Has this ever happened to you? You scroll the Internet for hours looking for information, or escapism, more or less.
You stumble across the proverbial digital nomad working on their laptop on the beach. You stumble across the van lifer taken elaborate road trips across the continent. You stumble across the influencers who are making money hand over fist with sponsors and paid ads. Or worse, the wannaprenuers, these are the people who are going to show you how to build a thriving business in three weeks, or help you make a million dollars from a thousand. You know who I am talking about. These people in many cases, are mostly delusional. They are preying on your boredom and naivete by exposing you to an imaginary world of wanderlust and adventure. And these guys just don’t want your money. They want your freedom and peace of mind. So, in this video, I explain why you should avoid these guys at all costs.
I know that you’ve heard of tourist traps.
The bus, train, or cruise ship drops you off right in the center of the town, where you are haggled and overcharged for cheap products or goods. Or worse, you get lured into some sacred lair where a dirty salesman is going to sell you something that you can’t afford. Well, the tourist trap is designed to inundate you with so much stimuli that you get overly excited. Your jubilance causes you to spend, spend, and spend, so that when you leave, you really don’t know what happened. Sadly, the same thing is happening now with social media. The overstimulation along with the bells and whistles causing people to make some of the worst decisions of their lives.
If you were lucky enough to live in the developing world, then you know that we have a whole new set of problems.
We are not plagued with famine, war, corruption and disease like other countries. Instead, we have rich people’s problems. We are bored with having everything at our fingertips and decide to leave the comforts of our own homes to live a more authentic lifestyle. We may call ourselves expats, or digital nomads. Only we fail to realize that when we leave our home country, we leave much of our earning potential as well. Who knew that developing countries have no need for American history teachers, or political science majors. Perhaps this is why the digital nomad lifestyle is so appealing. Only a few people can do it, the wealthy, remote workers, and the people who are utterly full of shit. Sadly, the people who are utterly full of shit are the bulk of the people bragging about the lifestyle and the freedom that entails. They almost always leave out the part that they are working side by side with Hector at the local taco stand, or that they’re getting cash up deposits from their Aunt May, or Grandpa Richie. But hey wanderlust sells. And they make a few pennies creating posts and making videos of how you too can live a life of freedom and luxury. All you have to do is quit the job that you spent thousands of dollars becoming qualified for. It’s not like there isn’t a hundred people lined up to take your slot. You can sell all your stuff that you’ve accumulated over the years, because who needs stuff when you have experiences and memories. Right? Right!
Then you move to a more affordable country, only to learn that being broke in another country is not only unsustainable, but straight up miserable. But you have hope that you can build your business or your social media following. It’s going to take off any day now. We keep telling ourselves that, as we go back to our laptops, hungry for both food and business, not realizing that we’ve fallen into the wanderlust trap. Yes, it’s happened to the best of us. Hell, it’s even happened to me. I was one of those suckers who got rid of all my stuff, to travel the world and fill my life with unstoppable adventures, only to miss the comforts of home.
I fell into the wanderlust trap, telling myself that the spiritual gurus traveled around the world to find peace and solace. But the gurus didn’t have a twelve-hundred-dollar smart phone glued to their palm. They weren’t looking to become Internet famous by posting all of their experiences on social media. In fact, the gurus were traveling to know thy self. They traveled to gain wisdom, insights, and explore other languages and cultures. That’s the biggest difference between the spiritual gurus and these crazy social media influencers. The gurus were looking for inner peace. While social media influencers are looking for fame, fortune, and constant validation.
Something really weird happens when you seek validation. You start to want more and more of it.
And slowly, over time, you become a fanatic. Rhyme and reason go out the door, critical thinking, and skepticism is avoided at all costs, and real growth ceases to exist. You become stagnant and thus you become more and more dependent on seeking validation. Social media understands our desire for validation. That’s why we get those small dopamine hits when someone likes, comments, or shares our posts. And when we don’t feel validated, our world implodes. We feel invisible, insignificant, not worthy of being part of the tribe. Afterall, these social media creators spent millions researching human behavior. They understand that we have thousands of years of inherited memories from our ancestors. Those memories affect our behavior and desire to belong, to be praised, to feel valued. Only in our ancestors’ days we belonged to small tribes who accepted us for who we were. Now, we are forced to belong to institutions and large communities that infringe on our freedoms and way of life. Many of us are born into the institutions. Public schools and religious organizations forced us to believe that happiness lies in getting married, having a big house, and a great paying job. Ten years in, we are burned out, looking for escapism, or some kind of wanderlust that will cure our woes. We fall into the hippie cult, the digital nomad lifestyle, the remote worker scheme, only to trade one set of problems for another. Or one set of rules in exchange for another. We feel like changing our external environment will fix all our problems. When in truth, we really have to change our mindset.
Afterall, I’ve been a non-conformist virtually all my life and I can’t tell you the number of times people have told me that I wasn’t living right.
Whenever, I tried to become a part of a community, I was seduced by the wanderlust. The bells, the whistles, the love bombing did a real number on me. But I realized through all of my years of non-conformity, I should never make a decision during the honeymoon phase. Through the school of hard knocks, I’ve also learned that I’m going to have to give up valuable pieces of who I am to be part of the herd. And normally, the sacrifices are small at first, but increase significantly over time. So much so that I become an entirely different person once sucked into the herd. My thoughts are influenced by groupthink, and my behavior is motivated by feeling accepted and validated. And getting away from the herd becomes incredibly difficult. In most cases I have to cut people off, and even cut off parts of myself to break free.
The truth of the matter is that we no longer run in tribes where there are four or five people who totally get us.
Instead, we are forced to lose ourselves while being sucked into the herd, or the hive, to survive. It’s all designed this way for a reason. Institutions need bodies, I mean numbers to maintain growth, power, and status. And your freedom is a threat to their very existence. They’ve been around for a long time and are crafty when it comes to manipulating human behavior. They know exactly what buttons to push to gain a desired outcome, and wanderlust is sadly one of them. So, what’s the solution to this problem? Well, we need to go back to being guru. We travel and create experiences that help us grow as people, and not just our social media following. More importantly, we have to let go of our desire for validation. Maybe we won’t have four thousand friends on social media. But maybe, we just might have four great friends who can be part of our soul tribe. Maybe you won’t make thousands of dollars as a social media influencer. But just maybe we can make enough to live a modest life in another country with an amazing welcoming culture.
