My Reflections on Two Years Since the Coronavirus Lockdowns (Surreal)

Sneak Peek:

Kristin:    00:00:00    You change your world when you travel. Which country is calling you and why? 

Introduction: Welcome to Badass Digital Nomads, where we're pushing the boundaries of remote work and travel, all while staying grounded with a little bit of old school philosophy, self-development, and business advice from our guests.  

Kristin Wilson, Host:    00:00:29    Hi there, how are you today? It's me, Kristin, from Traveling with Kristin. I hope you're having a great morning, afternoon, or evening depending on where you are in the world right now and where you're listening from. And welcome to episode 149 of Badass Digital Nomads today. As I mentioned last week, we are going to do a deep dive into one of nearly 50 digital nomad visa programs in the world right now. And that is on the Hungarian White card that will allow you to reside in Hungary for a period of up to one year with an option to extend for a second year. But I wanted to postpone that episode until next week because I realized it's been more than two years since the initial Coronavirus Lockdowns, and it's been more than two years since I've traveled outside of the United States. So in this podcast, I just wanted to reflect a bit on what I've learned and kind of what I'm thinking about since these two years have passed.  

Kristin:    00:01:43    I know I've certainly experienced a lot of ups and downs throughout the year, and chances are that you might have too. But one of the more positive things that I have gleaned during the pandemic is just really sensing how connected we all are, even when we don't leave our houses. And I've come to observe how much life persists even during lockdowns. You know, even when the world seems to stop, it keeps going. Babies are born, people pass away, work continues, work changes, your job changes. People get married, people get divorced. Somehow the world keeps turning. There have been declarations of war, peace, personal achievements, successes, heartbreak failures, new skills learned, new habits formed, habits, broken friendships have blossomed, have strengthened, have faded away. Seasons keep passing. I raised tomato plants from seeds. They grew, they flourished, they died. My orchid is still blooming though actually it's third stem has just sprouted. 

Kristin:    00:03:14    That's how you know time is passing. And spring has sprung. The clocks have sprung forward. So many of these seemingly nominal daily occurrences remind me of so many times in the past, like just yesterday. Well, every morning I walk over to the marina near my house to just do some journaling in the morning and watch the sunrise. And I noticed from one day to the next, all of these pink and white and yellow flowers just covering the grass like a big blanket across the ground and the sidewalk. And as soon as I saw it, instantly my mind jumped back to the streets of Tokyo and Kyoto and walking along the river bend and seeing flowers floating down in the sky and landing in the water and landing in the streets and and being there during cherry blossom season, which was three years ago now, four years ago now.  

Kristin:    00:04:22    Whew. And you know, this flood of memories, these months I spent in Japan just flickered by in an instant as soon as I saw these flowers on the ground here in Miami. And when I see the news headlines and I see what's happening in the world, and I think of all of the change that's happening in every moment and some, some of it's scary, much of it terrifying, especially in moments of crisis, the climate crisis, the war on Ukraine, these things bring back other memories from travel. I think about walking through the hallways of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, thinking about what it must have been like to live there in the 1930s and forties, riding my bike, carefree down the same streets that used to be filled with soldiers. And I also think about riding my bike from Munich to the concentration camp in  Dachau passing by the same railroads that used to carry civilian prisoners to the camp.  

Kristin:    00:05:30    Sometimes these memories sadden me, but it also makes me think about how strong and resilient people are and how we are somehow able to survive and even thrive in the most unbearable conditions, many of which none of us have ever had to experience. One of the many books I read this year was the Battle of Thermopylae by Steven Pressfield about the essentially suicidal spartan defense of Greece against the Persians. And another book I'm reading right now was actually recommended to me by a listener of the podcast, and it's called Two Years Before the Mast. Some of you may have read it, it seems like a classic, I don't know how I missed it before, but it's about a two year voyage at sea from Boston to California around South America. And when I read these books and I get lost in these stories, I also think about my own experience in the here and now.  

Kristin:    00:06:43    I think about walking the fields in Olympia, in Greece, where Spartan athletes actually competed. I think about being able to fly down to Patagonia at a moment's notice to go on vacation or explore a place where so many sailors perished and so many ships sank. And when I read the news, I think about people who have been trapped inside of walls like Anne Frank and her family and many families that had to hide during World War II. I think about people who are sent to prison camps, and I think about people who are trapped right now at this very moment underneath rubble, one of the granddaughters of a concentration camp survivor has a podcast called We Share the Same Sky. And I listen to the whole thing, I don't know if it's still being updated, but I'll link to it for you in the show notes.  

