that there were creative ways to keep moving during the pandemic no matter what their governments told them. Marek was concerned that his friends were not doing well but felt guilty that he was actually enjoying the pandemic:

My opinion was that it was better for us to escape and be in a safe place and be happy. I had the daily phone calls with my colleagues and friends and everyone…their attitude and happiness went down. Because of all the political things happening, all the restrictions of people being stuck at home losing their jobs…Everyone, like was really depressed of it…while my happiness level was going up this whole year, and I’ve never felt better than this last year and it just put me in a situation that I was scared, like, to admit that. Because everyone I know and love is still at home.

Marek and his wife continued to travel in countries without restrictions but he said they became much more careful in their social media use so as not to upset friends at home who would see them bending the rules or would be jealous: ‘I just wanted to see the reaction of people…it was not that big of a taboo, traveling, then I started posting, like from different locations…not very much. I’m not like, you know, trying to promote it so much. I don’t have a YouTube channel about being digital nomad, and so on’.

An Estonian participant echoed Marek’s comments, saying that mobility was still a choice no matter what governments said. She posted her pandemic travels because she wanted to let her friends know that there were other options:

I think it’s also about your mindset, because I felt really weird, like talking to some of my friends back in Estonia…if I would be stuck in Estonia, and they would be somewhere else. I would want them to tell me about the fun and happy things happening for them.

Others were more careful to no longer document their mobility for fear of moral sanctions from online friends. Katia, from Poland, said that one childhood friend implied that her unwillingness to return to Poland during the pandemic and to stop traveling was unpatriotic.

Some nomads continued traveling because they dismissed the hazards of COVID-19 entirely. Many already believe that they are nearly free of ‘the system’ and want to stay that way. They argue that their daily exercise practices, diet, and lifestyle have given them a level of natural immunity that makes them healthier than the average population (often subscribing to alternative medicine theories) and they should not have to follow the mobility rules for people less healthy than themselves. Sonia, a nomad from Los Angeles, said that concerns about coronavirus were an example of the overly worried American mindset that she was hoping to escape from when she went to Tulum, Mexico during the pandemic: ‘I’m learning more and more how to trust the universe and everything that happens. This COVID thing and why it’s happening. I’m like: “Okay, let [the universe] do its thing and I’m going to live my best life”.’ Others, with less spiritually informed views of the virus, also saw it as something that was bound to happen and attempts to respond were futile: travel, they maintained, was not to outrun the virus, but to continue their lives while the cosmos enacted its greater plans. In this limited sense of human agency, nomadism is something that happens almost automatically and shows a deep-seated desire for movement even at the cost of inconvenience or harm.

The border closures, quarantine rules, and lockdowns imposed by many governments during the pandemic were not always viewed as fate but rather as political overreach and an excuse to crack down on hard-won mobility. This view was, not surprisingly, more widespread amongst participants in the United States where pandemic safety measures have been thoroughly politicized. Mark, a mid-50s investor and nomad mostly based in Mexico, was resentful that his mobility had been limited and that he was made to feel guilty for continuing to travel:

I take care of myself, I eat really well…Your immune system: that’s the only real defense we have… I’m not really worried. I mean, I travel all over. As I’ve said, I go to the wet markets, and I go to these places, and I’m not afraid of that. Yeah, so I’m more of the ‘do it, and then ask permission later,’ kind of person. I mean, I’m a good guy…but a lot of rules are just arbitrary.

Others were even more chagrined. Dominic, from Canada who was living in the Philippines said: ‘The inability to travel has been really annoying…I got to see Canada’s true colors. And now I’m definitely never going back. I’m actually debating renouncing my citizenship’. Ironically, some of the most aggrieved comments went hand-in-hand with a blasé attitude around spreading COVID-19 to Global South countries because the prevailing logic amongst nomads was that people in poor places are more concerned with keeping up the tourism economy, and their own livelihoods, than catching the virus.

