We Were Always Nomads

For most of human history, we did not stay put.

For roughly 99% of Homo sapiens’ existence — about 200,000 years out of 300,000 — we moved. We followed seasons, animals, water, fruit. We left Africa around 70,000 years ago, and over thousands of generations, fanned out across every continent except Antarctica. We chose places to live the way you might choose a restaurant — based on whether the food was good, the company was right, and the weather worked for you that week.

Then, about 12,000 years ago, in a few river valleys, we started planting seeds.

Settling was the experiment

Agriculture wasn’t progress — at least not at first. Skeletons from early farming villages are shorter, sicker, and shorter-lived than the hunter-gatherer skeletons that preceded them. Anthropologists call this the agricultural paradox. But farming did one thing the old life couldn’t: it concentrated calories. Concentrated calories meant population growth. Population growth meant more farms. More farms meant land that had to be defended, which meant walls, which meant towns, which meant nations, which meant passports.

The whole architecture of modern life — cities, currencies, citizenship, the very idea that you belong to one place — is downstream of that experiment.

For 12,000 years it worked well enough that we forgot it was an experiment.

The experiment is changing

In 2020, something quiet happened: a meaningful share of knowledge workers discovered that their physical location was decoupled from their income. By 2025, more than 50 countries had launched some form of digital nomad visa — a legal recognition that the old contract (you live where your job is) doesn’t always apply anymore.

This isn’t a fringe lifestyle. It’s an old door re-opening.

The question this changes

If, for the first time in 12,000 years, you can again choose where to live — not where you happened to be born, not where your job is, but where your life actually fits — then the question is no longer “should I stay or should I move?”

The real question is:

Are you a settler, or a wanderer?

And whichever one you are, you almost certainly haven’t asked yourself in those terms before.

If you’re a settler

If you’re a settler — and most people are; this is fine — the next question is sharper than it sounds:

Is the place you currently live actually the best fit for who you are?

You were probably born into it. Or you moved there for a job. Or for a partner. Or because it’s where you went to university. Almost no one ends up where they live because they evaluated the planet and chose. That’s normal — but it’s worth noticing.

The same logic our ancestors used when they left Africa is available to you now. Different climates, different communities, different costs, different opportunities. The world has changed since you last looked.

If you’re a wanderer

If you’re a wanderer — and a growing number of people are discovering they are — your question is different:

Which places, in what sequence, will let you live the life you actually want?

You don’t need one answer. You probably need three or four. The art is in the sequence: where do you base, where do you visit, where do you keep an emergency exit, where do you put your money.

What this blog is

optle is built on this question. Opt. Life. Easy.

We cover 12 countries in depth — chosen for foreigner-friendliness, safety, tax structure, real estate, infrastructure, and the things you only learn after you’ve actually lived somewhere: Korea, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, the UAE, Georgia, Portugal, Spain, Türkiye, Estonia, Germany, Panama.

The next three posts in this series help you figure out which question is yours, and how to answer it:

• 0-1. Who are you? — A 15-minute personality test, mapped to the life you’d actually build.
• 0-2. What do you actually want? — A set of cards. You pick. You see.
• 0-3. The 12 countries we’ll cover, and why these.

Then we go.

Welcome to optle.