🌀 Nomadism: From Tents to Airbnbs

{{rh_onboarding_line}}

You arrive. Drop the bag. Walk through the apartment once. Move the throw pillow from the chair to the sofa. Plug in your laptop by the window, not the desk. Quietly decide the chipped mug stays in the cabinet.

By the third hour, you've claimed the place as your own, even though you leave on Sunday.

There's something almost humiliating about it, the nest-building, the urge to shuffle furniture around in a place you’ve rented for just four nights. Still, you can't resist yourself.

Here's what you should really think about: the people who've moved the most in human history aren't those who abandoned their homes. They're those who understood what it truly is.

Gmail is free, but you pay with your data. Proton Mail is different.

We don’t scan your messages. We don’t sell your behavior. We don’t follow you across the internet.

Proton Mail gives you full-featured, private email without surveillance or creepy profiling. It’s email that respects your time, your attention, and your boundaries.

Email doesn’t have to cost your privacy.

Ditch the Gmail data grab

For thousands of years, Mongolian herding families have migrated four to five times annually across the steppe, moving into mountain pastures and back down to winter grounds, following the grass for their animals. They have no fixed address; they have a route.

And yet, the inside of their home remains unchanged.

The larger round structure that most outsiders refer to as a yurt has a strictly organised interior. The north wall, known as the khoimor, is the honoured spot: designated for sacred objects and distinguished guests. The central hearth serves as the spiritual centre of family life. The western half is the men's side; the eastern half belongs to women and children. Every object has a specified position.

No matter where a yurt is situated on the steppe, its interior remains the same. A family packs up, travels hundreds of kilometres, and reassembles their home so that everything is exactly where it was. The entire structure can be raised in around two hours.

Manduhai Buyandelger, a Mongolian-born anthropologist at MIT, examines cultural memory and identity in Mongolia, exploring how communities preserve themselves through practice amid shifting political circumstances. The yurt exemplifies this: continuity resides in patterns, not in a fixed place. Home is something you reassemble, not abandon.

The American scholar Gloria Jean Watkins, who wrote on feminism, race, and culture throughout her career, had a clear argument about what home actually means.

In her 1990 essay "Homeplace: A Site of Resistance”, Watkins argued that for Black Americans, making a home was never just housekeeping. It was a political act. The ability to create a dignified, caring space even when the outside world refused dignity was a form of resistance. Home wasn't a luxury or an accident. It was something made deliberately, through intention.

This is exactly what nomads have always known.

The French philosopher Simone Weil, writing in 1949, made a similar point from a different perspective. In The Need for Roots, her argument is that rootedness comes from attachment to a living community, its practices, obligations, and shared memory rather than to a fixed place.

Both thinkers arrive at the same conclusion. Belonging is a practice, not a property. Nomads are not without homes; they have learned to build them more quickly.

After the pandemic dispersed millions of office workers, Airbnb made a quiet but important gamble.

In 2021, the company introduced monthly pricing and redesigned its search filters to make long-term stays easier to find. CEO Brian Chesky publicly stated that the world had reached a point where people could "live and work anywhere" and that Airbnb was built for that reality. By 2022, the company reported that long-term stays (28 nights or more) had become its fastest-growing booking category.

The platform wasn't inventing a trend. It was catching up to one.

MBO Partners' research tracked the rise of self-described digital nomads, people who work remotely while moving between locations. Their numbers more than doubled between 2019 and the early 2020s. By 2023, more than 50 countries had introduced some version of a digital nomad visa, including Portugal, Estonia, Croatia, and Costa Rica.

This is no longer a counterculture. It marks a documented shift in how an increasing number of people answer the question: where do I live?

📜 Quote: "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." — Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (1949)

📊 Study: MBO Partners' State of Independence research revealed that the number of Americans who identify as digital nomads has more than doubled. The growth was primarily seen among workers under 40 in the tech, creative, and consulting industries.

🎨 Artifact: The Mongolian yurt. Felt walls, wooden lattice frame, central hearth assembled in about two hours, structurally unchanged for roughly a thousand years. The most sophisticated portable home ever built.

😂 Meme: Airbnb guests who quickly relocate the decorative pillows to a closet, rearrange the kitchen, and leave a Post-it explaining their organisational system. We are all, at heart, temporary property managers.

🤔 Prompt: Think of a temporary space you've stayed in, such as a hotel room, a sublet, or a friend's spare room. What was the first thing you did to make it feel like your own?

What's your arrival ritual: the small, often irrational things you do to claim a space that isn't actually yours?

Nomads didn't fail to build permanent homes. They tackled a trickier challenge: what is truly essential, and what can be left behind?

The Mongolian herder and the Airbnb regular share more in common than their appearances imply. Both are responding to the same question and discovering that the answer isn't merely about square footage.

Home is a pattern you apply to the world. If you understand the pattern, you can create it anywhere.

If this reframed something for you, forward it to another person. Culture Decoded is free to share.

Subscribe to Culture Decoded for weekly insights on modern behavior.