The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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Paul Carr in The Guardian  (via Rithwik) –

In Tim Ferris’s book, The Four Hour Work Week, he discusses a concept called “Geographic Arbitrage”, or Geo-arbitrage. In a nutshell, the concept explains how you can achieve a significant real-terms increase in your earnings by being paid in one currency, say US dollars, but spending that money on goods and services from a much cheaper foreign country. The concept has become more and more realistic in recent years as advances in technology mean it’s possible to work from anywhere in the world with a laptop, a mobile and a broadband connection.

Sure, it wouldn’t work for everyone – if you work in a shop or have to manage people in an office then you’ll struggle to do that from a South American beach. But if your work primarily involves computers, telephones or “creativity” – if you’re, say, a writer – then it’s ideal.

But what if you took the idea further? If rather than renting or buying a house somewhere cheap, you didn’t have a house at all? What sort of possibilities would that level of mobility allow? What if you really, really embraced technology – living in hotels and short term rental apartments and making your travel plans at the very, very last minute using hotel and flight comparison sites and online currency data. Using services like Dopplr and Twitter to find out where your friends would be each month to help you decide where to go next; using Skype to stay constantly in touch and Boingo to ensure that you had access to wireless almost –almost - everywhere you went. What, in other words, if you lived as a technomad?

There was only one way to find out. Less than a month later, I had sold almost everything I owned – my furniture, most of my clothes, my DVD collection, the guitar I’d never learned to play – everything, basically, that wouldn’t fit into a small suitcase on wheels. And I’d used the money to buy a plane ticket to New York to begin a ridiculous experiment. To see if it was possible to enjoy a ridiculously high standard of living on the road, at absolutely no extra cost, simply by embracing spontaneity and putting my faith in the power of technology. What I couldn’t possibly have predicted at the time is that it’s not only possible, but massively preferable. The adventures I had since February – more on them soon – are such that I literally do not understand why people who are able to work remotely, and who don’t have a spouse or children to worry about, don’t buy themselves a suitcase and hit the road.