Challenging the dominant work ethic: Work,naps,and productivity of location-independent workers

Introduction: Challenging the contemporary work ethic

Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living

It is a paradox that despite technological advancement people work exceedingly long hours in the Western world (Suzman, 2020), often on jobs that they secretly consider pointless (Graeber, 2019). It is even more paradoxical that while a significant part of the population works too much, often in precarious jobs with insufficient pay (Molé, 2013; Muehlebach, 2012), the Protestant work ethic is still so dominant and remains mostly unchallenged (Roberman, 2014). ‘The mystery here is not only that we are required to work or that we are expected to devote so much time and energy to this pursuit but rather, that there is no more active resistance to this state of affairs’, states philosopher Kathi Weeks (2011: 1). The work ethic has taken various forms and incorporated different social groups, but has nevertheless remained hegemonic (Weeks, 2011: 38).

A critique of such a work ethic can be seen in various traditions of refusal of work. The refusal of work and authority is the beginning of liberatory politics, the valorisation of human activities which have escaped from labour’s domination (Berardi, 2009; Hardt and Negri, 2000). Frayne (2015) sees the critique of the work ethic and refusal of work as a path to social innovation as a vision of social progress based on a reduction of work hours and an expansion of free time. Gorz (1999) and Standing (2012) have emphasised the importance of free time to political participation and a functioning democracy. Applebaum (1992) suggests that the reduction of work hours will lead to a change in the work ethic. The current Western (Protestant) work ethic, which sees work as a moral duty of industrious and persistent effort in the workplace and entrepreneurial rational calculation, could be replaced with the ethic of leisure that was more prevalent among ancient Greeks (who viewed leisure not as idleness but active self-fulfilment). This shift in the perception of work, he suggests, would be a positive change that would give humans more choice as individuals rather than just consumers, enabling an expansion of activities that are done for the sake of love, pleasure, and satisfaction.

This article focuses on remote workers who could be seen as attempting to break free from the dominant practices of working long hours and accepting the dominant Protestant work ethic. My aim is similar to that of Marshall Sahlins in ‘The original affluent society’ (1974) fifty years ago. Sahlins looked at hunter-gatherers, who owned very little and worked much less than a contemporary office worker, and this example formed the basis of his critique of an overconsuming and overworking capitalist society. Similarly, I use the case of digital nomads, people who value their freedom and try to escape the 40-hour work week, as a lens for critiquing the contemporary obsession with work. By analysing their narratives and practices, I show how digital nomads practise reclaiming their free time but at times struggle with completely rejecting the hegemonic moral appreciation of ‘hard work’.

Digital nomads: Freedom, productivity, and the quest for a 4-hour work week

In recent years, a small but growing body of literature has concentrated on digital nomads, location-independent digital workers who work and travel simultaneously. Reichenberger (2017: 1) defines digital nomads as young professionals whose ICT-based occupation allows them to work independently of their location, and whose main motive for adopting this travel-based lifestyle is a desire to escape the inhibiting structures of a traditional, location-dependent working existence. For them, conventional life is characterised by alienation and too little time for leisure; the new nomads aim to overcome the dichotomy of work and leisure, ‘where both aspects of life contribute equally to self-actualization, -development and -fulfilment’ (Reichenberger, 2017: 2), with time their most valuable asset. Many digital nomads proudly state that they are opposing ‘the 9-to-5 routine’, ‘the rat race’, the ‘script’ (Mancinelli, 2020) and instead explore other ways to have a more fulfilling life. Their thinking is often inspired by the popular self-help book The 4-hour Workweek, in which Tim Ferriss (2009) claims that shortening the work week by automating and outsourcing most work will allow more time for personal growth and leisure activities, offering a critique of the conventional organisation of the life cycle, where one is expected to work hard and endure an unsatisfactory job until retirement age.

On a more critical note, the literature emphasises that these often highly educated young people have left the creative-class cities (Florida, 2005) where they can no longer afford to live (Woldoff and Litchfield, 2021) due to overwork, precarious employment, and/or few opportunities for young people (Nash et al., 2018; Sutherland and Jarrahi, 2017; Thompson, 2018). This points to a more general trend, where post-Fordist ontological precarity pushes various social groups to pursue fuller life projects and more autonomy in relation to time than conventional employment can offer (Millar, 2014).

