Same, Same, But Different

You’re reading an excerpt from Global Natives: The New Frontiers of Work, Travel, and Innovation, a guide to digital nomads and the work-from-anywhere movement, by Lauren Razavi. Purchase the book for instant digital access.

An interest in the exotic has always underpinned tourism. Beginning in the 17th century, graduates of England’s elite Oxford and Cambridge universities embarked on grand tours of Europe. They’d trek through France and Italy to experience the “otherness” of foreign cultures, visit famous monuments, and eat unfamiliar, potentially toxic foods like pasta and focaccia bread. The strangeness of these places and the experiences they offered made the journey a key rite of passage for the English gentry. In the 1800s, as railways and steamships expanded travel, the availability and ambition of these grand tours increased alongside. Americans flocked to the museums and art galleries of the Old World, and Europeans vacationed further afield in the colonial outposts of Asia and Africa.

But as more people visited places that were previously only knowable from books, questions arose about the “authenticity” of their travel experiences. In E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, published in 1924, the protagonist is perpetually disappointed to discover that life in the East was not too dissimilar to life back home in England. She laments afternoons of tea with scones and evenings of tedious networking drinks. Where was the real India?

Today, the desire to see the “real” culture will be familiar to anybody who has visited Egypt’s Pyramids—located opposite Pizza Hut’s Giza outlet—or tripped over the Starbucks coffee cups littering the Great Wall of China. Modern package holidays, luxury cruises, and all-inclusive resorts have dominated leisure travel for decades, streamlining the delivery of exotic experiences to be efficient, predictable, safe, photogenic, and profitable. The sights, trinkets, and stories may change, but the role of “tourist” remains largely the same whether you’re visiting Hagia Sophia in Istanbul or Chichen Itza in Mexico’s Yucatán region. Globalization can make everywhere start to feel the same.

For cities and countries keen to attract and accommodate nomads, the economic appeal can be a similarly homogenizing force. While tourism has led to thousands of McDonald’s and Starbucks outlets and Ramadas by Wyndham in every country on earth, the knowledge economy has its own globally recognizable aesthetic: exposed brick, tables made from reclaimed wood, and plants galore. Its venues are often set in converted warehouses and sell things like Gesha coffee beans from Ethiopia and Danish open sandwiches (which serious-looking men with mustaches will inform you are called smørrebrød). Other menu items may include Australian brunch dishes, Panko-fried Japanese chicken burgers, and American grilled cheese sandwiches. There’ll be either Oatly (from Sweden) or Minor Figures (from the UK) for the vegan lattes. No, they intentionally don’t sell any Coca-Cola products, and they think it’s weird that you asked.

Spaces like this can be found in cities as impoverished as Jaipur and as affluent as Singapore. Increasingly, there are recognizable spaces for “globals” in towns and cities everywhere. I’ve seen plenty of them on my travels: in Paris, Casablanca, Hanoi, Melbourne, Hong Kong, and many other towns and cities that most people couldn’t point to on a map. The city, language, and local customs out on the street may change, but there is a comforting consistency when seated at a cafe table or bar stool that could be anywhere—with so much to discover, familiar surroundings can help travelers feel grounded in faraway places. And the benefits of these global spaces go beyond individual comfort, they also facilitate crucial connections between and among travelers and locals.

Global spaces are like the offline version of internet meet-ups. They can bring people together based on shared interests, shared questions, shared values, shared projects, and shared dreams. The internet allows us to see other cities, cultures, aesthetics, ways of life from afar, and compels us to try them for ourselves. One way to do that is to travel; the other is for that idea to travel to you. For people living far away from big cities, global spaces facilitate membership in a global community, and connection to the world beyond the narrow boundaries of their homes.

But what about the local spaces, the ones that make a place stand out from the rest? Global spaces provide familiarity and comfort, but that’s not what nomads travel for. Like Forster, they go to experience the difference.

Increasingly, local spaces like street food stands and arts venues attract travelers from all over the world, and these also represent the new era of global culture. With increased global mobility, local cultures can have more of a global resonance. As we explored in Part V: Nomad Hubs, there are now fewer incentives for remote workers to live in major world cities, and compelling reasons for them to consider small towns, second-tier cities, and nomadic travel instead. But the appeal of a place has always been about more than just the job opportunities and office buildings. People go in search of the lifestyles and cultures they’ve encountered on TV and in movies, and increasingly, through the lens of their smartphones and laptop screens.

Does this mean people flock to the newest viral location, overwhelming the locals in order to post the same Instagram photo over and over again? Of course. But the internet also connects local places to the global stage and unlocks new forms of participation in the global economy. Social media spreads local slang, recipes, traditions, and other cultural quirks worldwide. The internet moves local cultures from the ground to the cloud, providing an international platform for them. A Mexican burrito stand or Singaporean cafe can attract visitors from afar and stay in touch with them after they’re gone. Local brands can sell products online to build their global presence, and leverage the content machine to educate far-flung readers about their neighborhood, region, or community. Critics lament a flattening of local culture, but the culture symbolized by nomads and made possible by the internet is one that elevates and celebrates difference.

What nomads want is both global spaces and local places, and to be part of an exchange between the local and the global. As nomads travel, they spread the culture they’ve experienced elsewhere, whether that’s in their countries of origin or the other places they’ve spent time. But they also spread their own culture, a culture that defines what it means to live a borderless life and still feel like you belong in the world. In the same way countries engage in cultural exchange to spread the customs and knowledge of a nation, a fast-emerging network of spaces is promoting the rituals and relationships of a global country.