Do You Want to Work In Paradise? Telecommuting is Breeding a New Way to Live Life

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It’s no secret that in the digital age we live in, the world is becoming a smaller place. One of the biggest perks of these changes for the everyday person is that the ability to work from home has never been any easier, convenient, or generally encouraged by many employers. As Wired pointed out in a recent piece, telecommuting doesn’t even necessarily have to mean strictly working from home anymore. Today, people such as freelancers can do their job while traveling the world.

One of the examples the Wired story gives is Jay Meistrich, founder of the to-do list startup Moo.do. While staying in the Philippines island of Boracay, allegedly focusing on work, he noticed an Instagram photo go up of some friends in the capital city of Manilla whom he had planned to meet up with. Despite the fact that he had totally spaced on the impromptu rendezvous, Meistrich was able to extend his stay and still get the work he needed to do done.

He’s basically spent the last two years of his life following this lifestyle, a term many have taken to calling “digital nomadism.” As the name implies, it’s a term used to describe this new generation of workers, largely in spaces like tech/knowledge/freelance, who toes the line between work and vacation by making a living on the move.

Instead of being confined in a stuffy office five days a week, these people take the opportunity to see the world while still performing their presumably more mundane tasks.

Overall, 50% of the American workforce that can support at least some form of telecommuting, according to an analysis of census data from Global Workplace Analytics. Equipped with a solid WiFi connection and enough megahertz (a data communications term used in describing the speed of data transfer in megabits per second), virtually anyone with a job that can be done remotely could take advantage of this new kind of lifestyle.

As the prevalence of these type of jobs continues to increase it’s likely that more and more people, especially Millennials, will be drawn to this new-age nomadic work model. Last year there were even organized conferences for digital nomads in cities like Berlin.

“It’s just within the past year that we’ve found out there are other people like us,” Meistrich said.

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