While there is a growing body of literature on the ‘lifestyle mobilities’ of digital nomads, their work practices and free time as non-work time have not been studied so much. Digital nomads are often portrayed as hard workers obsessed with productivity (Müller, 2016: 140; Thompson, 2021: 2; Woldoff and Litchfield, 2021), who experience difficulty when balancing travel and productivity (Mancinelli, 2020), and are aided by digital applications (Nash et al., 2018). These descriptions are commonly side-notes, rather than the central ethnographic focus, in the existing work. Cook’s (2020) ethnography of digital nomads’ work practices is an exception. He argues that the nomad’s productivity is based on the idea of a neoliberal self-disciplining subject who internalises the values of responsibility and self-reliance in the face of precarious work in the gig economy, trying to be maximally productive even in leisure time. Cook argues that nomads’ digitally mediated disciplining tools are applied not only to work activities but also to leisure, for example, ‘meditation, daily physical exercise, language learning and even book reading’ are ‘both timeboxed and digitally mediated’ (2020: 383). Digital nomads’ freedom, in his view, is tightly interrelated with efficient time use rather than letting time pass by in a wasteful and unstructured manner. Thus he sees them as quite the opposite of Sahlins’ hunter-gatherers. Such an approach, inspired by Foucault’s ideas of neoliberal personhood, is common in ethnographies on creating new types of workers or job seekers (Dunn, 2004; Gershon, 2016; Martin, 1995: 224). The concept of ‘serious leisure’ has been used to highlight how digital nomads choose their location based on available leisure activities rather than the location of work (Stebbins, quoted in Thompson, 2018). Less attention has been paid to the fact that nomads’ leisure is not always productive or serious. Their focus on productivity during work hours allows for leisure as autonomous activities that are not based on necessity or commodity exchange, but which create pleasure in themselves as well as their outcome. The aim of such leisure activities is to bring the Good, the True and the Beautiful into the world (Gorz, 1989: 165), through both enjoyable self-development and more mundane everyday activities such as cooking or taking naps.

Rather than taking the nomads’ obsession with productivity at face value, this article aims to differentiate between different registers of productivity and gives a more complex perspective on digital nomads’ views of personhood. I argue that digital nomads are not just committing themselves fully to the neoliberal idea of the ‘entrepreneurial self’; rather, their understanding of productivity serves as a critique of the practice and ethic of hard work. Furthermore, it is necessary to take seriously their self-representations as workers who consciously choose rest or exercise over work and try to claim back autonomy over their work, lives, and bodies. Nevertheless, practising working fewer hours and presenting working less as a moral value poses a challenge, and creates a slippage between different ways of talking about productivity.

Just as Sahlins’ purpose was not to romanticise the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, my aim is to critically explore digital nomads’ work practices while maintaining full awareness of their privileged position. For example, Tim Ferriss’s book can be read as advocating a neocolonial form of labour exploitation, with menial work being outsourced to workers in the Global South. Digital nomads are often described as strong-passport-holding Westerners whose life choices involve using global inequalities to their own advantage, as an opportunistic adaptation to a neoliberal ideology of entrepreneurial freedom (Mancinelli, 2020). ‘Digital nomads are not refugees but Westerners with strong passports and resources, just not enough to live as comfortably in their own land, as someone else’s’, states Thompson (2021: 13), referring to the continued colonial and tourist relationship that these location-independent workers have with places that they work from. Furthermore, she adds, despite downshifting as consumers, the digital nomad lifestyle remains embedded in the commodification of individual biographies and travel narratives that generate income and constitute the basis of social differentiation.

Nevertheless, as remote work is becoming more common since the Covid-19 pandemic, exploring the values and practices of digital nomads as among the early adopters of remote working (together with telecommuters; see Huws, 1984) is increasingly relevant. Looking into the potentialities of the refusal of work and the rejection of the Protestant work ethic offers an angle to critique the contemporary capitalist arrangement of work and alternatives to it. For this, I focus on digital nomads’ use of time, descriptions of their work ethic, and their struggles with the dominant values that require a moral person to work hard and long.

Jungle nomads and life transformation coaches: Fieldwork during the Covid-19 pandemic

My data is based on five months of fieldwork on the island of Koh X ¹ in Thailand where I had planned to conduct a short pilot ethnographic study of three months at the beginning of 2020. The Covid pandemic that started in March extended the fieldwork and changed its nature. Thailand’s pandemic restrictions limited any fieldwork involving free movement in public spaces, but the unusual circumstances also shed light on some aspects of digital nomads’ work practices that would have been less evident in ordinary circumstances.