Bianchi (2006) argues that cultures of mobility have become so ubiquitous within Global North societies, that the ability to seamlessly traverse borders is understood as an ‘inalienable right to travel.’ While the freedom to travel is embedded within Global North cultures, nation-states continually place parameters around forms of acceptable movement (e.g. tourism) and unacceptable forms of movement (e.g. ‘illegal’ immigrants). International and regional border closures enforced cancellation of flights and accommodation, and restricting citizens’ abilities to return home through the pandemic challenged and reframed these ideals of acceptable movement. Government responses to COVID-19 profoundly challenged the notion of an inalienable right to travel. Yet, while many nomads expressed anger toward governments for shutting borders they were more careful about narrating their own travels: they said they took pains to keep those in destination countries safe and they also moderated their online presence in order to not insult those stuck at home.

Travel restrictions have been largely underpinned by geopolitical relations, perhaps more so than biosecurity fears (Seyfi et al., 2023). Rowen (2016) suggested that mobilities and borders are increasingly recognized as inseparable domains. The inconsistent approaches taken by various governments seemingly reflect the political and economic dimensions of border control and travel sanctions, rather than any epidemiological imperative. Seyfi and colleagues state that ‘The uneven geographies of the pandemic and especially its effects on vulnerable populations, are also being reflected in the uneven political geographies of sanctions that restrict mobility that are either continued during the pandemic or may be specifically applied by the pandemic’ (Seyfi et al., 2023, pp. 11–12). Throughout the pandemic, many digital nomads negotiated these ‘uneven geographies’ by either remaining committed to traversing international borders through leveraging status and access (often through their citizenship), or uneasily returning home to avoid penalties or adverse outcomes. Many digital nomads were ultimately successful in avoiding strict lockdowns and were able to stay ‘one step ahead’ of COVID-19 and its impacts, reflecting the economic and political dimensions of border control and quarantine.

Mobility guilt: travel during the pandemic

Diogo, a young Portuguese nomad, was concerned when COVID-19 hit but he soon saw that staying in place (in Bali) was the best option: ‘the smartest thing to do is just chill, stay, and let things happen because, you know, it’s a pandemic, it’s new for everyone’. He also said that his mom was very happy for him to be abroad given that the Iberian Peninsula was an early hot spot for the virus. Yet, many nomads did come back to their countries of origin briefly, including Diogo. Mobility was often curtailed from global to regional, but many made use of varying state responses to visitors and border control during the pandemic, particularly Northern Europeans visiting Southern Europe and North Americans visiting Latin America. Yet, while they moved within their region they did so with more discretion and feelings of unease or as one nomad put it: ‘we were on the down-low’ after years of broadcasting to others about their lifestyle.

Participants often selected places that had a reputation for weak enforcement of laws as well as large tourism industries, for example, Southeast Asia. The first was explained in the language of individual liberty rather than state capacity and the second was remarked on due to low prices and supporting the local tourism industry (rather than taking advantage of desperate furloughed employees and businesses on the verge of collapse). Indeed, many nomads said that their movement during the pandemic was most criticized by people at home while locals in places like the Canary Islands, Greece, and Mexico were happy to see them because their livelihoods were more important than possible infection from COVID-19. It is extremely hard to verify this claim, but it suggests that nomads mostly saw their presence as a key source of economic development both before and after the pandemic. Charlie, an American man, recalled that he and his partner had used their US government stimulus checks to visit Mexico and people ‘were so happy to see him there’, but they still felt strange being abroad and tried to take extra precautions. There was a calculated procedure for picking new countries to work from, Charlie said: they had to be open to visitors, which was a limited list, but not a free-for-all. After leaving Mexico they traveled to Turkey and commented:

We wouldn’t have gone…if Turkey was just admitting anybody. You had to have a COVID test. You had to be tracked when you were there. So, we felt, I mean, we still wanted to be careful with our own health and we certainly didn’t want to be spreading COVID.

The balance between safety and freedom was often expressed in terms that lauded places that were ‘sensible enough’ to not close their doors to tourist income but had some public health response. This prioritized low-middle income countries with testing and medical record keeping. Yet, Charlie also expressed some fear that locals, particularly in Mexico, knew that letting Americans in was a big risk and he anticipated negative or even aggressive reactions to his presence. He said that at home he was worried that friends would judge him, particularly because, as part of the gay community, some were old enough to have experienced the AIDS crisis and likely took bodily self-management (Schilling, 2017) very seriously. Charlie had friends say: ‘I’m so jealous you’re getting the hell out of here again’. He continued saying that: while nobody ‘to our faces… expressed any concerns that we were taking risks that they thought were foolish’, it was very possible they were having that conversation in private. Charlie and his partner approached their digital nomadism much more conservatively than many other interviewees. While their risk mitigation strategies (e.g. being very selective in the countries they visited) were discussed in terms of sensible health and safety responses, they also appeared to act as defense mechanisms. Charlie and his partner were aware that their mobility in and of itself was an epidemiological and social risk to both themselves and those in the communities they visited and resolved any tension by conceptually and spatially distancing themselves.

