“Give me an hour with any other Balkan person and I guarantee they won’t be able to guess I’m a Bosnian Muslim.” He was also a Communist. And a Yugoslav. I’m not sure what exactly that one means. He had a long white beard and tattoos. Divorced but remarried. He spoke fondly of his ex-wife. He’d been 17 at the start of the war. The Croatian and Serbians wanted more land. A lot of them had settled in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina. The alliances switched quickly. Mixed-ethnicity families had to turn on their relatives. It was very bloody. Technically, the war never really ended. Modern Bosnia and Herzegovina is a stalemate constructed into a government.
At the risk of breaking the fourth wall on this project, I don’t think I can justifiably call what I’m trying to do with NWP “travel writing”. I think travel implies structure. Movement from one spot to another until some kind of narrative whole appears. It tries to propose the best outcome from the uncertainty of a new place. The no-fee ATMs and the right kind of taxi to take from the train station. Travel tries harder than I do. Post-facetiously, I suppose I’m a digital nomad. Placeless by design, arbitraging American dollars, bouncing between cities, staying at hostels. I think the distinction is important.
I left Belgrade on a bus that I’d not intended to take. The plan was to go through Bosnia on to Montenegrin coast. I wanted to go swimming. But, as I’ve come to realize, buses in the Balkans represent a particularly powerful kind of delirium, where any misunderstanding compounds and compounds. The ticket office only took cash. The bus to Bosnia had sold its last tickets, at least according to my gesture-Serbo-English conversation with the attendant. It reappeared later on, but I’d already bought the other “last ticket from Belgrade” to Zagreb, the Croatian capital. It was was 30 euros. I’d go down the Croatian coastline to get to Montenegro. It’s a lot of coastline. Croatia is very expensive. I should not have done that. I’m fearful that this might come across as travel writing.
When I left New York City last September, I’d just gotten a remote job and couldn’t justify the austerity it would take to stay. I’d been to Brazil before, I knew what to expect, and so I moved to São Paulo and started building a life there. As it would go, that life built in these kinds of concentric circles. Friends of friends. Tangential interactions from nights out, compounding through repetition. I was an outsider looking in, of course — at least I look a bit Brazilian. The shadow of a life started forming, local spots and remember-whens with my friends there. I suppose that was digital nomadism too, labor on the internet flattening other kinds of physical geographies. I could work from anywhere and so I could be anywhere. I had to leave because my visa ended. Space-time nomadism is harder. I’ll get back to that.
I quit my job. I do freelance writing now. Blogs mostly. That’s how I pay for my travels. At $0.10 a word, I work proportional to what I need. Eating what I kill, reaping what I sow. I like it more than when I had my remote job because the non-travel of digital nomadism is inherently not structured. It’s better that my job is like that too. I’m in Bosnia (and Herzegovina) now. It’s cheap.
Let’s try to construct a matrix around this. The axes are movement and income distribution. In one quadrant, there are work-lives that are fixed in a single location. Income is mostly from one source. Going to the office. Paying rent. Work in this quadrant can be remote too (“working from home”). The opposite of this is what I’d call a distributed work-life. Many income sources, moving from place to place. Hostels and Airbnbs. You might spend a month somewhere, but the expectation is that you will eventually move on. These are the true digital nomads. People with remote jobs who move around should probably be in a different category. They have incomes and their days tend to be structured around the working hours of that job. There is less time levity, but more financial certainty. Then there are people with many income sources who stay in one place. I don’t think there’s a good term for this. The “hustler” maybe? It’s certainly different from what I’m doing. Solo entrepreneurs who travel are somewhere in here too. Influencers are in that group?
As a true-believer digital nomad I can identify pretty clearly the problems with this lifestyle. There is something inhuman about it. There’s an irony to the use of the word “nomadism”. Nomadic peoples were often defined by the collectivity of their movement. Rain patterns across the Eurasian steppe pushing villages onto horses to escape seasonal drought. Nomadism is not defined by placelessness — its actual a complete intentionality with where one is located. I guess digital nomadism is kind of the same. It selects for exchange rates and Hostelworld ratings. Projections onto a technological void. I chose this life because I couldn’t manage the regularity of the alternative — but time and repetition matter a lot to humans. And without place, time starts to unravel. The limitation of the international system makes it this way. The intrigue of a new city does too. I miss going to the gym and having 3 (2) meals a day. I miss speaking the neutral language, I miss being familiar with the people around me. The whole thing can be very lonely and chaotics.
I think the trouble here is also with this inevitable marriage between travel and movement. I feel obligated to curate my life aesthetically. The world is so beautiful. Social media insists that I create representations of that world. I want to be above it but I’m not. The psychology of social media prefers novelty. This is all so novel. The day-to-day of my life is the similar to what it’s always been, though. The context of my life informs my surroundings, not the other way around. That loneliness compounds into insecurity. I’m not making enough money freelancing. I’m missing my friends from back home. But Sarajevo is so beautiful! And this is all so exciting and new! Everyone around me is sitting at tables with friends, though. They are speaking Bosnian. People are on dates. I get stared at sometimes. I drank at the hostel last night with a British girl, a Mexican girl, and a group of Serbians. They were all so interesting. I checked out of the hostel this morning without saying goodbye. Theres an unspoken trauma to leaving new friends so quickly. Maybe I’ll see them again. I didn’t get their Instagrams.
The issue is here is almost mathematical. Human connections can form across any time scale. First-meetings are always quick. Instantaneous. It is when these interactions become predictable that a life-narrative starts to form. You start to understand their personalities, the average of these short-term meetings. Travel makes that hard. The narrative is often scattered. You might see people again, but the context is totally new. New characters are introduced constantly. It’s exhausting because everything is tangential to the previous storyline. Even if you stay in one place, it’s almost always as an outsider looking into a world that began and ended without your involvement. It’s hard to embed yourself in narratives that are not your own. And without that embededness, you begin feeling lost. We have tools to alleviate this — Instagram friends and Whatsapp groups. But how embedded can you be in that. I still wake up in a non-digital world.
Speaking to myself, I suppose addressing this will be the the task of my nomadism now. I want to move across the steppe before the rains start. I want to follow others there, too. Is it a question of optimization? What would it take? Much like the rest of modernity, I fear that I’ve entered an alternative world in which the replacement for my sedentary life does not yet exist. It’s disheartening to be dangling in this void. I’m so grateful that I’ve chosen to do this. I understand the inconceivable privilege of being without any real responsibilities. I know that writing-for-free is an inherently bourgeois endeavor. I know that the freelance work that I get is skewed because I have a degree from a prestigious university. Embedding those truths into the narrative that I create will have to be a part of it.
Sarajevo is an interesting city because it’s been settled and re-settled over the last several centuries the many different occupying groups. It’s almost indescribable. Streets that look like Istanbul blending into Austro-Hungarian European-ness. Many groups have settled here.