Throughout the lockdown months of March, April, and May of 2020, the holidaymakers gradually left Thailand. Happy Resort, where I was staying with my family, became increasingly populated with remote workers from Germany, Israel, Thailand, Russia, and the US – primarily young professionals who could upgrade their living conditions as tourism came to a halt. The shared resort space allowed me to do fieldwork even when cafés and co-working spaces closed. I had an ‘interviewing bench’ on the beach that allowed two people to sit at opposite ends, keeping a safe distance between myself and my interview partners. When restrictions were eased, I worked in co-working spaces used by the digital nomads, attended networking events, and befriended the parents of remote workers whose children attended the same daycare as my daughter. In addition to informal chats, I followed the local Facebook groups and Instagram pages of research participants, written in English, German, and Russian. I conducted 17 formal recorded interviews with remote workers from different countries, mainly Europe, North America, and Russia, focusing on their life and work histories, attitudes towards work, money, and time, and their experience of the pandemic.

The circumstances of the study helped me go beyond the commonly used method of finding informants through co-working spaces and allowed me to diversify the profiles and stories of remote workers. Focusing on co-working spaces might result in a narrow sample of informants, and the multiple entry points I used allowed for a more varied range of remote workers. There were quiet workers who would label themselves ‘jungle nomads’ and preferred living closer to and socialising with the local Thai and Burmese population; professionals who only worked from their balcony in the resort; members of the Russian-speaking remote workers’ community who rarely participated in the English-language events on the island. Since almost all international travel had stopped, my research participants and I stayed on the island longer, which permitted repeated meetings over time. This allowed for a more classical in-depth, long-term ethnographic study than is usually possible with a highly mobile population. The experience of ‘being stuck in paradise’ enabled observations of the dynamic in work practices as the Covid-related restrictions and moods changed.

The research participants were aged between 25 and 40. They worked in numerous different fields of digital work (Wang et al., 2018), either self-employed or working for a company. Most of my interviewees were professionals in their thirties who had been location-independent for two years or more. The population was not representative of the global digital nomad population, as each location attracts slightly different remote workers. The main digital nomad hub in Thailand is Chiang Mai, known for its affordability, while life on the island of Koh X was somewhat more expensive, drawing in established professionals with a stable income, and people interested in spirituality.

Very few of my research participants had just one full-time job in one line of work. A few examples included: an English teacher to Chinese students who was also a supply chain consultant; a developer writing a mental health blog for other nomads; a digital marketer who also ran a travel blog and life coaching business; and an artist who also ran an internet provider company in India. The various types of online coaching among my research participants included biohacking ² and sleep optimisation, pregnancy and preparing for birth, making money online, eating disorders and addictions, and various types of life transformation. It was common for nomads to find their employers, clients, students, and coaches within the digital nomad network. Not all work was financially profitable yet, but it was important and meaningful to the participants. Such work was taken on for its social significance or hoped-for profits in the future and included developing an ethical and sustainable media collective, women’s circles, reiki healing, and various forms of coaching. Because of its importance, nomads often dedicated what they considered their ‘most productive hours’ to it. Some participants admitted that not all their work was fun or satisfying all the time, but at least it was done on their own terms. For others, their job was also their passion, like Oliver, who had held jobs as a bar manager in Switzerland before attending ‘some crazy rituals with plant medicine’ that ‘mixed up his whole world’, which made him and his girlfriend decide to leave Switzerland and start travelling while he was working on his biohacking podcast. As Oliver explained, ‘I was just questioning everything. Why we do this and why we have to work so much. Why we do what we do. And this was an ongoing process, we read a lot, a lot of personal development.’ The frequent ‘why’ questions characterised the responses of many of my research participants.

A four-hour week for real?

