I’ve noticed a trend lately within the travel blogger/lifestyle blogger arena: everyone seems to be heading towards an increasingly single vision.
It seems that just about every travel blogger and lifestyle blogger out there started out in the corporate world and then “came to their senses” and shifted over to their current, non-traditional lifestyle. They use the money they had from their previous job, plus money they make selling the stuff they have, in order to fund the beginning of their new life.
That’s all well and good, and very admirable, but what about those of us who saw through the corporate charade from the beginning and never joined corporate America or the Cult of Stuff in the first place? I honestly find very, very little advice out there for those of us who chose not to have a desk job, who chose not to acquire stuff, who chose to follow their dreams from the very beginning.
I was raised by two artists. Both of my parents have never had a desk job, and have always been the type to value experiences over “stuff”. These values were passed down to me from day one, and it has been great. I’ve never had trouble with choosing my own happiness over what the rest of the world seems to think I should be choosing. I spent a year living on the road, and a year living abroad. Sounds great, right? It is, but…
…nobody I talk to seems to be able to give me advice on how to start traveling again. Everybody’s immediate advice on blogs is the same old “quit your corporate job, use the money you saved through it, sell all the crap you acquired, and go!” adage that is becoming an increasingly single-path message on travel blogs. There’s a problem with applying this advice to me.
For starters, I don’t have a corporate job. I value my time over money (as most lifestyle designers do), and thus I work part time as a dog walker and I do writing, web design, photography, and other odd digital jobs on a freelance basis. I make about $1000 a month, which is pretty much just enough to pay for my part of our bills, and for me to pay my own bills. Sure, I could be earning more if I took a second job, or worked in an office environment, but…it seems silly to me to take on a job I would hate just so that I can “escape” it again a few months later.
As for the “stuff” part of the equation…I don’t have it. I donated about 70% of my belongings before I left for Korea, and I haven’t really acquired much since then. All of the belongings I have with me (meaning everything but the stuff from my childhood that is at my parents’ house) can fit into approximately 5 large plastic bins. Most of that is reenacting clothes (which I won’t ever get rid of, as it’s my main hobby), and the rest is a small closet’s worth of clothes, some books, a few toiletries, my digital supplies, and a few knickknacks. I don’t really buy much of anything these days unless it has a long-term use. All of our furniture is my boyfriend’s, since he is the one who prefers to have a home base. Most of what I own these days is not anything I really care to part with in a long term sense. So, the whole “raise money by selling stuff” advice doesn’t work for me because frankly, I have nothing to sell.
I’ll be honest: I sometimes almost feel like I have been punished for following my dreams from day one, rather than having an epiphany further down the road. When I talk to other travel/lifestyle bloggers about my life, I first get praise for my “understanding of the world”, but then I often get a confused or blank look when I ask them what I could be doing to further improve.
You can’t really expect people to provide advice on areas they have no experience with, but I feel that it’s a major failing of the travel blogging world that all the advice seems to be geared toward folks in a certain life situation, without providing much, if any, help for a wider range of potential travelers. This isn’t meant to be a “wah wah nobody helps me” post, it’s meant to be, hopefully, a wake-up call for those folks who are all writing the same material, and who don’t really have much to say to the world other than “do what I did”.
If you’re a travel blogger or lifestyle blogger, take a good, long look at your blog, and think critically about how wide of an audience your advice can actually help. How is your story different from the hundreds of other travel bloggers out there in the world, and how can those differences help a different niche of people? What are the limitations or strengths of your advice? Think about your message and how many people it can actually apply to. If your message is simply “do what I did”, then you might want to think about challenging yourself a bit as a blogger by thinking outside your own nomad box and writing about folks who may be in a different situation than you were once in.
Just some thoughts. Let me know how you feel about them.
This blog post is a response to comments on both my post "My Beef with Travel Bloggers" and Nomadic Read More
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P.S. You ARE being punished for following your dreams though! HA HA HA… My ongoing metaphor for my path is this- for some, God drew a straight line & said- “Just don’t fall of it & you’ll be fine”; for others (like myself), he drew a dot & said “Now find your way from there!”
@GRRRL TRAVELER: “My Korea EFL teaching choice puts me in my 1st “9-5 employee/non-gig situation” in… well, I think it’s actually my “1st” & that idea alone inspires stress for me.”
I was in the same situation in Korea – though I had worked before it was the first job I had that in any way resembled a traditional 9-5.
“Cubicle workers cutting loose to travel always seemed to have a nice financial cushion & digital nomads just seemed to fall into the category yr already struggling w/ as a freelancer… Who to look for for advice or ideas?”