Kristin:    00:07:47    And the name of that podcast really resonated with me. I think it came from her grandmother's journals. And I just, I think about that often when I look at the clear blue sky here in Miami, the same sky that the Spartan soldiers looked up at and marveled at right before they went into battle the sky that Pressfield wrote about the same sky that everyone shares. And you know, whether the world is struggling against a natural disaster, the religious crusades or the Bubonic plague or the Coronavirus Pandemic or whatever is happening, the more time I've had to think about this and stay still in one place, the more it all starts to blend together time and history. And the more I start to see how connected and interrelated everything really is. As you may have heard on some of the other podcasts, I'm in the process of writing my first book called Digital Nomads for Dummies.  

Kristin:    00:08:57    And yesterday I was writing a chapter or a section of a chapter about how to organize your workday when you work from home or when you're working remotely. And I went back again, <laugh> to research when exactly did the nine-to-five workday start and when was it set into law in the United States? And I've written about this before, but I went back for a refresher. And I remember now that it was in 1912 when it was passed into legislation, this eight-hour workday, which ironically was right before the flu pandemic of 1918 and also right before World War I. So the post-industrial workday that we have today wasn't fully adopted until after World War II. And then shortly thereafter, only 30 years later, a NASA scientist published a paper trying to convince everyone to work remotely The Telecommunications Tradeoff. I think that was in 1973, and no one listened to him.  

Kristin:    00:10:08    And here we are in 2022. And finally, people are starting to understand the benefits of remote work and the opportunities that we have at our fingertips today. In 1324, a man named William of Ockham, who was a great medieval thinker, philosopher scientist, you could say somewhat of a polymath teacher, he did all of the things. He was summoned by the Pope to go from England to France to stand trial for his supposedly heretical views. And after a long and arduous trial, he actually survived. But it wasn't because they didn't find him guilty, it was because another crisis caught the church's attention. And that crisis was the black plague. The black plague, of course, ended up killing half of Europe, ironically, William included. But do you know what else it killed? feudalism The bubonic plague helped presence and serfs escape the feudal system. The plague essentially helped the working class transform the labor system.  

Kristin:    00:11:32    And in an eerily similar way, the Coronavirus Pandemic has just basically upended the post-industrial model of the nine-to-five workday. And so here we are about six or 700 years later in a world that people like William of Ockham and Leonardo da Vinci probably wouldn't have been able to conceive of, I don't think, unless they were like really before their time. And the same types of things are still happening. We still have wars, we still have pandemics, we still have religious controversy, we still have differing scientific models and hypotheses. We still have writers and people trying to make sense of things. But my point is there's a lot going on in the world. In every moment right now is really the first time in history that we've been able to be aware of all the crazy stuff that's going on at the same time.  

Kristin:    00:12:45    But on the flip side of that is also opportunity. That access to information that can be overwhelming and stressful sometimes is also a gift. And it's a doorway really to opportunity and the ability to be a better you, to be able to create your own job or to find a remote job, to decide how you want to apply your interests, what skills you want to learn, what curiosities you want to pursue, what countries you want to travel to, and how you want to interact with the world and use your gifts in the world. It's also a time of connection. It's the first time that we're able to connect with each other without limits across borders. Another book I read this year is called The River of Doubt, and I heard about it on Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic podcast. And I picked up a copy, actually, it was a trilogy of books written by the same author.  

Kristin:    00:13:55    And the River of Doubt is about President Roosevelt's 1913 expedition to map the Amazon River, or at least part of the Amazon River for the first time. And while reading that book, all I could think of was how today we can just zoom in on that part, on Google Earth or go visit it in a motorized speedboat. And while I was reading that book, I went out to dinner with a guy who told me that he djd at a music festival on an island in the middle of the Amazon River. And so we are living in a crazy time, but it can also be a good time. I mean, some things you can control, some things you can't. But the one thing that never changes is time itself. Time is the great equalizer. It's a substance that can't be controlled, it can't be increased, it can't be decreased, it can't be bought, it can't be sold.  

Kristin:    00:15:04    It's just passing all the time. Whether or not it's a human invention or not, time is time. And so as I write this book on how to become a digital nomad, and as I research the travel visas of 50 different countries over the past few months, and as I bring my discoveries to you through this podcast and share with you about a residence permit that allows you to live in Hungary for two years, the same country that my ancestors fled from after World War I, I mean my grandfather and his family lived on the border between Hungary and Romania. They were war refugees who came to the United States and allowed me to be here where I am today. And it's literally at this moment that I'm realizing the subconscious connection, where last week I did a podcast on Romania's Digital Nomad visa. This week was supposed to be un Hungary and it wasn't even intentional to choose those two countries.  