A significant chunk of time spent in offices could be classified as ‘empty labour’ – non-work activities that workers engage in at the workplace because their work hours are poorly organised (Paulsen, 2014). One of the key ideas of Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs (2019) is that one must appear to be busy to be seen as a moral person and an accepted member of society. Commonly, digitally mediated life is seen as exceedingly busy (Wajcman, 2014) and pretending to work or be busy corresponds to the dominant ideals of a good citizen in capitalist societies. But the literature on digital nomads showed them rebelling against such ideas. For example, Woldoff and Litchfield (2021) found that millennial digital remote workers in Bali belonged to the ‘creative class’ who had left behind their ‘world class cities’, which they characterised as too expensive, overly busy, and with a toxic work culture. In this section, I demonstrate that digital nomads’ values centred on slowing down, working fewer hours, and preferring time over money.

Critiquing life in big cities was a common theme in the interviews. Gulnaz had left her busy working life and lavish apartment in New York, where she had earned more money than most of her peers in their late twenties. Her life story, of a studious migrant teenager who became a successful manager of start-ups in New York, took an unexpected turn when she had had enough in her early thirties. Spending the morning on the beach with me before going to teach a free yoga class in a nearby community space, she explained that the busy, noisy, men-dominated environments did not allow her to work on things that were meaningful to her; she left that life behind to set up a new home, working remotely from Thailand. When I met her, she was just starting her business as a transformation and meditation coach, and reiki healer, and was emphasising how this time, she was taking her time, building it up slowly, trusting her intuition.

Sameed, another New Yorker with a migrant background, recalled that during his recent longer, eight-month visit home, his friends did not even have time to see him because they had no control over their time. He explained that compared to his friends who earn money to pay the mortgage and the bills, he uses money as a way to buy more free time, either by outsourcing some of his work or living in a cheaper location where the money he has earned in US dollars goes further. These examples signify two ways of relating to time that is different in big cities: Gulnaz emphasised slowness and the slowing down that was now possible for her, while Sameed talked about the amount of free time he had, and autonomy over one’s own time.

Conscious slowing down of work pace and valuing their own time was a common theme. Since most of my research participants were already established in their careers, they claimed to be working fewer hours than they had in their office jobs or the first nomad years when they had to establish themselves professionally. Some proudly announced that they were working four hours a day. Others, either working full-time remotely for an employer or really enjoying and immersed in their work, were working closer to eight hours on some days. At the same time, boundaries were set to keep work time from colonising free time, especially as the nomads were getting more experienced in organising their work. Max from Austria, who was working in marketing for a fully remote online fitness company, confessed that when he started out as a nomad, he worked 40 hours a week for the employer and 20 to set up his own business. But he quickly realised this was not how he wanted his life to be. The 26-year-old then decided to reduce the hours in his own sports coaching business and to learn what he could from his employer. After a while, he reduced his hours in the company to focus more on his own business, travel, and personal development. Younger workers who are only just setting out and trying to make ends meet doing gig work do not have such opportunities (Thompson, 2021) to adjust their hours but, among my research participants, it was common to emphasise autonomy over work time. These workers were reflexive regarding their own working practices and stressed the importance of rest and self-care.

The digital nomads in my study preferred free time to extra money. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1992), Max Weber cites Benjamin Franklin, in his saying that time is money, as an example of the morality of having to use every minute in a useful and productive way. The interviews revealed a different relationship between time and money. The philosophy of money and how much money was needed to have a good life was something I often discussed with the nomads. Instead of maximising money, many remote workers focused on maximising free time instead, such as Sameed’s example of ‘buying more free time.’ In another example, 27-year-old Jon explained that, instead of having a target income, he has set target savings/investments instead.

A lot of people think about maximising income. You could almost look at minimising income to meet your cost of living and meet your investment targets. And I think that might be a way that people start to look at it. Then suddenly, instead of maximising income, they’re maximising their free time. Like if I work this much, I cover all my expenses. I have enough left over to invest a comfortable amount, I’m happy, and I have plenty of time.

It is essential to note that such an attitude towards money did not make it unimportant – investment targets had to be met before enjoying free time. But when their peers back at home were overworking, trying to cover their loans, achieving their expected standard of life and perhaps also their investment targets, these remote workers claimed to be settling for less money and more time.

Sahlins (1974) describes hunter-gatherer societies in Australia and Africa where, for both men and women, work time did not exceed four to five hours a day. When enough food for subsistence was acquired, work stopped, and time was spent chatting, visiting others, singing, and napping. Rather than using all available labour and resources to acquire more, they under-used available economic resources according to the norms of a Western society. The remote workers in Thailand seemed to behave in the same seemingly sub-optimal manner and did not maximise their working time. The descriptions of their ordinary day, time management, and working hours showed that, at least among peers, it was not common to boast about being busy, but quite the opposite – taking time for oneself. But there is a difference between an ideal representation of the lifestyle and everyday life. In the next sections, I show the slippage between the ideal of working fewer hours, with its desire to give up the appearance of busyness and minimise empty labour, and the lived reality of guilt, doubt, and justifying one’s lifestyle choices through the hegemonic discourse that sometimes occurs.

