Digital nomadism is dead — at least for now. It seems like a thing of the past; something people did years ago. The thought of a gallivanting programmer circling the globe, or an Instagram travel influencer sampling luxury hotels — it seems like an almost alien concept at this point. It’s hard to think that this phenomenon only peaked just a few months ago. You might have heard of people who are now making the most of the low travel costs, and enjoying the lack of people, but air travel is down by something like 90% in terms of daily passengers. If you do travel, hardly anything is going to be open and most cities have an eerie vibe. Also, you don’t know where you could get stranded, nor how the local lockdown policy applies to travelers, especially amidst the mass closure of hotels. In other words, if you do travel, rest assured that your experience is not going to be particularly glamorous. 

If you travel as a digital nomad, please note that the networking that typically comes with it, is dead. The meetups are gone. After work drinks, get-togethers and social events are just not happening. Longer term, in a post-corona world, I the very appetite for travel might also remain weak, and people may not be too interested in cosmopolitan, sprawling megacities. What a lot of people are finding out now, is that being holed up in a box in a big city indefinitely, is not fun. By the looks of it, it’s going to get a lot worse still, and even when the immediate ordeal is over, people are not going to forget this any time soon. Longer term, many people may even choose to live in smaller towns, closer to nature, away from the claustrophobic beehives that are today’s busy megacities.

Speaking of busy, one thing that definitely isn’t dead, is working from home. Overnight, this became the modus operandi for virtually everyone. Necessity is the mother of invention, and sudden constraints can really force a change, and that’s exactly what’s happening here. People who are lucky enough to have a job are going to try to cling on to it and deliver value. What we’re about to see is that many business processes can totally be managed from the comforts of people’s homes. A lot of middle-managers and executives are going to find out that workers don’t need to be chained to a cubicle to deliver value. At the same time, most companies now find themselves having to conduct extremely Spartan and immediate cost cutting exercises. Working from home or not, a lot of those middle-managers are going to find these themselves out of a job very shortly (if they haven’t already joined the ten million newly unemployed Americans the past two weeks alone).

Remember though, there are entire companies that are run completely virtually; they are very lean, flat organizations with few BS jobs in them. More companies are going to be trimmed and run this way. As for the workers who do successfully convert into remote workers, I’m not convinced that they’ll want to go back into business as usual afterwards. Longer term, if and when this is over, and people are herded back into corporate captivity in an open plan office, I predict that many people will start looking elsewhere for more flexible jobs.

What about the people who work in startups? Startup funding is dead or dying. I made a bet back in 2016 with a friend (who ran a tech accelerator that shall remain nameless), as to when the startup bubble would pop. I was off by a year (and I believe I might owe someone a steak dinner). I did predict an abrupt and unceremonious end to it (like most asset bubbles pop); not because I suspected a virus, but because I did anticipate some exogenous shock to shed light on the weak financial situation (for instance the complete lack of an real earnings) you generally saw in the startup space. I used to do a lot of startup mentoring, I’ve worked with many startups and even taken a stake, and the one indicator that convinced m