Kristin:    00:16:23    It's just that they are some of the most recent countries to announce digital nomad visas. And so those were the ones that I was researching last, but it kind of goes along with this podcast and that all of these things kind of connect like a spider spiderweb. That is to me the strangeness, but also the beauty, of the human experience. These experiences that you are living today are layered and interconnected with history, with your ancestry, with geopolitics, with technology, with travel. It's all connected. And a lot of this all comes full circle to today because as we get close to 150 episodes of Badass Digital Nomads, and as I've been reflecting on the state of the world, the state of change throughout the pandemic, and writing this book that will hopefully help many, many people follow this path in the future, this path of personal freedom, this path of location independence, it all comes back to the reason that I started sharing content to begin with.  

Kristin:    00:17:47    And through this podcast, I hope that I am sharing insights and, and messages that have value and that you can apply in your life. Before I started this podcast and before I started a YouTube channel, I spent so many years researching and learning and traveling and seeking and talking to people and having experiences and working and just trying to develop a more objective and realistic and truthful perspective of the world, and to develop an understanding of the world that felt real and that felt whole and fulfilling and a perspective that I never got in school. And although the more you know, the more you know that you don't know, traveling the world has helped me put some of the pieces together in my own life. And it got to a point to where all of the information and all of these experiences were just kind of overflowing.  

Kristin:    00:19:05    And so I started creating content, I started stepping out and speaking up and writing and talking and sharing what I had learned and what I had observed. And, and all of this was just to help other people. <laugh>. You know, that's another thing that I reflect on a lot is how, how funny it is that that humans are just here trying to figure out what's going on <laugh>, what our purpose is, what we're doing here. But, um, I think that that part of that reason is to help advance society in general. Like the progress that you make in your career and in your personal life becomes this impetus that carries humanity forward one person at a time. You know, in the past when people spoke up or spoke out or did things that were not allowed for their place in society or for their gender, it it was dangerous.  

Kristin:    00:20:12    They could be killed for their beliefs and expressing their views. And this is still happening in so many countries, Russia included, but it's because of the work and the research and the risks that people took in the past that we are where we are today. So when you do you, when you follow what you're interested in, when you work and what you are passionate about, when you help your friends, when you help your family, when you help your colleagues and clients and coworkers and communicate with strangers on the internet, and when you live each day, and you live your life to the best that you can do that day, I think that you're advancing society one day at a time and one moment at a time regardless of where you are, uh, regardless of if you're traveling or if you're still staying home. So yes, this podcast was supposed to be how you can travel to Hungary and stay there for longer than you would've been able to two years ago or 200 years ago.  

Kristin:    00:21:28    But bringing attention to these special visa programs is also marking a milestone in society at this moment that these opportunities to travel the world and work remotely, voluntarily exist. That's another reason why I created this database of every single country in the world that has one of these visas and how you can get one because we are so lucky to even have the opportunity to apply for these visas. And you can choose, of course, there might be some financial constraints, some other types of limitations and requirements on the different visas. But you can ask yourself which country is calling you and why? What is there for you to uncover there? You don't have to travel for some altruistic motive. You don't have to volunteer. You don't have to try to stop a war or report on a war or try to change the world, but you change your world when you travel and you open your eyes, you open your mind, you open your perspective, and you increase your level of happiness and fulfillment in the world.  

Kristin:    00:23:01    And that has a butterfly effect. So many of you have sent me emails and private messages about the podcast I did about seizing the day, uh, which was inspired by my Patreon, Teklordz, who passed away from cancer last year. And I said in that podcast that, you know, you're here on this planet, this moment in time for a reason. And I strongly believe that there's a reason that we crossed into each other's orbits and we're sharing this experience now through audio. And as I look back on the past two years since those initial covid lockdowns and how much society has changed and the world has changed, and I think we were in a difficult time going into COVID, we were in a difficult time during COVID and we are coming into a new type of difficult time coming out of COVID and these cycles will really never end because that's life.  

Kristin:    00:24:18    Like, there's good and bad things happening all the time. There's always challenges and there's always just so many layers to what's going on, especially when we have the opportunity to stay so connected and, uh, see what's going on in every corner of the world. But in general, life is change. Life is defined by change and, and evolution and history does continue repeating itself, but I like to think of it as a spiral and hopefully, uh, an upward spiral. So as humanity cycles through all of these struggles and all of these challenges, we get better, we get stronger, we learn more, and we just keep advancing. Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, time is on the side of change and she couldn't be more right? So stay focused. Stay focused on what you can do, on what you can control. Maybe do a little spring cleaning <laugh> here on this two year anniversary of Pandemic Life and and, and celebrating the world opening up.  

Kristin:    00:25:37    Um, one of the things I was going to talk about in today's podcast was how Hungary has completely dropped all of their covid travel restrictions as of March 7th, 2022. No vaccine required, no testing required. So tune in next week and I'll have much more for you on the Hungary Digital Nomad visa, which is called the White Card, and how you can live in Hungary for up to two years. So cheers to you. I hope you go out and crush the day today or get a good night's sleep if it's nighttime where you are, and I'll see you next week.

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