Who Really Gets to Be a Digital Nomad? Class, visas, and the cost of freedom

The dream of working from anywhere sounds simple until you meet the real borders: income thresholds, visa hoops, trade rules, and algorithms that shrink your reach the moment you move. We unpack who truly gets to be a digital nomad and why mobility often functions like a privilege reserved for the well‑resourced, even as remote work has become normal for so many.

I walk through the post‑pandemic landscape—how outsourcing evolved, how Brexit narrowed options for UK workers, and why wages in essential roles often fail to match the cost of living. We get candid about platform friction: location‑sensitive feeds, flagged VPNs, and commerce policies that block you from selling to the very audience you built. From indie bands losing tours to last‑minute visa denials to creators seeing income dip after crossing a border, these stori

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Nomad Spark
• 0:25 Pandemic Remote Promise
• 1:08 Access & Class Barriers
• 2:05 EU, Brexit, and Work Hopes
• 3:00 Outsourcing Then and Now
• 4:11 Wages, Cost of Living, Reality
• 5:00 Overwork, Side Jobs, Survival
• 8:20 Algorithmic Friction to Mobility
• 10:45 Global Pull vs Local Control
• 12:20 Youth, Skills, and Mobility Paths
• 14:10 Travel Walls and Trade Rules
• 16:00 Touring, Visas, and Setbacks
• 17:20 Build Networks, Then Expand
• 19:20 Platform Localisation Limits
• 21:20 Post‑2020 Work Shifts

