In the days before the twins’ sudden exit, the community was filled with outlandish rumors.
At first he seemed okay, but it took all of about five minutes before I knew something was off about him.” But even Chiang Mai’s skeptics didn’t foresee the events that, just months after the brothers’ arrival, would lead to their stormy departure. I’m thinking, like, Dude, this is a friend of mine. Ron Tuch, an Army vet who now plays poker professionally, among other ventures, recalls Travis talking, right after meeting him, about a mutual Facebook friend and how he’d “almost had his way with her. They quickly became well known, and well liked, in the campuslike community, though some were a little put off by the pair. “They kind of do fancy handshakes,” an Australian nomad based in Chiang Mai told me. The brothers were identical twins - lanky and youthful-looking - and inseparable. By late October, his brother, Travis, who’d most recently been in Brazil, had joined Aaron in Chiang Mai.
He began showing up at events and interviewing people for a book he said he was writing about the movement. Nimman teems with Westerners in search of fresh starts and grand pursuits, and Chiang Mai feels like nothing so much as a frontier town, a pit stop toward some version of the American Dream or else a portal to opt out of it altogether.Īaron Atlas, a 35-year-old from Indiana, joined the seasonal influx last fall.
“I tell my friends that living in Chiang Mai feels like a giant Burning Man,” Janie Lin, a 34-year-old retired professional poker player from Canada by way of Malta, told me. (Disenchanted longer-term expats have taken to calling the preponderantly bachelor-male nomads Bromads and Digital Gonads.) And there were also, of course, a lot of people working many more than four hours a week to get businesses off the ground. A notable percentage of nomads seemed to have at least flirted with different parts of the manosphere. There were groups devoted to ayahuasca and microdosing and bitcoin and salsa dancing. When I visited, there were transplants who’d defaulted on student loans and planned never to return to the U.S., and other people who were there in search of affordable health care.
It’s a place full of people looking to radically change their lives, and so inevitably it has a robust personal-development scene.
Virtually every day in Nimman, a neighborhood west of the old city favored by this tribe, there are meetups and networking groups and evening get-togethers, with a vibe that’s half-hippie, half-hustler.
Because of the hospitable weather low cost of living tasty food and abundance of cafés, co-working spaces, free Wi-Fi, and other digital nomads, Chiang Mai is an attractive launchpad for a virgin business-minded vagabond, a place where you can buy time to bootstrap your start-up. Ten years after the movement was birthed by Tim Ferriss’s blockbuster 2007 best seller The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, an ever-expanding archipelago of digital-nomad hubs has arisen Medellín, Berlin, and Ubud are among the most popular. For four months, when the air is cool and dry and clear, the city sees a surge in so-called digital nomads, migratory laptop-toting entrepreneurs who make their livings online and can work from anywhere. The high season in Chiang Mai falls between November and February, after the monsoon rains and before the burning season, when farmers in the surrounding valleys set fire to old rice stalks and smoke shrouds the mountains that ring the northern Thai city.