I'm an "Older" Digital Nomad. If I Don't Put Down Roots Now, Will It Eventually Be Too Late?

Supposedly, I still have "twelve good years."

Eighteen years ago, my mom died unexpectedly at the age of sixty-two — the same age I am now. As of a few months ago, I’m officially older than she ever was.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Not: Oh my god, I’m going to die one day! More: Well, this is a strange milestone.

I’ve always been aware of my mortality, but now that I’m in my sixties, it’s a lot less theoretical.

Recently, a Substack article took the world of expats and retirees by storm: “Your 12 Good Years.”

The premise was simple: if you’re in your early sixties and healthy, you likely have about twelve more years where you can take on new challenges, be spontaneous, live independently, and, yes, easily travel.

After that, physical and mental deterioration will almost certainly slow you down.

I’m well aware that my time on Earth is finite, but having a number, no matter how arbitrary, assigned to my remaining “good” years was jarring.

And how exactly will this affect my life of travel? For the last nine years, I’ve been a digital nomad, continuously traveling the world with my husband, Brent.

Brent and I are still fit and active, but I already see hints of what’s to come. My left knee complains more than it used to. My lower back wakes up most mornings very cranky.

In my seventies, transoceanic flights will almost certainly be harder, bad beds more challenging, and climbing Machu Picchu probably ain’t happening, even if my spirit is willing.

Sadly, in the last year, illness has struck some of our closest friends, so the future is even less theoretical now.

Which brings up a related issue: when it does happen — when we do have to start dealing with serious health issues — we don’t want to be on our own in dealing with them.

Our sick friends have all had fantastic support systems — both friends and family.

But Brent and I are childless. And while we have lots of friends, many of them are spread all over the world.

If we got sick now, our support system would be: It’s complicated.

So if we don’t put down roots soon, will it eventually be too late?

On the one hand, we don’t need to keep traveling. We’ve been on the road for almost a decade, and it’s been incredible. Maybe asking for twelve more years of travel is getting greedy.

On the other hand, we really love our current life. We both agree that becoming nomadic was the best decision we ever made.

In nomad circles, older folks talk about these issues a lot. Some people insist they’ll travel until health issues force them to stop. Then they’ll find a country where they can join an expat community and settle down for the last time.

There’s a grim term some folks use for this place: a “death destination.”

Brent says it’s naive to think you can wait until you have a serious health problem to settle down — and after watching our friends deal with major health issues this year, I agree with him.

If you’re dealing with a major health issue, the last thing in the world you’d want to do — or even have the energy for — is also figure out the process of emigrating to another country, much less finding a permanent apartment and, oh yeah, integrating into a foreign culture.

Other older nomads say that when the time comes, they’ll return home. And if they have children and a strong, existing support network, this seems like a much more reasonable option.

But without kids, Brent and I would have to rely on friends — and even our old circle of friends back in the Seattle area is spread out all over Puget Sound.

So if we really do want a supportive community for when we’re older, we need to start building one relatively soon.

See the problem? We want two incompatible things: to keep traveling as long as we can, and to ensure we’re not alone and vulnerable when we can’t.

If I were on my own, I think I’d risk a harder ending to avoid giving up years of a life I love. But Brent disagrees. He wants to start putting down roots soon, so we’re not trying to frantically build a support system at the exact moment we need one.

We have options, but they all come with a cost.

We could return to the Pacific Northwest for at least part of the year, to develop that support network. And when the time came, we would move back here full-time. We’d be in a familiar culture, and we’d also have access to Medicare.

But we’d also be moving back to America, which would mean being totally dependent on a car again, and giving up the more people-centered communities we’ve both grown to love. Instead, we’d be stuck back in the American sprawl we both detest.

We’d also take another hit on the quality of life issue due to the “affordability” issue, since almost anywhere in the world seems a lot cheaper than America right now.

Brent is very interested in building some kind of “intentional” community with existing friends, which would at least partly improve our quality of life.

But our friends have competing interests too — in the form of kids, grandkids, weather, and their own affordability issues.

And, of course, we think it’s still an open question whether America collapses completely into fascism.

The other option is for us to permanently settle somewhere outside the U.S. — Mexico or Europe but also maybe Thailand — and try to build a life among the locals and expats.

I’m more drawn to this, but Brent argues that it would essentially mean severing our existing friendships back home. After all, how often would we see them? Once a year for a week until we become too old to travel at all?

Plus, he says, we’d have to navigate foreign cultures and bureaucracies at an age when that becomes increasingly difficult to do. So if this is our choice, we’d have to start sooner rather than later.

Unfortunately, trying to permanently settle in another country almost always includes some kind of “residency” requirement — often at least ten months out of every year. So we’d be in a foreign country, true, but we’d also have to stop nomading.

At least the U.S. gives us the option to be there only part-time. We could live there for four or five months and travel the rest of the year.

Every path comes with drawbacks and complications — and both mean we won’t be traveling full-time for all that much longer.

Then again, we’re trying to balance two competing truths: that our immediate phase of life is still full of possibility and shouldn’t be wasted, but that the future version of ourselves will depend on us making choices now that keep them safe.

Most likely, it will be the “part-time in America” option that we’re doing this year.

After all, twelve more years of this wouldn’t exactly be terrible.

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Michael Jensen is a novelist and editor. For a newsletter with more of my photos, visit me at www.MichaelJensen.com.