Many nomads sought out places within their home regions with more leniency or they began leaving cities for rural areas with the ability to lead a less constrained life. While residents of Madrid, for instance, had to abide by strict confinement to their apartments, they could get on a plane and live cheaply in hotels in the Canary Islands while still going to bars. In some ways, this flight to rural or isolated areas echoed the experiences of previous European pandemics in which elites fled to the countryside to be in contact with fewer potentially infectious people. Yet, in this outbreak, nomads used their relative privilege and past travel experience to seek out locations with weaker local government and more lax regulations. They sometimes felt conflicted about how these adaptive strategies were deployed but they fit them into their previous narrative as canny ‘life hackers’ who deployed smart tricks to game the geopolitical system, seeing no reason to stop for a global pandemic. Deploying these strategies was both a quintessential part of being a successful nomad but also a source of guilt. Diogo was tasked with regular government check-ins, testing, and mobility restrictions in Bali but when he returned to Portugal he quickly left more restrictive Lisbon for an island known for having few rules. Diogo’s mother contracted COVID-19 while he was away, and he recalled that he was nervous about the entire situation but, being young, he felt that staying on a party island was a good outcome for both him and the general public (who were at less risk of infection from his behavior if he was isolated). However, he still felt a sense of guilt for avoiding the places with the highest COVID-19 rates and for partying while others were addressing the crisis.

Another Portuguese participant, Rita, suggested that many people she knew thought that escaping one’s local community during the pandemic was selfish. What if something happened to a family member? What if they were needed to help care for someone? She also said that many people at home, who had not been nomads, did not understand her wanderlust and saw it as a kind of compulsion. Eventually, she settled in a smaller seaside town away from her home city. Yet, she said even there, people judged her for renting an apartment when tourism was meant to be shut down. Ana from Estonia, also chose to travel in rural Albania, where there were few regulations and she felt that she would not be judged as harshly as in the Baltics, commenting: ‘Only 5% of people said that it’s irresponsible, the other 95% are okay, but I think people are not so easy, and they are a bit jealous’. She said that pandemic travel was ironically resented the least by the people who had traveled little (such as in rural parts of Albania) and this was because they had always struggled to make ends meet and this led them to welcome people spending money locally: ‘local people need to survive. People in the Balkans still survive’, she said.

An American couple said that they had made increased provisions for risk during their COVID-19 travels but stopping altogether (mandated by law in some places) seemed too extreme to them:

So, we hope that you respect that we’re not trying to be jerks about the whole thing. We’re doing the best we can with what we have, which is to, you know, travel in our camper from place to place and stay in remote areas. So, we traveled a lot during the pandemic, I think, because we knew how to pivot like, because we are so nimble.

Other people said that it did not matter if they stopped because infection rates were so bad all over the world and they were not necessarily defined by a country’s income (as was the case for the UK and the US). Therefore, being from the ‘metropole’ and venturing to the ‘periphery’ did not mean, necessarily, bringing germs. Yet, just in case, many of those who felt more shame over their continued movement attempted to mitigate their behavior, such as a British couple in rural Portugal who said: ‘We don’t want to be in a city. One for you know, lockdowns, we want to be able to go out for a walk and not feel at risk to people. They were scared and we were scared’.

The Canadian participant frustrated with his lack of mobility in the Philippines during the pandemic remarked that his group’s mobility was part of a larger sea-change in how people saw travel, but not in a good way: ‘Digital nomadism is the new seafood. So back in the day, seafood was for poor people, now it’s for rich people’. He continued saying that nomadism was natural and should be freely available to all people but public anger over too much travel would soon have regulatory effects:

We should be heading towards a world where…we’re all digital nomads now. But they’re gonna find a way to curb it by you know, first it’ll start with a vaccine passport, then they’re gonna say we’re gonna add in your carbon credit balance. And then you can’t fly. So, and then, you can’t eat steak this month.

