Why I Ended Up Miserable As A Digital Nomad

"I'm bored out of my mind. I don't know what to do. I feel alone, and I'm bored, and it sucks."

"I'm glad you finally admitted it because I feel the exact same way too. I've been traveling for 4 years and it's been hard for me to admit it. And no one I've talked to admits this."

I was having a few beers with a fellow coach at Heli Lounge in Kuala Lumpur.

It's a bar on a helipad on top of a skyscraper.

We were both laughing at how miserable we felt.

Portugal. Spain. Morocco. Indonesia. Malaysia. Singapore. Thailand. South Korea

I was "living the Life."

Traveling with a beautiful woman, working online, closing deals over the phone.

And yet, I was fat and unhappy.

After a while, your tolerance for novelty gets so high.

You're visiting all these amazing places and experiencing all the different cultures, and eating all these new foods.

But you're like, "Oh cool, another temple with monkeys."

When I talked to Adriana about this, she agreed.

She was feeling super lonely too.

As a Latina, she's super close with her family.

But besides that, there's a human relationship your romantic partner just can't give you.

Our polarities are opposites.

I'm super-masculine and Adriana's super-feminine.

I need to be able to bro out with my bros.

And she has girl needs she can only fill with girl time.

Neither of us could fill those needs for each other.

It's the dark side of the digital nomad life no one wants to talk about.

In many cases, their identity gets tied up in the lifestyle.

Who they are becomes enslaved to the glamor of exotic locations and friends living vicariously through them.

They just paint a pretty picture on Instagram.

But the 'gram ain't real.

We were back home for the holidays.

My dad gave me a copy of The Happiness Hypothesis.

He had no idea about the state I was in – synchronicity, I guess.

There's an equation for happiness.

It's not woo-woo.

It's based on FMRIs and EEGs and peer-reviewed studies and shit.

Happiness has 3 components.

The first is your baseline level and that's based on who you are naturally as a person.

Some people have a positive affect, some negative.

The second is your circumstances and the environment around you.

The book described studies that showed people who became paraplegic/quadriplegic usually end up just as happy as they were before they were disabled.

People tend to adapt to circumstances quickly.

This is why novelty wears off.

The third is your variable activities and these are the things you do, day-to-day, that give you spikes of happiness.

And the 2 activities that have the biggest effect on your variable happiness are your relationships and the work you do.

Once I read this, I was like,

"Whoa... I've been optimizing for the wrong thing all along. I've been optimizing for circumstance."

So even if there's a change in happiness, we adapt to circumstance and revert to our baseline.

I thought of myself as an investor in happiness.

And I wasn't getting the yield that I wanted from my investment.

I realized I was sacrificing my work and my relationships for travel.

So, we moved back.

Found a place of our own.

Got our health back.

10X'd the business revenue in a year.

We're close to our friends and family.

I was able to develop this amazing relationship with my grandma who's almost 100.

We had Mia Valentina.

Life's just a hundred times better overall.

And it's all because I chose to invest more in the work I do and the relationships I have with the people I care about.