"If you’re going to work from home indefinitely, why not make a new home in an exotic place?..."

"It turns out there are drawbacks the trend stories and Instagram posts didn’t share. Tax things. Red-tape things. Wi-Fi rage things. Closed border things. The kinds of things one might gloss over when making an emotional, quarantine-addled decision to pack up an apartment and book a one-way ticket to Panama or Montreal or Kathmandu.... The anxious self-optimization pingpongs between 'Why aren’t I living my best life?' and 'Why aren’t I killing it at work?'... Ms. Smith-Adair’s office became a folding chair on the sidewalk outside whatever McDonald’s or Starbucks was nearby. It wasn’t exactly a peaceful commune with the redwoods. During one curbside conference call in Eugene, Ore., a nearby man with a weed whacker began roaring his motor. Ms. Adair-Smith told him that she was trying to salvage her career. He didn’t care." 

 From "The Digital Nomads Did Not Prepare for This They moved to exotic locales to work through the pandemic in style. But now tax trouble, breakups and Covid guilt are setting in" (NYT). 

This is a very amusingly written article by Erin Griffin. 

There's a photo with the wonderful caption: "After six months in Costa Rica, Austin Mao returned to the United States, where he has fewer opportunities to chop open coconuts knocked out of trees by monkeys." That's like the first line of a novel! I love the main character's name!

  

There's also the story of a guy stranded in Portugal with his visa expired who attempts to apply for asylum there: "I said, ‘Trump’s a dictator, my city is burning, and people are dying.'... They made a joke that I was the first person since the Vietnam War from America to ask for that." The Portuguese officials were nice anyway. They laughed at him, but extended his visa.

Strangely, in the comments over there, people are bitching about it. Why did the NYT even publish it? They regret reading. Oh! I see what's going on: "Are we supposed to feel sorry for these people who made selfish, ill advised decisions?" Unlike the Portuguese officials, they don't know how to laugh.