19. The myth of location independence, inter-being and reciprocal responsibility

The promise of location independence has become the holy grail of entrepreneurial success. But what if our obsession with unlimited mobility is actually disconnecting us from something essential? This episode explores the spiritual and ethical implications of the "work from anywhere" dream.

Listen to hear more about:

• Why the fantasy of complete geographic freedom might be rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of human interconnectedness
• The hidden army of rooted workers whose place-based labor makes your mobility possible — and what happens when we ignore this reality
• How the idealization of the "location independent" lifestyle is based on a hierarchy created by the privilege of some that excludes others
• Indigenous wisdom about reciprocal responsibility and "honorable harvest" that can transform how we approach any new place
• The paradox of freedom that comes from commitment vs. the absence of it

We all need both wings and roots.You'll discover a framework for conscious mobility that honors both your desire for autonomy and your responsibility to the communities that sustain you — whether you stay put in one place, or travel the world.

Transcript

Let’s talk about something that’s been glorified across social media and normalized in countless marketing campaigns for online business courses: the idea of location independence and freedom from being tied down to a place as the ultimate ideal.

You know the images — entrepreneurs working from exotic beaches and cafes in Bali and mountain retreats, totally free from geographic constraints. It's very compelling to a lot of people. 

But is that something we should all want?

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to dismiss or criticize the idea entirely. It can be the right choice for many people and their families. But I want to:

• consider what might be lost in pursuing the kind of mobility that comes without any boundaries
• ask deeper questions about what it means to have a relationship with a place and a community
• explore, when we are mobile, whose rootedness makes our mobility possible: In other words, who has to be rooted so that some of us have the freedom to move around? (Because, when only some of us are free, and that requires others to be unfree, then in the end, none of us is free)

It's not just about the impact of the mobility of a select few people on other people; it's also about the impact on ourselves. It’s probably fair to say that all healthy human beings have a drive towards freedom, but at the same time, all healthy human beings also have a drive towards being rooted, towards belonging, towards connection.

I want to share with you a quote from one of my all-time favorite novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. It's a meditation on lightness versus heaviness, which is one of the themes of the novel. I thought of this quote because I think seeking “independence” is about seeking lightness. 

Here's what Kundera writes (apologize in advance for the heteronormativity, but this book comes from a particular time and place): 

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously the image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Let me start by acknowledging why location independence is so appealing to so many of us. The freedom to work from anywhere, the ability to travel while maintaining income, escaping harsh weather, exploring new cultures — these are real benefits that many of us in online business have experienced or aspire to.

I've had my own taste of this. I've been extremely fortunate to be able to live and travel in many countries, and I have learned so much from these experiences. They really made me the person that I am. They gave me countless friendships and lessons that I treasure to this day. 

But here's where the narrative starts to break down if one insists that being free of being rooted to a place is the ultimate pinnacle of entrepreneurial achievement… if we believe that remaining rooted in one community or having life circumstances that require you to stay put somehow makes you less successful, like your lifestyle is less desirable, less glamorous, less fulfilled, less “free”. 

I think this idea comes from a spiritual disconnect.

It's a sense that we can somehow transcend our connectedness. It echoes what the great Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh called the illusion of separateness — the mistaken belief that we can exist independently of our relationships. 

Thich Nhat Hanh often used the example of a flower to illustrate what he called “interbeing”, which sounds simple, but the more you meditate on it, the more profound and powerful this idea becomes.

When we look at a flower, we see the flower, but actually we see everything that's not the flower. We see the entire universe that made its existence possible. We see the soil that fed the flower. We see the rain that nourished it. We see the sun that gave it energy. We see the gardener who tended it, even the compost of countless previous generations of other beings that enriched the earth. 

The flower cannot exist at all independently of everything else. The flower is made entirely of non-flower elements. There is no flower without all that which is not the flower. 

You are like that flower and so am I.

Our existence is woven from countless threads of connection: the communities that shaped us, the places that formed our understanding of home and belonging, the local ecosystems that we depend on, the network of care and relationship that sustain us.

