I started thinking about Nomad Earth Catalog when I was still working full-time in a remote and location-independent job. I was nomading in Chiang Mai, and met some folks who seemed to have more autonomy, not just in how they lived, but in what they chose to put out into the world. They were steering their own work, while I was mostly responding to briefs handed down to me.
I’ve always been attracted to the idea of putting out in the world what I want to be there (instead of what clients ask for, or what employers instruct), but for the most part that mode of life always seemed to feel reserved for artists or entrepreneurs.
To be an artist, make art. To be an entrepreneur, start a business. Neither of these decisions were inaccessible to me personally, but working a typical 40-hour a week in exchange for reliable income stifled my ability to give serious consideration to making a big change in my life.
During my undergraduate years, I was deep into thinking about communal experiments, and the question of how life otherwise might look. I remember being fascinated by the communes of the 1960s and beyond, and the attempts at collective ways of living that refused the default. That thread, of searching for alternatives, has been part of my life ever since (even though I ended up falling into a fairly banal working life for about a decade).
Whole Earth Catalog kept coming up in my mind as a reference point. It was countercultural, experimental, and strange in the best way. And I kept wondering: what would a project like that look like today, for today's people? That question was really the seed of NEC.
A few months ago, I decided to go all in and create this. That meant walking away from my tech career, investing in coaching and development, and putting real time and money into building this.
There’s no guarantee this will sustain me. Obviously I hope it does, because I feel more in service to others doing this than I ever did working for an employer. So, while I have the financial buffer to sustain this, I'm going to give it my all. I’d like to be transparent about it as NEC evolves.
After making all the different kinds of content NEC has put out so far, I’ve realized that what I most enjoy writing are the Nomadics essays. They let me dig into ideas and questions that I think are most important. The Nomadics pieces remind me why I wanted to start NEC at all: to think out loud about how we live, move, and make meaning.
I like writing about places too, and I think my places content will hopefully broaden my readership and give this more potential for working out financially, but at the moment I feel that many of my experiences have been too generic to offer anything truly substantive, which I guess is a prompt for me in and of itself: how can/should I travel to be capable of producing the kind of work I myself would admire? You could say that my travel experiences thus far have been squarely within the digital nomad realm, and I think it's important for me to depart from that frame.
Right now, one clear way to monetize is through affiliate links, most of which I can tie to Places and Tools content. In practice, this has meant linking to Amazon or brands directly. That’s not inspiring and comes with some tradeoffs, but it feels like the least bad option available at this stage. What matters to me is that the content itself remains free—at least 90% of it, even if some paid content comes later. Paywalls shrink access, exclude entire geographies, and reduce the reach of ideas that should circulate widely. If using affiliate infrastructure for now makes it possible to earn anything at all while keeping my content open, that feels worth the compromise.
I’m also in the midst of working on things that could live in the NEC store—zines, digital downloads, and small experimental offerings. A lot of the ideas I’m most excited about are pretty niche, and without an established readership I’m not counting on them to make much money, if any at all. For now, I’ve decided to invest in creating things I’d be proud to put into the world, whether or not anyone buys them. That obviously isn’t sustainable forever, but it feels important at this stage to start with integrity—making things because I believe they matter, not just because they sell. I imagine that as my financial buffer drains, they'll be some tradeoffs here I'll need to face, but for the moment, I'd love for the offerings in the store to represent the ethos of the brand as closely as possible.
What I don’t want is for NEC to become another publication that mostly exists to teach people how to replicate itself: how to start a blog, how to sell a lifestyle, etc. That cycle doesn’t interest me. What matters to me is that NEC’s creations—whether essays, guides, or future experiments—feel like they stand on their own, as something meaningful in themselves.
This space is where I’ll share the behind-the-scenes: joys and woes, decisions made, experiments brewing, finances, and the things that do and don’t work for the various things I'm trying to achieve. I love when others open up their process, as there are often so many learnings to come from it. This is my way of doing the same. I have no idea if this will be useful to you or apply to your own life or creative practice, but I trust that if tend to this space, someone will probably learn something from my mistakes, my successes, and my feelings about it all.
Looking ahead, the publication is just one layer of what I hope NEC becomes. In its broadest sense, I see it as a collective—an art and media cooperative producing culture. I’d love to create (and co-create) zines, documentary films, pop-up experiences, maybe even a print edition of The Catalog (an homage to Whole Earth Catalog).
The real goal is to assemble people around ideas, around futures worth building, and around ways of living and making otherwise.
For now, though, it’s just me at desk, sharing where things stand while I get ready to go live.