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hi there, welcome to Empowerment Diaries. This is Lita, Goddess of Growth. And I was just having a moment of reflection, so I thought I'd come on and uh record. How are you doing? Hope you're doing really well. Please do come in and connect. I'd love to see some comments at the end of the podcast. My thoughts were on the nomadic lifestyle. The pandemic encouraged businesses and countries, islands to start thinking about how one can work, be productive, and basically live anywhere and let's say everywhere. But it seems that this is an opportunity that's available mainly for the wealthy, mainly for those of us that are in the West or the West leaning. I was so happy to hear about the opportunity that Barbados had created encouraging nomads to spend a bit on a visa. They had to be on a minimum income and they could stay on the island for a year. My parents are of Jamaican descent, both born in Jamaica. I know I can easily, one thinks, get access to CARICOM, which facilitates travel around the island as a skilled citizen. It's just not been the path that I have managed to embark on as yet. It is in mind. We had the European Union, which was to encourage people in the UK to explore more opportunities. English being a very predominant language, maybe because of the Empire, colonialism and so on. I know that when us British travel, we often command that everyone speaks to us in English. So I can imagine that for many, especially in the working class, the idea of travelling abroad to work wasn't really high on any ranking. And I know there is this hope that local employers will employ plenty, and that was a subliminal message, I suppose, of Brexit. Stop the foreigners from coming in, there'll be more local jobs at home. But the reality is jobs started disappearing many, many, many, many, many decades ago. We're not even talking about the time of manufacturing, the time of steel, the time of all the Margaret Thatcher riots. I would say in my lifetime, a couple of riots were significant to highlight the despair at not having enough work opportunity for the working to middle class. The holes have never really been filled. We have pivoted quite a lot. A lot of businesses outsourced. Initially, when I was a child, the outsourcing would take place towards the north, Manchester, all the way up to Scotland. And then as we aged, outsourcing took place and was sent to India. I was reading this article about an employee in Chile who apparently was accidentally paid three hundred and thirty times his monthly salary. Apparently, he was taken to court, I suppose, to recoup the costs which was issued to him in error mistake. Apparently, his usual income is£386 a month. Now, when we're considering moving abroad, which I have considered a number of times, it can very be very difficult to understand what it is you earn locally and what it is that you can purchase with that income. And often when you're thinking about traveling to places like the Caribbean, you are thinking not about moving to work for someone, you're mostly thinking about how you can travel and take part in, participate in some level of self-employment, investment, and so you're looking for a different life, right? Because the reality is once you start working in the system, you earn you end up in the same situation close to broke. If you're not working for yourself or if you're not doing something creatively that makes sure that you always have something coming in. So we have£386 in Chile, and that is a month's work, months income. However, the majority of people I know tend to have land, tend to have property, even if it's a small space. London is a clear example where the footworkers are doing quite a lot of heavy work, manual work, carrying, cleaning, plumbing, electrics, all of that. And I know electricians they can get paid very well, actually. I'm talking about the core, the base, and a lot of them in this moment as I speak, in accommodation, probably one, two, let's say as a minimum, in a room, just attempting to make ends meet. I reflected on the article in my last podcast about the cleaner that was apparently dismissed from her role. Working 17 hours days, apparently, after 16 years she was found out as hiding the fact I suppose that she had two jobs. I questioned if the standard of her work wasn't great, because evidently for so many years she must have been doing a good job. And so what? If she's got the energy to do it, so what? Digital nomad, is this an opportunity for us all or only for the rich, the wealthy? I ask as even with social media, many occasion I heard people had lost access to their accounts, was getting their content suppressed because the algorithm was picking up that the person had traveled or moved location. It can be that sensitive, and that sensitivity can be the difference between you making an income today and losing your following tomorrow. Many of us are building a presence. We're thinking about how can we earn that's not reliant on an employer that has decided this is the salary and this is the best that you'll be able to earn, and this is what you'll be doing for the rest of the time that you are with us. So we're now branching out because of the cost living crisis, and also spiritually, mentally, we are evolving. Humanity has evolved. We want to do a bit more that relates to our creativity, our ability to connect with each other, our ability to travel. And the dichotomy of us being part of this global movement whilst having our politicians, our workplaces pull us back or attempt to to ensure that we're only focused on local. It's a pull and a tug ultimately that is going to have to allow us to move forward and connect. It really has to because there's no way otherwise. I say there's no way otherwise. I do not know how people will be able to house, clothe, and feed themselves if we continue on this trajectory. What needs to happen? Probably the ideas that were implemented in Scotland, in Ireland, where young people were encouraged to travel to America, to Australia, to other places, they would skill up locally, get educated locally and travel. Same with Cuba, Caribbean. The UK is not immune. There's many, they say, young people out of work. And the allure of temporary roles is not the same. Back a day, if you went and got yourself a temporary role, it was one to help you get experience, and you could more often than not rent accommodation and have a taste of what it was like to have a career as you found your way around the office or whatever job it is you chose to do. Today there's a huge balance between going to work and the value of doing so whilst you're progressing. Many are simply working just to pay for accommodation, and next month is the same again. No hope of home ownership if that's what they'd like to do, no hope of being able to save enough to travel to go anywhere. And in this global economy that we are all benefiting from, we have countries preventing us from traveling. No more European Union, and from what I can see with the US, there's a lot of people being booted out and prevented from coming in. And then, of course, we have migration, forced migration, migration by choice, digital nomad. Is it for you? Is it for me? Now I do not say don't build, but when you're thinking about building your platform, your presence, your brand, it is important to think about the political environment, the economical environment. My time on social media taught me that I could have connections, make friends with people from all other areas and parts of the world. However, in the space that I was in, I was unable to sell anything to them because apparently the trade laws prevented. So we've got barriers according to trade laws. Politicians have their ideas as to who should be communicating with each other, how data should be controlled. So you're thinking about traveling with your concept, your creative idea, your artistry, and we understand that there's a lot of work that happens before we present ourselves and move to a different location, a different country. In fact, I saw another article about an indie group. Apparently, they had done all the work that they needed to do to get ready to tour to the US and Canada, and last moment their visa application was rejected. This is the sign of the times, actually. So what are we being reminded to build? We're being reminded to go back to basics and build a foundation, and we're being reminded that for us to progress, we do need to make sure that our network is tight, and then whilst we make sure our network is tight, we need to then make sure that our network facilitates growth, and as we make sure the network facilitates growth, and this network spreads, we hope, to a global sphere, we also need to understand what the challenges are for us to trade and share ideas and connect as a working class, middle class, upper middle class entity person. Because if you don't have the wealth to take you from one country to the next, it's likely that the freedom of movement that the wealthy experience, we will never achieve, we will never experience. We then have if you have the opportunity to travel, you'll go to an island or a country, and in that space where the social media is, that platform is operating, you're then only going to see your local environment because they match you according to your IP, your VPN, or block you if you have a VPN. They want to know where you're located so they can send you the commercial products that's in your local vicinity. That makes sense, right? So you've joined to expand your world, expand your opportunity, social connection, but ultimately what you're getting is more local connection, whether it be your local residence or a perceived idea as to your cultural connection. We are here to grow, and ultimately the progression that we're here to have cannot be stopped by individual companies that have not quite worked out how to get their algorithms to move, how human beings move around the world. The pandemic was one shock. I suspect there will be others. In the meantime, we as individuals need to prepare ourselves because what wasn't possible before 2020, working from home full-time for an employer for the majority of us has become possible. And yes, there has been a pullback to the office environment, and for those that can't do anything else, have no idea on how to do anything else, that will happen. There will be some that feel really bruised with this idea of working for next to nothing and being able to achieve next to nothing on the income being received. That will be doing as I do, spending time to create sovereignty, spending time to tap into their artistry so that what they're doing is supplementing their income so that they are in the best space and place to explore horizons, and many will be leaving their local environment, many will be traveling, and I suspect the focus on keeping in a little box on social media at that point will then dissipate. Digital nomad is part of it. We need to be in a position where we can travel wherever our desires take us. It's unfortunate, those taking the highest risks at the moment are those that appear to be the poorest because opportunities were removed from the lands that they've been escaping from. Rich lands that the rest of the world appear to be benefiting from and prospering from. So that was my reflection. I thank you for tuning in. Let me know are you working on your nomadic lifestyle? It doesn't have to be a digital role. There might be something that you're doing creatively, maybe you're opening a retreat or thinking of doing so. Are you on social media? How are you building your foundation so if you had to leave and travel, you could do so easily, and your business, your brand could travel with you? Have you thought about how it is your brand, your business, your service will be able to move from your locality to another town nationally, internationally? Social media was to make it easier. Now we need to think strategically. Thank you for joining me.