The pandemic lockdown and work ethic

The fieldwork undertaken while ‘being stuck’ allowed a detailed insight into remote workers’ practices during the first wave of the Covid pandemic. Globally, as well as in Thailand, workers in the tourism and hospitality sectors were losing their jobs, while digital business increased during the first lockdown. This also affected digital nomad jobs: one of my research participants lost their job in the online recruitment industry for cruise ships, some e-commerce websites that relied on merchandise from China were put on hold, and all football betting, the main source of income for one of my Italian informants with a lavish lifestyle, moved to Belarus, which was the only country where live tournaments continued.

Nevertheless, most of my research participants received more work offers when the pandemic started. Jon, who was teaching English to Chinese children, usually after their school day, suddenly had Chinese children permanently at home because of Covid from December 2019 and now had more class sessions to teach. Irina from Moscow, who was running online courses preparing women for giving birth, saw many more Russian-speaking women signing up for her course and consultations because they could no longer attend in-person classes and were even increasingly planning their births at home. Max, whose company was selling online fitness trainer and nutrition coach courses and certificates to the German-speaking market, saw many people stuck at home, having lost their jobs or transitioned to part-time work and needed to launch a marketing campaign for the online fitness coach training programme. As all businesses needed to sell their merchandise online, anyone who was in the business of building websites was able to get more work – more blog articles, landing pages, and newsletters.

Suddenly, many people found themselves working more to fill the time since work was available and cafés, yoga studios, and co-working spaces closed, large gatherings were forbidden and a night curfew was in place. An extreme example is an Israeli family who had started out the nomad lifestyle with their one-year-old son six months previously. Their plan had been to work less in Thailand after they left the high-pressure work environment in Tel Aviv. When starting their journey in Thailand, they initially worked four days a week, enjoying both the Israeli weekend and the European one. But with Covid restrictions, they started working six days a week, covering both the European and the Israeli working week. As Noa explained:

After there was a Covid case on the island, we decided to stop going to co-working spaces. [We] work from home, only eat at home. We moved to a bigger house to have a nanny come in for our son instead of taking him to kindergarten. And then we started working six days a week because we were at home anyway. We didn't want to see people. We had a lot of work to do. So why not?

Even when the initial panic eased and their son returned to kindergarten, they kept working long hours, unlike most other people in the remote working circles. When I expressed my surprise, they shrugged apologetically and explained, ‘It’s in our DNA, I think, to work really hard, you know?’

But even during the pandemic, Noa and Erez were an exception. After the initial excitement of being able to get new clients and earn more money, especially nomads with a European background consciously took holidays. For example, a German couple from Happy Resort emphasised that since the pandemic was creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and stress, it was particularly important to take time off. After earning more than ever before in April and May, they said no to new work and religiously stuck to the rules they had set up after experiencing a burnout as novice nomads in Bali a year earlier. They took a two-week holiday in June, and completely switched off their phones and laptops, disconnecting from the world of work. Others, who had left their jobs before the pandemic to explore more meaningful ways of generating income, stuck to their plan of slowing down. Tommaso, a developer from Italy, and Soritsa, a Serbian digital marketer, were both working on new projects aiming to monetise content creation on topics that they found important such as wellness through mindfulness and mental health treatment with psychedelic drugs. While working out where to get capital for the new projects, they did not allow income-generating work to eat up their time. They had enough savings to allow this downtime, and the Covid slowdown helped with this. Although during the interviews, my conversation partners emphasised leaving behind busy city environments and learning that working long hours while travelling was not wise, the novel situation, isolation, and uncertainty made some of them return to their pre-nomadic working habits. I suggest that this points to a larger contradiction in values where the nomads try to reject the Protestant work ethic and stick to slowness and fewer hours, but in unusual situations, there might be something familiar and comforting in the dominant values, especially when circumstances encourage money-making over sociality.