To believe that we can simply uproot ourselves without consequence, floating freely from place to place, is to misunderstand the nature of our being. We carry our inter-being with us, and when we try to ignore or deny that, we likely end up creating suffering for ourselves and others.

What if true freedom comes from understanding and honoring our inter-being, and the responsibilities that come with that??

Even as I record this, which I could technically do from anywhere — Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok, the North Pole — I'm completely dependent on countless people who are tethered to specific locations. 

• I need farmers to grow the food that I need to live. Those farmers need to be in one place tending to their crops. 
• I need healthcare workers to stay in one place to staff local clinics and hospitals. 
• I need civil workers to keep the infrastructure of the society that I'm inhabiting working so that I can go about my business as usual, safely, and without disruptions. 
• I need scientific researchers to be in their labs doing their research and staying put there so that they can study treatments for conditions I might face later.
• Even the internet, which allows many of us to work from anywhere, requires physical infrastructure and physical energy, which must be supplied and maintained by humans who are affixed to a place. 

There's no such thing as transcending the need for place-based work and place-based communities. When you think you've transcended it, you haven’t; you're simply outsourcing that need to others, those labor you depend on.

There's also the question of privilege. The ability to be location independent isn't equally available to all, even if everyone wanted it. 

It often requires economic resources, passport privileges (which I think not enough people talk about—not everyone has equal access to all places), currency privileges (some people have access to currencies that give them access to a lot more places than others), certain family structures, health statuses, and abled-body status that many people don't have. 

When we present this lifestyle as the pinnacle of entrepreneurial achievement, we're creating a value system that privileges certain types of people, where these very systems of privilege were created by centuries of systemic oppression, and extraction.

Now let's talk about what it costs us on a personal level to be striving towards constant mobility. This is the part that rarely makes it into the carefully curated Instagram posts — the part that touches on our deepest human needs for meaning and connection that has to be offline.

We humans need deep, sustained, offline connection. We need to be known as our physical selves. We need to be touched as our physical selves. A lack of touch is considered a form of torture for children, and it's not too different for adults. 

While technology helps us maintain connections across distances, there's something irreplaceable about physical connection: showing up consistently in the same place with the same people, breaking bread with those same people, tending to the same place with those people, breathing the same air with them, and being liable to the consequences of what happens to a place with the same group of people.

I was on a trip recently to Hawaii and was lucky enough to learn from an indigenous Hawaiian teacher who taught us about a concept called kuleana. While I do not speak Hawaiian nor am I Hawaiian, my best understanding of this idea is that it can be translated to a kind of reciprocal responsibility. We all have responsibilities that come with our privileges. For all that we're given, we have obligations to care for place and community. 

When we reduce place to merely a backdrop for our laptop — somewhere with good wifi and a picturesque view and a “high livability index” according to some Western media outlet — we risk commodifying not just locations, but the people and other beings that inhabit them. We become consumers and extractors of place rather than active, responsible and reciprocal participants in it. We have stepped out of kuleana. 

So what's the alternative? I'm not suggesting that we all abandon location independence and stay in one place forever. I'm not saying that we all return to purely local economies. That's not necessarily realistic, or desirable. 

The connectivity that the internet provides can be an immense advantage. It is a tool. But I'm advocating for a more conscious, intentional, and integrated approach; one that honors both the freedom that technology affords us and the ethical spiritual responsibilities to the inter-being, the communities that sustain us.

What might that look like? 

Now, before I jump into sharing concrete suggestions for action, let us first consider the teachings of Robin Wall Kimmerer, who's a scientist, teacher, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and author of the widely acclaimed book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. 

She shares with us a concept called the Honorable Harvest. This is something that I recognize in my own indigenous Korean tradition as well as what I've learned from Hawaiian culture. But these are her words describing what an “honorable harvest” is in her Potawatomi tradition:

Ask permission of the ones whose lives you seek. Abide by the answer. Never take the first, never take the last. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.Take only what you need and leave some for others. Use everything that you take. Take only that which is given to you. Share it as the earth has shared it with you. Be grateful. Reciprocate the gift. Sustain the one who sustains you and the earth will last forever.

