User:TsunamiSurfer777/Digital nomad

READY FOR GRADING

My edits include everything in bold, as well as the entire COVID-19 section.

== Article Draft ==

Lead
Digital nomads are people who travel freely while working remotely using technology and the internet. Such people generally have minimal material possessions and work remotely in temporary housing, hotels, cafes, public libraries, co-working spaces, or recreational vehicles, using Wi-Fi, smartphones or mobile hotspots to access the Internet. The majority of digital nomads describe themselves as programmers, content creators, designers, or developers. Some digital nomads are perpetual travelers, while others only maintain the lifestyle for a short period of time. While some travel through multiple countries, others remain in one area, and some may choose to travel while living in a vehicle, in a practice often known as van-dwelling.

(Removed: "Digital nomads are often younger remote workers, backpackers, retired or semi-retired persons, snowbirds, and/or entrepreneurs.")

Benefits
People typically become digital nomads due to a desire for travel, location independence, and the lowered cost of living often provided by leaving expensive cities. Cost of living ranks chief among the criteria that digital nomads value when selecting a destination, followed by climate, diversity, and available leisure activities. There are also benefits for employers, as a 2021 study concluded that there is a causal relationship between worker productivity and the option to "work from anywhere," as workers who were freed from geographic limitations showed an average output increase of 4.4% while controlling for other factors. '''Digital nomads also typically spend more than 35% of their income in the location in which they are staying, an injection of capital that has been shown to stimulate local economies in popular destinations, primarily promoting the service industry and the sale of consumer goods. '''

Challenges
Although digital nomads enjoy advantages in freedom and flexibility, they report loneliness as their biggest struggle, followed by burnout. Feelings of loneliness are often present in the practice of nomadic lifestyle, since nomadism often requires freedom from personal attachments such as marriage. The importance of developing face-to-face quality relationships has been stressed to maintain mental health in remote workers.

Other challenges include maintaining international health insurance with coverage globally, abiding by different local laws including payment of required taxes and obtaining work visas, and maintaining long-distance relationships with friends and family back home. Digital nomads also very rarely have access to retirement benefits, unemployment insurance, or set time off from work, and often make less money than they could make through traditional employment. As many digital nomads resort to gig work or freelancing, their oppurtunities for pay can be inconsistent and sporatic. Other challenges may also include time zone differences, the difficulty of finding a reliable connection to the internet, and the absence of delineation between work and leisure time. There are a few contributing factors to the blurring of this line; certain paid work can be viewed as leisure when it is enjoyable, but many tasks that involve travel and acquiring commdations can become viewed as another type of work, even though those would traditionally fall into the leisure category. Another issue faced by digital nomads is that of mobility; a travelling worker must be able to keep any necessary equipment with them as they move from location to location, and it is difficult to for a digital nomad to manage personal belongings. In fact, many digital nomads do not have a "home base," and must therefore adopt a minimalist lifestyle.

One potentially negative impact of digital nomadism, that does not affect the nomads themselves, is the possibility of 'transnational gentrification.' Concerns have been raised about the nature of the relationship between digital nomads, who are most often from the Global North, and the countries they travel to, generally in the Global South. The problem may arise in regards to housing competition between native people and travelling workers, as well as in personal interactions and the risk of tourism over-dependency. However, the exact scope and real-world impacts of this problem have not yet been settled by research.

Impact of COVID-19
In 2020, a research study found that 10.9 million American workers described themselves as digital nomads, an increase of 49% from 2019. The primary reason for this rapid increase is office closure and the shift toward remote work due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Multiple countries were prompted to offer new visa programs and to change their policies towards foreign workers as a result of the pandemic.

The pandemic had a larger impact, in terms of mobility, on traditional job holders than on independent workers. While the number of independent workers living as digital nomads increased slightly in 2020, the number of traditional workers who described themselves as digital nomads nearly doubled, from 3.2 million people in 2019 to 6.3 million in 2020. This is because of the fact that many traditional jobs stopped requiring their employees to physically report to an office or set location everyday, so many people were subsequently able to travel freely while still working. The majority of this increase consisted of Millennial and Generation Z workers, possibly due in part to their minimized concern about COVID-19. At the same time, another effect of the pandemic was the limited ability to travel, particularly across national borders. For this reason, more and more digital nomads have chosen to remain domestic, especially in the United States. Living as a digital nomad often entails travelling from high-cost areas (eg. major cities) to cheaper regions (foreign or domestic).

Though the rapid increase of digital nomads in 2020 is expected to be more than just a short-lived trend, the extreme rate of change is not likely to continue indefinitely.