Hard work versus productivity

I continue by showing the uneasy tension between different ways of talking about work. As previous research has noted (Müller, 2016: 140; Thompson, 2021: 2; Woldoff and Litchfield, 2021), digital nomads talk about productivity a lot. My aim is to go into more detail and show that the tension between the dominant work ethic and the desire to reject it is present in the different registers of talking about hard work and productivity. First, I will juxtapose the dominant work ethic with digital nomads’ understanding of productivity. I show how for nomads, productivity predominantly signified a shared discourse around using certain technologies and tools and autonomy around work hours.

One rainy April afternoon during the lockdown, Pascal, a French-American entrepreneur who managed two co-working spaces for remote workers on Koh X, was getting restless as his businesses were closed due to Covid restrictions. He came to have coffee on my terrace. Having read my research proposal on digital nomads and post-work imaginaries, he was perplexed that I wanted to study digital nomads’ practices of working fewer hours and ideas of liberation from work. Passionate about his business, born into a French Jewish family and growing up in the US, Pascal explained that hard work was always a central value in his life. Indeed, as I witnessed over the five months, he would show up to work, cutting sleep short or even when suffering from dengue fever. During our chat, he proudly announced that he had turned his 12-hour days into 15 hours to fit in community-building activities on top of setting up the co-working spaces, training staff, and dealing with marketing and the website of his business.

Pascal felt that I implied that remote workers were lazy and disagreed with this. He assured me that people were already working in his co-working space at 7:30 in the morning when he arrived and that they were sitting there past 10:30 at night. ‘I can name you 15 people that I've met, that I have gotten to know, whose work ethics are truly mind-blowing, truly mind-blowing,’ he argued.

Later that day, I was talking to Sameed, the digital marketer whose Happy Resort bungalow stood a hundred metres from mine. Sameed, who had been a remote worker for eight years, was surprised by Pascal’s reports of nomads who work non-stop. Like many other remote workers that I talked to during my fieldwork in Thailand, he was proud to work less than 40 hours a week and claimed that he did not know any nomads who were working long hours. After thinking about it for a while, he admitted that perhaps these were the nomads who were only starting out and ‘had to figure out productivity’. He explained:

I’ve always been about efficiency. I love the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. And that helped me in terms of my inspiration to start travelling and do the whole digital nomad thing. And his whole premise was kind of like, how can you be more efficient and work less and work 4 hours a week versus 40?

The difference between Pascal, who talked about hard work and long hours as something admirable and which he practised himself, and the remote workers who used Pascal’s spaces was that the latter rarely represented themselves as virtuous because they were hard working. One could argue that by leaving behind the ordinary social structures, they had managed to escape the dominant work ethic. Many nomads tried to follow Ferriss’s advice that preached efficiency, automating and outsourcing tasks to work as little as four hours a week and enjoying a rich life the rest of the time. The key to this was being productive at work. For the digital nomads who, in our (multilingual, non-native speaker) conversations, used the words ‘productivity’ or ‘efficiency’ interchangeably, it was not about producing more surplus value for capital. Instead, productivity signified a shared discourse around using certain technologies and tools and autonomy around work hours.

Various technological, material and social strategies aimed to improve productivity (see also Cook, 2020). Productive and focused work meant working at quiet co-working spaces, cafés or resorts’ co-working days in an air-conditioned room and with other motivated workers, or avoiding such spaces and staying in the resort’s garden or their bungalow to avoid social encounters. Material strategies included putting smartphones out of reach or using noise-cancelling headphones or special music that would help to tune the brainwaves to a focused mode.

Another way of being productive was creating a suitable schedule. Consider the example of Tommaso from Italy, who thought that working for an employer – remotely or in an office – meant that he could not work when he was most productive.

That’s why I’m trying to also make my own business because I think I can set a better schedule for myself. I figured out at some point that I know when I have the most energy and when I can work. So, if I’m working on my own schedule, I’m way more productive than if I’m working on someone else’s schedule. Because I know I am most productive at lunchtime, early afternoon. That's my time to shine.

Tommaso believed that working fewer but more productive hours might be better for him. He had quit his job as a developer for an Austrian start-up and was setting up his own business, which would allow flexibility and therefore increase productivity with fewer hours. He explained that for his work as a programmer, which was essentially problem-solving, the difference in time of the day would be enormous: catching him at a good moment, he would do the task in 30 minutes, but at other times it would take him a day. Remote workers described their working ‘productively’ or ‘efficiently’ through ideas of autonomy, but also in terms of a comfortable setting or personalised structure in order to get the most done or the best of their work done.

