Letter to the Editor: It’s Better to Get on the Wrong Train Than Get Stuck at the Station

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message-in-a-bottle

Reader B writes:

Hi Rob,

I was wondering if you’d heard of or seen the film, The Last Journey (2024). It’s a Swedish documentary about a man and his friend who takes his elderly dad, a former French teacher on a trip to France to try to bring him back to life.

It made me think of a lot of Escapological ideas: the power of travel to affect us, interest in other cultures and ways of life, the joy of old tech (cine films and cassettes are a big part as well as an old Renault 4) and how a rewarding life is/should be about more than just accumulating money and stuff.

One of the lines that stuck with me was a piece of advice the teacher gave to one of his students, “It’s better to get on the wrong train than get stuck at the station”.

I think we are all fearful of making big changes and the consequences of those not working out which can make us stay in terrible jobs we hate for years or get stuck in indecision mode.

Anyway, it’s a great movie and struck a chord and made me laugh too. Having looked after my parents in their later years (an escape from the office in some respects) it was interesting to see aspects of that [life] on screen. I’m not sure whether the next Mission Impossible will have Tom Cruise ask a co-star if he will help wash his dad… I feel it would make a change from OTT stunts though and inject some much-needed realism into the franchise.

Best of luck with the return of the magazine.

Kind regards,
B

Thanks B! I had not heard of the film until you introduced me to it, so thank you very much. Meanwhile, seeing the care you gave to your parents as an escape of sorts makes me think of radical care work. And well done to you for doing it.

Big thanks to everyone who backed our biannual Kickstarter. The campaign is over now, but you can still pre-order Issue 18 in our online shop.

06 Jul 2025 No Comments

I Don’t Regret a Second of My Travels

Here we are together on this paradise island in south-east Asia, laptops closed for the day. This is the digital nomad dream, isn’t it? This is what adventure and freedom looks like, right? We’re happy! Or are we all just pretending?

There was a piece in the Guardian recently, nominally about some digital nomads and how their escape turned sour.

I was looking forward to posting another cautionary tale about how escapes sometimes don’t work out, but despite the headline, the piece isn’t exactly that. It looks to me like the digital nomads had an excellent time:

I worked my own hours, usually during the day, for a handful of clients. Come evening, I would hop on the back of a scooter and drive through plumes of street-food smoke to meet new friends on the beach and sip from coconuts. It all felt wonderfully freeing.

Some of these nomads have had enough of the freedom and want to settle down again with some property and stability and a sense of permanence. Okay. Nothing wrong with that. And do these nomads regret their time on the road? It seems not:

Like all the former digital nomads I’ve spoken to, I don’t regret a second of my travels. I am immensely grateful to have had an opportunity that many aren’t afforded – and I often felt that gratitude intensely as I looked on, in awe, at the foreign landscapes I found myself in.

So the story isn’t that “the dream turned sour” at all. It’s that “I had a brilliant time with digital nomadism and now I’m trying something else.”

A change isn’t forever. Why would it be? Who said it should be? You can change again, whether forwards into another experiment or back into something more conventional. That’s not a failure. Nothing turned sour. You just moved on.

And it’s not a “gap in the CV” by the way. Your CV, if such a thing is important to you, will display an era of successful self-employment. When asked about it, tell the truth. Tell them what you got out of it and what you learned.

Big thanks to everyone who backed our biannual Kickstarter. The campaign is over now, but you can still pre-order Issue 18 in our online shop.

06 Jul 2025 No Comments