ARTHUR DEANE NEVER imagined that the digital nomad lifestyle—traveling the world while working remotely—was for him. As a senior manager for tech giant Google, he thought being in an office was essential for the job. But the pandemic changed that.
Four months of working from his apartment in Washington, D.C., had him going stir crazy and needing to get out. After researching places where Americans were allowed to travel and reasonable safety precautions seemed to be in place, he jetted to Aruba for a week in July.
“I wanted to dip my toes into the water, literally and figuratively,” he says.
Now, he’s looking at returning to Aruba or one of the other destinations open to Americans for a longer trip. There are still details to sort out, but he has time: Google’s U.S. offices aren’t reopening until July 2021—at the earliest.
Freelancers, entrepreneurs, and the self-employed have made up the majority of the digital nomad crowd, but this could change as more companies reevaluate work culture after six months of remote log-ins. The number of people who might remain out of office is staggering—one study found that more than a third of American jobs could be done entirely from home. And a survey of company leaders revealed that 82 percent plan to offer remote work at least part of the time after the pandemic.
For Deane, the chance to work remotely for a few months each year while maintaining a home base in the U.S. could be an ideal setup—and a reality sometime soon.
“I don’t see returning to an office full-time being the way of the future,” he says. “The pandemic has taught us that we can be productive without being in the office, Monday to Friday, nine to five.”
A growing trend
Remote work was gaining steam before the pandemic, with companies experimenting with work from home days and investing in hardware to ensure safe off-site log-ins. Now that millions of employees have months of experience proving they don’t need to work from an office, some want to take it a step further and find out if they even need to work from home.
The term “digital nomad” dates back to at least 1997, when the book Digital Nomad argued that technology would allow humans to work from anywhere and return to the wandering ways of our ancestors. It took another 15 years before widespread Internet and budget carriers like AirAsia allowed the dream to become reality for a distinct group of travelers. By 2019 one report found that 7.3 million American workers consider themselves digital nomads.