I spent four months working from beaches, mountain towns, and borrowed flats across Europe. Everyone said that is 'living the dream'.
So why did I spend most of it feeling isolated and exhausted?
The High (Everyone Talks About This Part)
For the first month or two, it was everything I thought it would be.
Freedom to work anywhere. Midday swims. Sunlight through cafe windows. No fixed address, no commute, no office politics. Just me, a laptop, and wherever I decided to be that day.
It felt like winning.
The Flip (This is What They Don't Post)
Then it stopped feeling like freedom and started feeling like drift.
When every day is the same "work from anywhere" setup, you start craving the structure you spent years trying to escape. The flexibility becomes shapeless. There's no rhythm. No natural stopping point. No reason to close the laptop at 6pm because there's nothing waiting on the other side.
The hardest part wasn't the work. It was the nothing around the work.
No local friends. No cafe where anyone knows your name. No Friday drinks because everyone around you is a tourist passing through. Just you, your screen, and the constant low-level hum of being nowhere in particular.
I celebrated my 36th birthday in Crete while fighting for wifi. Everyone else was on holiday. I was just... there.
Job hunting at 33 degrees while surrounded by people actually enjoying paradise made the whole thing feel surreal. Not in a good way.
The Truth About Freedom
Here's what I actually learned after living both sides:
Remote work isn't the problem. Rootlessness is.
The Instagram version of digital nomad life is all sunsets and laptop-by-the-pool shots. The reality is loneliness that doesn't look dramatic enough to photograph. It's quiet isolation. It's your brain never switching off because there's no container to put work into.
Freedom without foundations just becomes drift.
I still believe in remote work. I just don't believe in living like a ghost anymore. The fantasy of "work from anywhere" sounds brilliant until you realise that "anywhere" quickly becomes "nowhere."
You need anchors. A stable flat. A consistent workspace. People who aren't just passing through. Weekends that actually feel different from weekdays.
The difference isn't the work. It's the life you build around it.
What I Chose Instead
I'm back in Reading now. New job, same laptop, but this time with structure.
Regular hours. A team. A rhythm that doesn't require constant reinvention. Travel will still happen - as breaks, not as a lifestyle.
Turns out freedom with roots hits harder than freedom without them.
I don't miss waking up in paradise and feeling nothing. I don't miss the performance of flexibility. I don't miss being always available because there's no boundary between work and life.
What I do miss? Absolutely nothing.
The Real Lesson
Remote works. Just don't forget to build a life around it.
Freedom isn't the absence of structure. It's choosing one that actually fits.
The rebellious move isn't rejecting stability. It's being honest enough to admit when the thing everyone romanticises isn't working for you.
I tested it. I learned what I needed. And I made a deliberate choice.
Now I'm building something that doesn't require living out of a suitcase to prove it's real.