Tony, an Australian, also believed that travel would forever be changed: ‘I don’t know if that’ll ever really bounce back the way it used to keep jumping on planes and flying off to another state or another country for a meeting or for a conference’. He and others believed that nomads, because of their emblematic mobility and visible social media presence, would be a first target for regulation and that was not necessarily a bad thing. A Spanish participant agreed that as the pandemic and immigration crisis in Europe made travel more difficult, even for the affluent, he had started to feel a deep sense of shame (Vanolo, 2021) about his lifestyle:

When you are in paradise we like to show the world how good we are…I am not stuck at home. I am free. This kind of thing …what I tried to do during COVID was to try to be more aware of what I share with people, what they hear about my life, because maybe no one would be ready to be happy for me.

To many nomads, the idea of stopping their lifestyle seemed unjust and particularly difficult for a group defined by their decision not to have a permanent home. Yet, without a place to quarantine and go through lockdown, many decided simply not to follow these guidelines and continue living life as normally as possible.

Conclusion: mobility’s uncertain future

The coronavirus pandemic may be more than a temporary period of restrictions on mobility. It could be the start of an era in which travel is far less seamless than it was at the start of the twenty first century. With these restraints, an increased social stigma around travel may also spread. Nomads are attuned to calls for low-carbon leisure (Haas, 2022) as well as less frequent travel as an aspect of mobility justice in which some people travel frequently while others not at all. One participant mentioned that lots of uncomfortable questions are now being asked about who gets to be a nomad, pointing out that many of them do not represent the racial diversity of their own societies. In this sense, it is not a scrappy practice of geoarbitrage but a form of elite cosmopolitanism (Calhoun, 2002). The COVID-19 restrictions on mobility began to highlight some of the inequalities built into the model of digital nomad geoarbitrage, often for those within the group who found themselves newly experiencing the mobility restraints common to those from less wealthy countries. While some participants felt genuine guilt, others were worried about social sanctions for travel or a sense that they should perform guilt to their social networks as an act of geopolitical awareness during a global pandemic. With this, came a certain preemptive deflection of guilt based on privilege particularly when nomads bent new health rules in order to maintain their mobility (Sheller, 2021).

Many nomads missed the collective experience of lockdown which, while traumatic, was something experienced simultaneously as a distinctly national event. Indeed, it has been argued (Cresswell, 2021) that the reduced mobility of the pandemic may breed a new kind of localism which could provide some systems of mutual support but will also be parochial in nature. In this sense, the lives of digital nomads and their mentality to keep moving, however privileged and in some ways lacking cultural sensitivity, does provide a model of cosmopolitanism (Calhoun, 2002). With growing perceptions of shamefulness attached to hypermobility, a new form of post-pandemic wariness around international travel may form. This will be reflected both in the political choices of national governments arguing for harder borders as well as in individual opinions and practices around mobility.

Within this limited conversation of mobility guilt, it must be remembered that movement is a capability that is unequally distributed throughout the world (Sheller, 2018). How it is framed when it does happen, is often an exercise in power. The free circulation of goods and people are frequently promoted by those in the Global North (who possess the capability to be mobile) while seen as a danger when those with newly won, but legally denied, mobility decide to travel from the Global South. Acknowledgement of mobility guilt may have been provoked by epidemiological fears but, in the future, it is more likely that it will be tied to regional inequality and environmental harm (Sheller, 2021). While many of the hypermobile, such as digital nomads, will probably not change their behavior, they may rein in the way they present their lives online as one of complete freedom and autonomy based on their own choices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Urban Studies Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Max Holleran

Max Holleran is Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union (Palgrave, 2019) and Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing (Princeton University Press, 2022). His articles on tourism, EU development, housing, and post-socialist urban planning have appeared in Urban Geography, Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Ethnos, Contemporary European History, and City and Society. He also frequently contributes articles to general audience publications such as Public Books, Slate, New Republic, Places, Times Literary Supplement, and The Washington Post.

Mallory Notting

Mallory Notting is a social research consultant based in Melbourne, Australia. She has a BA (Hons) in Anthropology from James Cook University and an MA in Social Policy from the University of Melbourne.