Two registers of productivity

Kathi Weeks (2011) emphasises that the labour, anti-racist, and feminist movements have challenged the idea of the Protestant work ethic by including new population groups in the narrative. Nevertheless, it has been done by reinforcing the centrality of work in claiming the group’s value as a productive member of society through its relation to the legitimising ethic of work. In the same way as work ethic, the term ‘productivity’ changes depending on the context. Ethnographies of the transformation of the post-socialist workplaces to capitalism are a good illustration of the variations in the moral basis of productivity. Müller (2004) has demonstrated different understandings of productivity in socialist and capitalist factories in East and West Germany in the 1990s. Müller shows how in Western capitalist firms, productivity meant extracting the maximum from the workers for a minimal salary in order to make a profit. In the socialist factory, labour productivity had been an objective too, a scientifically determined (Taylorist) category with a strong moral base. In socialism, the increase in productivity was seen as a political act, made possible by the contribution of workers through the improvement of technology.

Digital nomads mostly talk about productivity in relation to their autonomy regarding time, as described above, but sometimes slip into a different register that incorporates them into the dominant work-productivity ethic. In the conversations with my research participants, we often caught ourselves discussing the uneasiness that we had about being seen as lazy. The discomfort of not fitting the role of a hard-working neoliberal was often experienced in interactions with parents or peers left behind in the nomads’ former hometowns, and led the remote workers to the discourse around the justification of their approach to work.

By the beginning of June, some restrictions were lifted, which allowed Pascal to organise sharing circles where nomads could talk about their challenges, fears, and dreams in a confidential and supportive atmosphere. This is where I met Jon, an American who had let go of his secure job and comfortable small-town life, and sold his house to pursue a digital nomad dream. Jon was living in Palm Bliss, one of Pascal’s co-living and co-working venues, where we met up a few days later, sitting outside next to a fan, gazing at the blue sea, as it was still not allowed to gather indoors due to Covid restrictions. We were talking about his ordinary day. Jon explained that his mornings were free and the evenings occupied with teaching. Besides swimming, reading the news, getting groceries, and driving around the island, Jon described how he takes naps during the day. As a firm believer in the importance of being able to nap in the middle of the day, I endorsed it. Jon who had earlier described that his family did not understand his lifestyle, started to justify his routine.

Some people in certain cultures would view taking an afternoon nap as lazy. But if you read the science, it’s the opposite of lazy. If you take a 30-minute afternoon nap, all the science says you’ll be more productive for the rest of the day. I know a lot of people back in the States would just say, oh, that’s so lazy. You’re taking a nap during the day.

While talking about naps as productive can be seen as another example of nomads’ obsession with productivity as mentioned in earlier literature, I would emphasise another aspect that was important in this conversation – the difficulty of leaving behind the dominant values of hard work and presenting oneself in a guilt-free manner as a person who works fewer hours. Slipping back into the discourse of ‘productivity as hard work’ was a common theme: in their public talks and posts digital nomads often emphasised that the lifestyle does not consist of sipping cocktails on the beach but requires a strong work ethic and self-discipline. While this is undoubtedly true, such remarks can be read as a sign of uneasiness about being accepted into mainstream society if they are seen as not working hard. In several conversations people confessed their anxiety about being labelled lazy. Katya, who was not able to work according to the eight-hour schedule considered the norm by her German clients, confessed that she often wondered if she was lazy. She said that she had to remind herself that not sitting in the office did not make her a lazy person. Furthermore, she was trying to be cautious and not take on too many projects, keeping in mind that ‘it’s social conditioning that I’m thinking, oh, I have to be productive, I have to work, that I’m lazy if I’m not sitting in front of my computer or if I’m not working on some project.’ Katya was reflexive about her own practices, reminding herself why she had chosen this lifestyle in the first place.