On the surface, we can think “harvesting” applies to plants and food. But, if you think about it, that's not the only thing we harvest. We also harvest energy. We harvest ideas. We harvest the benefits of other people's labor, other people's goodwill, other people's hospitality. We harvest opportunities and advantages. 

Now, with the idea of “honorable harvest” in mind, let me also offer some concrete steps you can take to align our relationship to place and communities. I know many people are very active in this work already, so please take this as being more of a beginner’s guide for those who are wondering how to balance their desire for travel and exploration with responsibility to interconnected communities as you pursue your online business journey. 

First, practice recognition. Take a moment to identify three people whose rootedness makes your current level of mobility or location independence possible — whether you mostly stay in one place, or are always on the move.

Maybe it's the farmers who grow your food, the healthcare workers who reside in the area or areas that you are in, or even the people maintaining the internet infrastructure you depend on. 

Think specifically about their role. Feel genuine gratitude for their commitment to place. If it is appropriate or possible, reach out to them in person, or in writing, and tell them: thank you. 

Second, choose one small and concrete act of reciprocity this month that goes beyond just words. This could be supporting a local business instead of ordering from Amazon, volunteering a few hours of your skills to a community project, attending a town hall meeting, or participating in local environmental stewardship.

The key is that it's something the community defines as valuable, not just what feels good to you. If you're not sure what that is, start by doing your homework. Research local issues, read community newsletters, attend public meetings, and learn about ongoing challenges and initiatives. Put in the labor to understand the context before reaching out and asking: “hey, what do you think is valuable?”

Then, when you do connect with local organizations, community centers, or mutual aid groups, you can ask informed questions about how to contribute meaningfully. Listen to community members about their priorities rather than assuming you know what's helpful. Sometimes the most valuable contribution isn't having an extraordinary amount of resources or specialized skills — it might be showing up for mundane but necessary work, or simply being present, caring, and building relationships over time.

Third, if you want to relocate somewhere new, if you want to travel, or if you are living in a land that is not your home, honor those who are already there by examining the impact of your presence there.

This means going beyond just acknowledging that you're on a land that is not your home. 

Start by learning whose traditional territory you're on — not just the name, but the ongoing story. What happened to these peoples? What struggles do they face today? What are their current priorities and needs?

Consider the practical impact of your presence. Are you contributing to gentrification that displaces indigenous or long-term communities? Are you consuming resources in ways that strain local systems? How might your mobility affect housing costs, water usage, or cultural spaces?

Look for ways to support indigenous-led organizations and initiatives rather than just learning some things so you can just “feel” informed. Knowledge is not enough; it must be backed up by action. There is no need to get everything perfect, but that does not let us off the hook from being complacent either.

This might mean financial contributions, purchasing from indigenous businesses, supporting land back movements, or amplifying indigenous voices in your networks.

And recognize that if you're living as a non-indigenous person on indigenous land — which so many of us are — this isn't a one-time consideration. It's an ongoing relationship that requires continued learning, humility, and action.

Please remember, the idea is never to feel guilty about the unearned advantages and freedoms that you enjoy, but to approach them with awareness, gratitude, and reciprocal responsibility.

It's a profound and beautiful paradox that real freedom often comes through commitment, not the absence of it. 

Choosing to invest deeply in specific places and communities — touching others’ lives physically, and letting them touch us — even as we expand the reach of our creative work globally, we may discover a richer sense of purpose and belonging than unlimited, digitally-enabled mobility can provide.

I truly believe that doing so is going to enrich our work, enrich our creativity, enrich our wellbeing, and enrich our businesses in the long run—not to mention, enrich the generations that come after us.

That’s it for today. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving the podcast a 5-star review.

I’m Simone Seol, and I’ll talk to you next time. Bye.