Why We Left the United States
And became Digital Nomads
And became Digital Nomads
On September 5th, 2022, Deana and I sat next to each other in an Airbus330 on the tarmac of SeaTac airport and exclaimed to each other: “Can you believe we’re doing it?!” We were. And we did!
We left the United States. And moved to Sarande, Albania.
Three months later, we left Sarandë and moved to Cyprus.
Soon, we will move to Greece, stay for a time, and then move to… and stay… and then move… and stay…
We are digital nomads.
And our life will never be the same.
“Digital nomad” is a term our family and friends learned a year ago. It is a handy title to describe a person who decides to quit his career, sell his belongings, leave his country of origin and start wandering the globe while working online. Handy because it gives family and friends a phrase to go home and google after you’ve dropped the bombshell you are leaving the western hemisphere in 6 months.
Everyone had so many questions when we made the announcement. The most frequent was “Why?!”
What causes a person to get up and move continents? It’s one thing to take a new job or move to a different city. It’s another thing entirely to abandon your career, rent your house out, and say “Goodbye, America. Hello, Albania!”
See the world
The first reason we chose this new life was our shared hunger to see the world. We were captivated by the ancient Egyptian relics we experienced as children when we visited the King Tut exhibit. We knew that someday we would want to experience Egypt directly. Italy and Greece similarly captured our imagination.
History was not the only reason we wanted to see the world. We love to experience new things and meet new people. And we have a mutual respect for the diverse manner in which humans live authentic lives throughout the globe. We wanted to witness the diversity firsthand.
But lots of people travel the world. They don’t leave their homeland and move. Why did we ultimately relocate?
Stress
The real push happened when the stress of our lives in America became so intolerable we determined it was time to reevaluate.
My wife and I have worked in helping professions our entire adult lives. I have been an educator, and she has been a healthcare worker. These are stressful occupations under normal circumstances. But the circumstances in America haven’t been normal for quite some time.
The steady increase in violent crime, aggressive behavior, addiction, and homelessness has created a pressure cooker of stress for people on the front lines. Three times a year, I would shepherd my 4th-grade students through active shooter drills. And at least twice a year, we would be in a district-wide lock-down for an unknown crisis, worried it might be an active shooter. Multiple patients in the ER had assaulted my wife.
And we couldn’t retreat from the stress once we left our workplaces. We had to move our family twice due to neighborhood gun violence. A walking path along the lake in our community was no longer a safe place for a casual stroll because it had become a homeless camp.
As the rhetoric and tone of political discourse have changed in the past 30 years, civil disagreements over policy and values have morphed into violently charged civil threats and actions. You could try to ignore it by keeping your TV off, but you couldn’t turn off the bumper stickers and yard signs.
We couldn’t escape the stress.
Covid
Everything changed in 2020. In March, public schools across Washington state closed their doors. By April, the number of patients in our local ER dropped, and my wife was laid off. Like everyone around the world, we traded the familiar stress of our pressure cooker careers for the great unknown of a pandemic.
We discovered quiet. The background noise of the nearby freeway was gone. The quiet encompassed more than a lack of sound. Despite the existential threat of this unknown deadly virus, we experienced an inner stillness that came from stripping away distractions and being centered on the simplest expressions of daily living.
We started a garden. Took walks. And enjoyed spending more time with each other.
I also discovered I love working remotely. For most teachers, remote learning was a complete drag. I loved remote teaching. Our students were given laptops, and a patchwork quilt of Wifi was distributed to every home. It was now up to teachers to learn how to utilize these tools so students could resume learning. I had a head start because I had already implemented technology in my classroom and was very comfortable with the tools. I thrive on innovation and outside-the-box thinking.
But by the fall of 2021, the world returned to normal. Students went to brick-and-mortar schools full-time. My wife had already returned to work at the hospital. The inner quiet we experienced in 2020 was gone. Our schools, our hospitals, and our country had gone through an immense crisis requiring huge sacrifice and innovation, and yet here we were on the other end of it, and everything had gone back to what it was before, only worse.
We knew at that point, we could no longer abide by what we had previously considered normal. We had to do something different. We had tasted a new way of life and would never be satisfied with anything less.
I spruced up my LinkedIn page and discovered that many educational technology companies were advertising remote-only jobs. And I learned from a teacher friend that there is a whole world of online opportunities for teaching English as a second language (TEFL.)
Gradually, the pieces fit together. I had marketable skills for this new remote world. And if I could work from anywhere, I could work from ANYWHERE! Our town had a heavy demand for rentals, so we knew our house would rent instantly.
The Great Escape
Deana and I began scheming to become expats (nationals of a country living abroad in another country) and move to Europe. Our original destination was Portugal. We started researching how to secure a D7 Visa allowing us to stay for a year. I quickly became impatient with how long it would take to leave. I happened upon Kristin Wilson’s Youtube channel and discovered there are all these crazy people out there traveling the world relying on tourist visas to stay in countries. Americans can generally stay about 3 months in a country as a tourist, without applying for a specific visa.
I thought, “Surely, Deana won’t go for this.” Big surprise! We discovered Tim Leffel’s book A Better Life for Half the Price and researched locations where we could live cheaper than in America and experience the world. When we chanced upon this video about Sarande from Jen and Stevo’s Two Can Travel Channel, we were hooked.
As I publish this article, we have visited Corfu and Athens, Greece, Rome Italy, Prague Czech Republic, and 3 cities in Cyprus. The stress that pushed us out of America has evaporated. We are, without a doubt living our best lives. We are just getting started.