The illusion of the digital nomad
The very first time I realized that travel could be a lifestyle, not just a luxury for the hyper-wealthy was back in 2019. I stumbled upon the term “digital nomad.”
Suddenly, my screen was flooded with images and videos of people traveling the world, actually….white people.
They were backpacking through lush green landscapes like Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, or hopping across cheap European destinations like Greece, Albania or exploring the deserts of Morocco, meeting fellow travelers, and living what looked like a completely magical existence…well, even if their day-to-day reality had its own dull moments, to me, looking from the outside, it was pure magic.
In those moments of obsessively clutching at every travel video, I knew what I wanted to be. A Digital Nomad. I didn’t just want to become a digital nomad; in my mind, I was already one.
All I needed was a passport and a flight ticket to prove it.
I became utterly fascinated with maps. I bought maps of different continents, tracing lines, pinning the exact places I wanted to visit, and mapping out a grand strategy.
Using Workaway, a travel website to find HomeStays, so I could travel for cheap and not pay for accommodations. I told myself that within the next year, I would finally be out of Nigeria.
The Reality of Traveling as a Nigerian
How myopic I was. A travel-sick 24 year old girl. It was a daydream completely detached from the reality of the society I lived in.
Do you know how Nigerians travel? We don’t travel for leisure. Except for the top 1% of the ultra-wealthy, Nigerians do not travel to sightsee.
We travel to run, to escape a crisis, to Japa!
Our people travel for greener pastures, to work, to grind under back-breaking conditions.
We don’t travel to find ourselves, to explore, to discover—we travel to survive.
The Financial Disconnect
I quickly noticed a massive disconnect. Most of those Western digital nomads could afford to pack their bags and leave their countries using savings from their standard nine-to-five jobs or small side businesses.
Meanwhile, my nine-to-five in 2019 couldn’t even feed me for a full month, let alone purchase a one-way plane ticket to Bangkok. It was a statistical impossibility.
Desperate to break out of the trap, I quit that poor job which paid me less than $20 a month and decided to become a scriptwriter. I threw myself into writing movie scripts for Nollywood, thinking this creative path would give me financial freedom.
Instead, I fell into an even deeper rabbit hole. Even with my writing, I quickly realized I couldn’t afford a basic flight ticket to Ghana, our closest West African neighbor, or basic road trips to nearby African countries.
Embracing the “Local” Digital Nomad Lifestyle
Yet, in my mind, I was a digital nomad—well, a local digital nomad. And I can prove it because the last five years of being a goddamn scriptwriter, I didn’t do it being stationary in Lagos.
I took my laptop with me and travelled to serene villages.
One month hiking in the hilly village of Enugu, six months living in the bustling city of Osogbo, three months living in Agbor, four months here, five months there—on and on I went living in villages in complete isolation and solitude for four or five years.
I was a local digital nomad. I needed to do it, otherwise my mind would drown in the misery of a mundane life.
Now nearing 30, where my mates are all hoping to settle down, I find I am not interested in the ropes of marriage and children. I just want to travel!
The Myth of Traveling with “Zero” Money
I began aggressively searching for loops, typing queries into YouTube on how to travel the world cheaply, or how to travel with zero money. I watched dozens of videos detailing step-by-step guides on how to see the globe on a penniless budget.
But when I broke those videos down to their absolute nitty-gritty, the truth hit me like a slap in the face.
The people making those videos do not live in my reality. They are operating from a high pedestal that an African living in Nigeria cannot touch. What gives them that massive leverage isn’t their bravery or their packing skills.
If you talk about brave, come and be a local nomad traveling the unsafe roads of Nigeria into an even more unsafe remote village where you could be snatched up by kidnappers in your sleep. But I did it. Why? The adrenaline of doing something careless and adventurous!
How are these people able to make videos that say “Travel Without Money?”
This is why: they have the raw, unadulterated power of the US Dollar, backed by a powerful international passport.
The Privilege of “Zero” Dollars
Let’s start with the financial side. When a Western creator says, “I left my country with no money in my pocket, now I live in Thailand,” you have to look closer at their definition of “no money.”
Usually, it means they left with a “small” safety net of about $5,000. To them, that’s broke. But they take that $5,000 to a country with a weak currency where that money can easily stretch and sustain them for two solid years.
For a Nigerian earning in Naira, saving $1,000 a year from a local salary is a pipe dream. To save $1,000, it means you have to not exist. And to not exist, it means you have to not eat, not pay rent, and not buy clothes.
You would literally have to starve yourself to death to have $1,000 in twelve months. And guess what? A single flight ticket out of Nigeria can easily cost $1,000.
So before I even leave my doorstep, my entire life savings are wiped out just by the airline ticket. Do I sleep on the streets when I get to Ho Chi Minh? How do I afford basic survival in the next country?
And oh, a digital nomad cannot stay stationary; the lifestyle requires constant movement, which means recurring flight expenses. How do you fund that from a baseline of zero?
The Reality of Remote Work Online
The video gurus always have a quick fix for this: “Just look for remote jobs online!”
I tried that route too. I hopped on platforms like Upwork to see if I could tap into that global dollar power.
But international remote platforms rarely hire Nigerians unless you possess some hyper-specialized, elite tech skill. And let’s be completely honest, I didn’t have that. The only thing I knew how to do was write.
In the digital market, writers are like soldier ants. We are everywhere, crawling in every single nook and cranny of the internet. It isn’t a rare, high-demand skill that makes clients scramble for your services.
Trying to land a high-paying dollar gig as a Nigerian writer online felt close to impossible. The only place my writing had any immediate value was the local Nollywood industry, which paid near-zero wages in heavily depreciated Naira.
The Content Creation Grind
Then comes the final piece of advice from the travel influencers: “Break free from the system and start creating content! Build a YouTube channel and live off the internet!”
As if content creation is a casual walk in the park. They make it sound so seamless, but the reality is a brutal grind.
You can open a YouTube channel, pour your soul into it, and post consistently for two straight years without seeing a single dime of monetization. You keep uploading and uploading, watching your view count hit 15 views, 3 views, or 200 views if you’re lucky.
Breaking through the noise and making a living with your face on screen isn’t an automatic ticket out of poverty.
So, when you tell me, “just buy the ticket, just travel, just do it,” I have to ask a very real question:
How do you actually do that as a Nigerian? How do you travel the world with no money when you live in Lagos and earn less than $100 a month?
The Western creators don’t have an answer for that, because their advice was never built for an African passport.
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