I see its body, a hazy translucent blob, tentacles drifting softly beneath it. I've been seeing it for days, now. The sun rises, the sun sets. It’s late now? And then the night continues into the day. I’ve lost sight of it, finally. Crossed the river into the next town. There are no weekends there. There are no weeks. Everything is held loosely together. People come and go, the tide swings life’s pendulum in full circles, a lunar soliloquy to new beginnings and inevitable ends. That’s the feeling I have. A tidal motion, approximations of days, or maybe half-days, of weekly cycles and monthly rounds. I feel as though I must eventually stay somewhere, find the time to write, feel my feet on solid ground. There’s too much sand here. No place for solid footing. And the sand gets too hot in the sun. I try to imagine what will happen next. Imagine it! Imagine if it all changed. Imagine if everything stayed the same. I glance down into the foamy swell and see it again. My breath catches in my throat.

The myopic good life, balanced between escapism and hedonism, exploration and conquest. I’ve found that it isn’t the nomad portion of the digital nomad title that feels overstated — it’s actually the digital. The digital disrupts the nomadism. Inverses it. It sucks me from my surroundings, from the soil, and places me somewhere that feels like a poorly made reconstruction of reality. It puts me in a world that is so small, electrons circulating through micro-processors. Cosmopolitanism’s collapse — the the promise of post-nationalism condensed into TikTok algorithms optimized for our collective future. Is this escape from physical violence going to be this homogenous, this automated and sterile? Was this the future we were promised? Was there ever such a thing as the globalized internet? Global culture? Is there such a thing as a global market? Global economy? What is the opposite? The pre-global? Pre-geographic? That would need to be something pre-human, right?

So, in this thinking, what is the New World Person? It certainly has to do with empire. With an escape from history into something constructed. What are the United States or Brazil but an ongoing project of people who, in some way, lack a real country? We are trapped in a constant project of self-discovery. Self-assurance. At some level, it is an evolution of what it means to have a national identity. Post-national or pre-national? Maybe it's all that a nation ever was. This is the blessing and the curse of the countries located on these(this) continent(s). Outside of those who are legitimately indigenous to this place (and even then, nationality requires reevaluation), the project of every American nation is to somehow construct a stable pseudo-indigenousness, or perhaps the opposite of indigenousness, onto their territories.

It is why the United States is constantly caught in esoteric wars of identity, why Brazil can so thoroughly mask its inequality with its culture, why Hispanic, Latino, Latinx terminology (in English, especially) is so important. The project of the New World is not to protect some cohesive, ancient identity that links its inhabitants. The goal is to prove that any identity exists at all. To make it exist.

Brazil deals with this differently than the United States. Americans project their existence onto the world. The irony of the Immigrant Empire is totally lost on us — the cultural and economic takeover of the nations our ancestors left. Immigrants boarding battleships and building multi-national corporations to enforce what was learned in their escape back onto the world. We project blue jeans and Universal Music Group everywhere around us. We suck in cultures, from our families, our landed histories, recombine them into something “American”, sell it back to the world, and integrate the world’s feedback into our understanding of what it is to live the “American Dream”,  to live as a person in The Most Influential Country on Earth. To be the Immigrant Empire is to focus the lens of the world onto ourselves, and then to reflect that energy outwards, endlessly and everywhere.

Brazil seems to project itself inwards. It does the opposite. It creates something precious and unique by insisting that it is that way. To be Brazilian is to be born into this world as a Brazilian. To understand the jeitinho. To suck in the nutrients from the soil, maybe in the womb of your mother, and to become distinct because of it. The culture exists somewhere beneath the soil and beneath the bodies buried there, children and families, beneath flesh and blood, beneath the skin, every tone captured in the sunlight, beneath the heritage, beneath the caravels, ocean liners, ports of call, container ships gathering salt in their turbine engines, carrying sugar for British tea, carrying gold and then coffee and then oil. It’s beneath the export economy, the BRICs, the good years, beneath the promises, the politics, the favelas, beneath the land and those who own it, beneath the Amazon, beneath the smoke plumes as the trees burn. It’s beneath the samba beats and the guitars, beneath forro, feijoadas and executive lunches. It is entirely self-contained, profoundly protected. It’s in the eye contact, in kisses on the cheek. It exists because of course it does.

This is where I’ve maybe lost myself as a New World nomad. I know what it is to consume a culture, to draw parallels from the commodity that is American-ness and the cultures that I enter — but I’m not sure I feel attached to the observation or the original. I remember my childhood, my family, I remember Maryland, my school, the street names and the stores. And I can describe Brazil. I know what it means to me.  But I fear that the day-to-day of my life actually has nothing to do with my meta-imagination of what it is to be here. I fear that the big picture has very little to do with culture or history. I fear that the only place I can look for meaning is within, somewhere deeper than the ways I can describe myself, deeper than the ways I can express myself.

