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We’re Steven and Diana. A couple of traveling social entrepreneurs from the Netherlands. We quit our corporate jobs in 2011 when we realised that the world was a lot bigger and more complex than we knew. We wanted to get out there, not as tourists but as travelers. We wanted to feel what it meant to live in a different part of the world. We wanted to stay longer than a couple of months. In fact we desired to have all the time in the world. We dreamt of taking our jobs with us and making money while traveling. We dreamt of helping out on local projects with our personal skills and talents. We dreamt…. and then we decided to DO! We started an experiment. An experiment that would turn out be a new lifestyle.
Our experiment
Our experiment would last one year. We would travel from Mexico to Argentina and back again. We would try to make money while being on the road and we would create a bucket list of things that we wanted to do, see, hear, feel and experience during this year. This experiment we would call Digital Nomadz and we would see where it would take us. So in the summer of 2011 we bought two tickets to Central America and have been on a crazy adventure ever since. The year turned out to be too short. Argentina turned out to be far away. And our bucket list filled up quicker then that we could mark off items. And of course we bought our beloved 1972 VW bus called Nina.
Living rent free
We live our lives to the fullest and we won’t let money interfere with what we want to do in life. During the first two years of our trip we haven’t paid rent. We’ve made deals with hotels here in Mexico where we do freelance projects for them and in return we have a beautiful place to stay. (For example: we have lived a tropical island for almost a year, for free!)
Minimalistic
We’re living the minimalistic lifestyle. When we left the Netherlands, we gave up 90% of all our possessions. The rest of it went in our backpacks. We discovered that it’s is true what they say: the things you own end op owning you. This is a picture of everything we owned when we left in 2011
All over the world
In the meantime we have been on trips to India, Thailand, Mexico, Guatemala, the US and more and we are on the route to Argentina. We even got married in Mexico and had many different adventures and learned valuable life lessons. On this site we are writing about these things in the form of our personal experiences, new experiments and of course we share pictures.
Working Wonderfully
One thing we discovered while living this lifestyle is that we have to bring a deeper sense of purpose of living back into our society. The unhappiness in so many lives should tell us that success alone is not enough. Material success and focus on constant growth has brought us to strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy. These realisations made us start a project separate from Digital Nomadz called Wonderlijk Werken: a Dutch lifestyle design blog and training program to inspire more people to live and work on their own terms in a more meaningful way.
Enjoy both of our sites and drop us a line about what you think!
Diana Zwerink-Vermeij and Steven Zwerink
Digital Nomadz