Exactly. I don’t have a cushion to work with because I’ve never had a normal job, but the other group, the nomadic designers, often already had a client base and portfolio to pull new gigs from before they left on their nomadic journeys. Maybe I’m just asking for too much, but I’m just trying to practice what everyone seems to have been preaching. One of the reasons I am so into encouraging bloggers to look at situations other than their own is that I think many bloggers don’t realize the privilege their previous situation afforded them. Everyone has some sort of travel privilege, be it a financial cushion from a previous job, skills that are not location dependent, hell, even previous experience with traveling or a supportive family (those last two are mine). It’s good to recognize it, because if you’re not careful, it can become a weakness.
“Artists/travelers are more rare than cubicle lifestyle dwellers & we don’t always blog bc we’ve got our own art focus. Hence, why there seems to be many ex-corporate bloggers suddenly finding their creative expression & why as an artist yr always going to feel like a marginally touched upon category. “IT ALWAYS WAS…” You made yr pact w/ yr devil early off- life will be a $$$downslide in exchange for the pursuit of passion… self-reflection was/is always.”
I do often feel that there seems to be a dearth of bloggers out there who were artists or writers from the very beginning. I know that a lot of bloggers discover writing or photography in the course of their journey, and that’s great…but it also ends up marginalizing those of us who were there from the beginning, to a certain extent. I’ve had an SLR camera since I was 4 years old and was raised by two professional photographers. I’ve been shooting my entire life. But, unfortunately, my work often gets pushed out of the way by less skilled folks who have a more interesting “cubicle break/personal discovery” story. I find it kind of annoying, as an artist.
“We’ve always created our “own” rule/designers of an individual path but we do seek inspiration and role models at times. “
I think this is a key point you’ve hit on. The lifestyle design category of blogging has my response being “duh” to many, many entries. I appreciate the fact that the blogger is introducing these concepts to people who are unfamiliar with them, and I hope they help folks, but I just often wonder how these things aren’t common sense to most people. I think you’re right, though, in that as artists we’re already used to going our own way and creating our own path, so much of the information that is out there is of limited use.
“God drew a straight line & said – “Just don’t fall of it & you’ll be fine”; for others (like myself), he drew a dot & said “Now find your way from there!””
What a great metaphor! I’ll have to remember that one.
This, plus comments… a great read.
Here’s one for you, I’m the inverse. Like you, I was on experiences, not things, and to follow my heart. The thing is, my heart is nerdy and studious and that meant a couple of really good degrees. For me the “quit your job/sell your stuff” model is hard to swallow because, although I love travel, I also really enjoy my Corporate Job. I don’t really know if a hiatus may close the opportunity to come back because the environment I work in doesn’t understand my wanderlust. I’ve tried to conceptualize how to take work with me, but it’s not really possible to do in a meaningful way without rebuilding somewhere. I WISH there was a road map.
Right now the decisive factor pushing me over the line is that my partner is foreign and at a critical life stage and I want to be with him across a couple of oceans.
When I read a lot of “sell your stuff/quit your job/buy these kevlar shorts and go” blogs, sometimes I see someone looking for validation that they’ve made the right choice. Or someone looking to replace the grind they left with a new project that makes them feel, well, important. Noticed. Participatory. A lot of people out there who are doing it without the model du jour don’t seem to need to tell anyone about it, outside of people they meet who ask (I’ve met some! They’re awesome! And inspiring!). Just a thought.
@JC: “A lot of people out there who are doing it without the model du jour don’t seem to need to tell anyone about it, outside of people they meet who ask (I’ve met some! They’re awesome! And inspiring!).”
Yes! Exactly! I did wicked cool stuff throughout most of my life, but I never really wrote about it because, well, I was 1. too busy doing cool stuff and 2. I didn’t want to sound like I was full of myself. When I tell people nowadays that I used to be a professional tall ship sailor and have sailed across the Atlantic twice, that I have flown a small plane from Texas to above the Arctic Circle, that I took my first solo trip when I was TWELVE, etc, they tend to freak out and think it’s awesome and ask me why I don’t publicize that stuff more. Well, I recognize that it’s all neat and unique stuff, but at the time I was doing it, I was just doing it because I wanted to, not because I wanted any sort of recognition for it. As recently as two years ago I spent a year living nomadically out of my truck, traveling up and down the east coast, but I never really blogged about it because I didn’t see it as extraordinary. I just saw it as “what I do”. I agree with you that sometimes travel blogs tend to have a sort of “look at me! I’m doing cool stuff!” smell to them, and while I do want to attract readers, I also don’t want to have that scent attached to my blog.