Why does digital nomadism has a reputation for being performative cosmopolitanism, Instagram influencers, and pseudo-spirituality. The end state of global citizenry is an understanding that the idea of “immersing” oneself in a new culture is a kind of fantasy. Modernity strips away uniqueness and leaves only representations, only content. In trying to escape our original culture and place ourselves within something new, we are forced to confront the reality that the “original” culture is often just a loose film on top of lived experience, a tapestry of aesthetic traditionalism (Thanksgiving!), life-specific randomness (I’m a Yale man…), or commodified nationalism (Americans just LOVE Chik-fil-a). And in the empty space that this exorcism leaves, we resort either to hedonism or egotism. Social media is an incredible place for both.

I think after nearly two years of doing this, the project of becoming a New World Person has settled on this conflict. Culture certainly exists – but it exists outside of ourselves. If I were to escape culture entirely, what would I be? How can I prepare for the time (possibly very soon) when artificial intelligence learns that human creativity is often just a hallucination of expression — and is really just a regurgitation of what people are told is unique about their life or culture? Is that too pessimistic?  I want to create a framework for a viable alternative. For a new cosmopolitanism. I’ve settled on a matrix of three things that define life in the New World: context, embeddedness, and consequence.

Context is the first to appear. Your plane lands at the airport, you get your bags, move into your apartment, and the story begins. It’s story telling — in the way that an anthropologist might describe stories as the basis for human cognition. It’s why so many people love to journal as they travel. Or why traveling with friends is so much more satisfying than traveling alone. Event A is able to follow Event B — and both seem to matter is some way to the unfolding of Event C. Context builds and divides non-linearly: visiting a friend, leaving suddenly, plane tickets bought before you knew what was going to happen. Divine purpose seems to emerge from logical progression.

Embeddedness might also be called “authenticity”. This is the one where the stories that form in a new location feel, in some way, specific to that location. Not to some abstract understanding of a location — but to physical, tangible reality. The “travel industry” works against this to some degree, standardizing experiences anywhere, continental breakfasts in Bali, MSNBC on hotel TVs. This is when you learn some Portuguese. When you find your favorite songs and develop local friendships, go on a couple dates, and find the café with the really good pão de queijos. It’s the part where the locals, let’s call them Brazilians, laugh at the references you make in your writing. This often comes very naturually. It is not about understanding where you are — but accepting your reactions to it.

And then there is consequence. Materializing in the world around yourself. Reflexiveness in your surroundings. Instead of getting to a place where things feel neutral or navigable, you get to a place where your preferences outside of what is “normal” or “local” are both recognized and acted upon. You’ve transcended novelty or discovery and instead create a preferential steady-state.  Assimilationists often reject the existence of this category. To assimilate is to surrender to the-way-things-are. But if you were to leave, would anything change? Should things change? What if you were to stay? To “matter” to other people, to the world around you, is an extraordinary challenge — many prefer to numb themselves to that fact. Some cast blame on others for their inability to shape their surroundings. Others prefer to escape. To escape is to start anew, to push yourself to the periphery and to have a justification for being there. Truthfully, this just takes time. A lot of time.

In the last few months, I’ve discovered the extent to which the good life, “living my best life”, is not a substitute for living a desirable life. I think I’ve been stuck in a place relatively low in context, relatively high in embeddedness — and as a result, I’ve found it difficult to live a life of particular consequence. That is how I imagine these categories interacting. I think that’s why I haven’t been writing much. I think I have a strong mental model of Brazil, I have friendships and stories, history and habits, in this country. But I feel as though it is precisely those linkages that have produced this contextual recession. I know the specific ways in which I am not like a “Brazilian”. I’ve tested the edge cases, I’ve run the experiments.

I see the way American politeness flattens my Portuguese — I know the words but not how to use them. I’ve had to unlearn the nihilism of the American culture I've been rewarded for performing. I've had to unlearn the irony. My American dollars circulate differently here too, they enter and exit my bank account in a different way. I can wear my knowledge of Brazil as a sort of fashion, Dom Pedro II and Getulio Vargas, Belo Horizonte and Balneário Camboriú, Duda Beats, Skol Beats, BBB, and Bolsonaristas. It’s an aestheticized locality, a reference — but these things only matter to me insofar as I choose to wear them. I struggle to identify the fabric. I’m not even sure if any of it fits me. What I need now are reasons to put it on. Perhaps this piece is my red carpet.

I’m sitting on the beach again, somewhere in the northeast of Brazil. It’s nighttime and I’m alone. There’s a full moon and waves are crashing against the shore. A line of lights runs along the horizon, probably container ships headed to Europe or maybe fishing boats out on an early morning. I see it again. Its round top catches the moonlight differently than the water around it, a kind of hazy luminescence, as though moonlight were emanating from somewhere within. It’s far from shore, but I immediately spot it. I sit transfixed on the sand. I close my eyes. I feel my body fall forward, onto another beach, onto other moonlit nights I’ve spent on beaches, back in Thailand, red bucket filled with vodka and Red Bull, and then to that one time when I was a kid, just outside of Annapolis on the Chesapeake Bay, on the James River, and then to a rocky beach outside of Dubrovnik, small cuts across my feet, and then back to Brazil, only there’s music in the background this time. When I open my eyes again, I can no longer see it.

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