Challenging the dominant work ethic: Work, naps, and productivity of location-independent workers

Abstract

This paper critiques the centrality of work in capitalist societies and looks at people who have abandoned their location-bound jobs for the lifestyle of a digital nomad. Five months of fieldwork in Thailand during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that digital nomads aspired to have autonomy over their work, including reducing their work time. However, pursuing their ideal meant negotiating the desire to minimise labour hours on the one hand and guilt about not fitting the hegemonic values of hard work on the other. Digital nomads try to overcome the dominant work ethic in their talk about working productively. While these digital nomads generally spoke of ‘productivity’ in terms of autonomy and efficiency, concerns over ‘appearing lazy’ shifted the register to mainstream concepts of productivity, such as ‘hard work’. Drawing on philosophers of work and the need to take utopias seriously, this article proposes that even if small-scale and individualised, digital nomads’ attempts to reorganise their working lives are an important critique of work, especially in post-COVID trends toward more remote working.