There is an important distinction around registers of ‘productivity’ here. On the one hand was the nomads’ subcultural language of productivity hacks, working when it is their time to shine and then taking time off, and on the other how the nomads thought that mainstream society understood productivity – as synonymous with ‘hard work’ and the ‘Protestant work ethic’, as represented by Pascal. While creating a life where he had plenty of free time, Jon was still feeling the need to justify rest and leisure activities and argue that they were productive. This is because nomads saw that the hegemonic understanding of productiveness was sitting at a desk for long hours, being a ‘hard worker’. The guilt, and the need to justify an unusual lifestyle, was common, and that was what made the nomad community sharing circles so important and the Covid time so lonely. Among peers, free time was acceptable and did not have to be productive: when I went over to Katya’s bungalow in the mornings to ask her to open her window to hear her singing spiritual songs on her guitar, she never claimed that her singing was making her more productive, challenging the model of the neoliberal person who is constantly aiming for self-improvement. As our conversation in Palm Bliss continued, it was clear that Jon knew that his naps were acceptable, but even he sometimes had to justify them with science to his peers back in the USA. In the world of digital nomads, naps, and singing, were what Gorz (1989) describes as autonomous activities: actions which are performed as ends in themselves. I would propose that the naps of digital nomads can be seen as attempts to exercise more autonomy in their own life and work and start distancing themselves from the unquestionability of the predominant work ethic. In the same way, as there was a slippage between talking about working fewer hours and the reality when the pandemic started, there is sometimes a slippage between the different registers of productivity.

Conclusion

As my research continues in other digital nomad hubs around the world and as remote work is becoming increasingly common, I have encountered precarious nomads, those (unhappily) working 60 hours a week, or those who introduce themselves as ‘normal business owners’. But my research at the particular time of the first wave of the pandemic, among remote workers with established careers or in career transition, can point to some new and some old and forgotten ways of critiquing the all-encompassing centrality of work in capitalist society. Following Frayne (2015) and Weeks (2011), the aim of this research is not to renounce labour completely, but rather to question the ideology of work as the highest calling and moral duty, the centre of social life and meaning.

I point to the importance of shifting values and morals by studying self-reflexive individuals who want to make something meaningful out of their life in the circumstances that in which they are placed. In my earlier research in heavy industry, work enriched lives with meaning and social relations, but also signified precarity, social decline and health issues, suffering, injustice, and death (Kesküla, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c). In that research, the main way for workers to keep their dignity and resist was by critiquing their social conditions at the kitchen table. It is indeed due to the more privileged status of the digital nomads compared to Kazakhstani coal miners that they can move beyond the kitchen-critique of work and aim to create a new way of living, however temporary and individualistic. So, in the ongoing research, I have tried to critique the capitalist obsession with work through how people are trying to organise their lives in the way that they consider best. Their aspirations, ideals, and utopias allow a relevant and hopeful critique of the current state of the centrality of work ethic to be built.

Weeks (2011: 176) sees utopianism as a distinct mode of thought and practice. She believes that utopias, as modes of affirmation, change our relationship towards the future, while the critique of the present – a negation – creates estrangement from the current situation. Utopianism allows the present to be relativised as a product of human history and thereby opens possibilities for a different future, distancing us from the ‘common sense’ of the narrow orbit of political possibilities in the present (Weeks, 2011: 205). Looking at alternative ways of living that appear strange is a way of making ourselves strange and therefore questioning our own current practices. She proposes ‘life’ as a possible counterpoint to work, in the sense of a full life, filled with qualities that we might strive towards, pointing to the future. For Weeks, this allows speculation as to what post-work life might be. Getting a life, as a political project, refuses the existing world of work that is given to us and also demands alternatives. As an anthropologist, my aim has been to find the people ‘getting a life’ through ethnographic fieldwork, and to show that alternative practices and discourses about work are worth exploring in all their fragility, as I saw them – attempting to let go of the dominant work ethic, sometimes being pulled back to it for practical or moral reasons, and then attempting again. Even if working fewer hours is currently a marginal practice, these insights can feed into a wider political project of questioning the current work practices and ethic.

Location-independent work is becoming increasingly common due to Covid, and some of the questions and practices that I describe in this ethnography become relevant beyond the small middle-class subculture of digital worker-travellers. Instead, they point to larger questions about how work should be organised and the potential of increased (digital) worker autonomy as a result of the current spatial and temporal reorganisation of labour. While Mancinelli’s (2020) claim about digital nomadism as an individualistic and opportunistic strategy is still a strong one, and it is unrealistic to talk about the refusal of work here in collective and political terms, paying attention to such new forms of reorganising living allows discussions for alternative ways of working, different ways of creating lives and communities.