They Call It A Phase Because They Left

The line comes around every year or so, usually from someone two years deep, usually with the calm voice of a man who has figured something out.

This isn't a destination. It's a phase.

You go location independent. You do the full time version for a while. Then you settle, or you burn out, or you end up rotating between two or three places you half know. The loud full time thing, he tells you, is the part people pass through. Not where they stay.

And mostly, he's right.

Most people do leave. That part is true. I've watched it for years. They arrive lit up. They post the first sunrise. Eighteen months later the posts stop and a while after that the person is back in the country they came from, with a story about how it was a chapter, a season, a thing they needed to get out of their system.

So yes. For most people, it's a phase.

But "most people leave" and "it's a phase" are two different sentences, and the second one is doing something the first one isn't. It sounds like a fact about the life. It's a fact about the leavers.

The payoff in this life is back-loaded. All of it.

Year one is the tax. The visa runs you didn't budget for. The wifi that lied. The bank that has opinions about a man with no address. The Sunday afternoons that arrive with nothing attached to them. The routine you swore you left behind, rebuilt in a hotter country, in a slightly better chair.

You pay all of that up front. And the thing you paid it for doesn't show up on schedule.

It doesn't show up in year one. It barely shows up in year two. The antenna for a place, the read on a street, the language that finally cracks open far enough that you know when someone is lying to your face, the handful of people who are yours and not on an app, the woman at the coffee cart who starts your order before you sit down. None of that is available early. It can't be. It's made of time and there's no version you can buy.

So picture the curve. The cost is front-loaded. The reward is back-loaded. And right in the middle, around month eighteen, is the lowest point on the whole graph. Maximum bill. Minimum receipt.

That is exactly where most people do the maths.

They add it up. They see what they paid. They look around for what they got and the good part hasn't arrived yet, because the good part runs late by design. So they make a reasonable decision based on incomplete evidence. They go home. And then, being decent and thoughtful people, they explain the whole thing.

It was a phase.

It wasn't. They quit during the tax years and called the unpaid refund a law of nature.

I almost did it too.

Year two. Chiang Mai. I remember sitting on a plastic stool at a som tam place I'd been to maybe twenty times, and the woman running it still looked at me like a tourist, still held up fingers for the price even though I'd been ordering in Thai for months, and I thought, this is never going to be mine. I'm a long stay tourist with a laptop. The founder voice in my own head was telling me it was a phase and I was nearly ready to agree with it.

I don't fully know why I stayed. Some of it was money. Some of it was stubbornness, which I'd like to dress up as conviction but won't. Some of it was the culture depth, fascinating.

What I can tell you is what happened later, because later is the whole point.

It came in pieces and none of them announced themselves. The som tam woman started leaving the fish sauce out without being asked. A mechanic remembered my bike. I walked into a year I'd already lived and the city, for the first time, felt like it was running underneath me instead of past me. There was no moment. That's the thing about depth. It never has a moment. It just one day is there, and you realise it's been there a while.

That is the part the leavers never get to see. Not because they failed. Because they left before the slow thing finished arriving.

Permanent full time nomadism is not common. It's genuinely rare. The number of people who do this and never stop is small, and a lot of the reasons people stop are good ones. A partner who wants a base. A kid. A body that gets tired of new beds. Plain loss of interest, which is allowed. None of that is failure either. People are permitted to change their minds.

I'm telling you it's a real destination for some, and you can't see them, because by the time someone is five or ten years into this they have stopped performing it. The loud ones are loud because they're new. The quiet ones went quiet because they got busy living the thing the loud ones are still announcing.

And for those few, somewhere around year three or four, a switch flips that nobody warns you about either. It stops being a project. It stops being a lifestyle, that word that always sounds like it's about to sell you something. It becomes the boring, ordinary, unremarkable way you live. Not an adventure you're on. Just Tuesday.

That's the destination. It looks exactly like a normal life, because that's what it became.

So when someone tells you, in the calm voice, that this is a stage and not a place, listen to what they're actually reporting. Most of the time they're telling you where they got off. That's useful information about them. It's almost no information about how far the road goes.

The road goes further than month eighteen. The good part is parked out past where most people turn around.

Time is the only thing you can't get a refund on. You can spend three years here and leave and call it a phase. That's a real cost and I won't pretend it isn't.

But you can also spend those same three years getting to the part where the woman at the cart leaves out the fish sauce without asking, and the place stops being somewhere you're visiting, and becomes, quietly, with no announcement at all, yours.

One of those is a phase.

The other one was just early.

Andrew - No Refunds •••