How Two Gay Guys Sold Everything, Left Home to Travel the World...and Lived Happily Ever After

Our origin story.

We’re a longtime couple, and we’re both writers — Michael writes novels, and Brent writes novels and screenplays.

In 2016, we owned a nice house in Seattle with a good circle of friends, but we weren’t especially happy. It was partly our writing careers, which had both seen their share of ups and downs. It was partly the political situation in the United States, which seemed to be rapidly careening out of control. And it was partly just living in America; we didn’t realize it at the time, but almost every aspect of American culture encourages people to be busy, anxious, and lonely.

So we decided to sell our house and travel the world. The plan was to move to a new country every few months, at least until we found a place where we wanted to settle down.

We were lucky because our jobs as writers made it so we could work anywhere, as long as we had access to the internet.

We spent most of 2017 selling our house, downsizing our belongings, and moving our lives into the cloud.

But where would we live? Would we feel isolated? Would it be dangerous? What about the language issue? And how expensive would all this be?

It was really hard to visualize our life ahead, and kind of scary, because we’d never personally known anyone to do anything like this. And even though it was only seven years ago, there were fewer online resources.

Michael had backpacked through Australia for a couple of years in his twenties, but this was all new to Brent. And he wasn’t — and still isn’t — a particularly adventurous person. Neither of us likes taking huge risks.

But somehow it still felt right.

Then one day while we were still making our preparations, we saw an article in the New York Times about something called “digital nomads.”

“Hey!” Michael said to Brent. “I think this might be what we’re planning to do.”

Finally, we had a term — “digital nomad” — to describe our future lifestyle.

We left Seattle at the end of 2017. We spent the winter in a “cohousing” community in Miami, Florida, designed specifically for digital nomads.

And we loved it. We loved the newfound simplicity and intentionality of our lives: we had to carry everything we owned with us, so in order to buy something new, we literally had to get rid of something old.

Talk about getting your life in balance!

After three months, we left Miami for Europe, spending seven weeks in the island country of Malta (in the Mediterranean). Then we moved on to Matera in southern Italy, and Bansko, Bulgaria, in Eastern Europe for the rest of the year.

Since then, we've lived at least a month in twenty-four different countries, including Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Hungary, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, Czechia, Greece, and the Republic of Georgia.

Along the way, we’ve made shorter stops in countries like Cambodia, Armenia, Slovenia, Guatemala, and St. Lucia.

We had lots of crazy adventures along the way. Some were scary, like the time our apartment in Bulgaria caught on fire. Or when our plane across the Atlantic caught on fire and had to make an emergency landing in Boston.

At this point, we’re not a big fan of fire.

Of course, most of our adventures were much less frightening: flying in a friend’s floatplane over Lake Como, exploring forgotten monasteries in Armenia and ancient ruins in Turkey, and riding our bikes through rice fields in Vietnam.

In those rice fields, we did run into a few disturbingly large water buffalo, but at least they weren’t on fire.

We were frankly shocked by how much cheaper it was to live as digital nomads, especially when we spent significant time in less expensive countries.

Digital nomading and remote working is a phenomenon that’s exploding in popularity right now. It’s driven partly by changes in technology: the world is more connected than it’s ever been. And more and more businesses, and business opportunities, can be done remotely.

Covid also showed many people they didn't have to go into the office to do their jobs.

More than anything, we’ve loved the people we’ve met: smart, funny, passionate, quirky digital nomads from all over the world, as well as locals generous enough to invite us into their lives.

We're both introverts, and we really did worry it would be hard to make friends. Plus, most digital nomads are in their 20s and 30s — younger than us — and we wondered if they'd think of us as their peers.

We soon discovered that digital nomads were as open to new friendships as we were. Why wouldn't they be? They'd left their old lives behind just like us. Life on the road is nothing at all like the judge-y or cutthroat social circles we'd traveled in as writers in Seattle, Los Angeles, or New York.

To our surprise, instead of being lonely, we’re more socially active now than we’ve ever been in our lives. The life of a digital nomad means you’re constantly saying hello, and also constantly saying goodbye. But after seven years of doing this, we’ve also discovered that you can say hello again, by meeting up with old friends in new countries all over the world. This may be our single favorite thing about this lifestyle.

We’ve also met plenty of locals, and we’ve definitely had an education on just how shockingly privileged most Americans are.

But mostly, we’ve found that people are far more alike than they’re different. And ironically, we’ve never felt more connected to other people. Despite not having a permanent home, we’ve never felt more rooted.

In short, our lives of anxiety and routine in the United States have become lives of excitement and adventure in the rest of the world.

Our careers as writers have continued their ups and downs. In 2021, one of Brent’s screenplays, Project Pay Day, was produced as a feature film — and since we have no permanent home, we were able to travel to Pennsylvania for most of the shoot. But there’s been plenty of new rejection as well.

Funny thing, though. Our lives have become so rich that those rejections don’t get us nearly as down as before. We’ve got too many other things to focus on.

The reality is that life on the road is far less stressful than our lives in Seattle. It’s not even close.

A month after leaving Seattle, we looked at each other and said, “Leaving home may have been the smartest thing we’ve ever done.”

Our opinion of being a digital nomad has only kept rising since then. We’ve never been happier or more satisfied with our lives.

In this newsletter, we tell the full story of our travels — warts and all.

But honestly, there aren’t that many warts. We’re not trying to be aspirational, but that’s how it’s ended up.

Some people tell us they’re considering a digital nomad lifestyle themselves. As a result, we like to share practical information about the nuts and bolts of our newfound lives.

Other people say they simply enjoy living our travels vicariously.

Either way, we hope you'll subscribe to our newsletter, below, and/or follow us on Instagram, Twitter/X, or Facebook.

Brent & Michael