The Nomads Who Went Back (And What Happened Next)

Marcus left on a Tuesday.

No announcement, no farewell drinks. One week he was at his usual desk in the coworking space in Roma Norte — window seat, second from the left, the one with the best afternoon light — and then he wasn't. A WhatsApp message a few days later: Heading back to Toronto. Time to figure out the next chapter.

I'd known Marcus for about eight months by then. We'd met in my second month in Mexico City, when he'd already been there almost a year. Canadian, mid-thirties, spent years in television — operations, news, marketing — before deciding that two weeks of travel a year wasn't enough anymore. He'd told himself the freelance pivot was temporary. A year, maybe two. See how it goes.

He stayed three.

The shift

He didn't go back because it failed.

The media industry he'd come from was contracting. Projects were shorter, rates were lower, the clients who'd kept him busy for two years were harder to reach. He'd started renting out his apartment in Toronto when he left, which helped. But somewhere in the months before he left, a question had taken up residence that he couldn't quite shake loose: he wasn't sure what he was building toward anymore.

That's different from running out of money or missing home. It's subtler — the problem of sustaining meaning over time, which doesn't surface in year one when the novelty is still carrying you. It shows up later, when the energy of the original decision has worn off and what's left is just the work, the life, the question of whether that's enough.

For Marcus, at that point, the answer became: not right now.

The plan was straightforward. Move back into the Toronto apartment, pick up contract work at the local stations that knew him, rebuild the financial buffer. Maybe he'd leave again. He didn't treat it as permanent — just necessary.

The door doesn't close, he said, the last time we had coffee. You can go back without it meaning you failed.

What going back actually looks like

The first two weeks were warm. Everyone wanted to hear the stories. He was the returning traveler, and there's a specific kind of welcome that comes with that.

Around week three, the messages changed tone.

His friends had lives built around schedules he wasn't part of — 9-5 jobs, kids, weekday evenings already spoken for. They were glad he was back, genuinely, but their availability hadn't shifted to meet his. He had open mornings and no particular reason to be anywhere. The coworking space he tried felt quiet in a way that the one in Mexico City hadn't — more permanent residents than people passing through, less of the ambient energy of people in motion.

I feel like I'm visiting a city I used to live in, he wrote. Like I remember how it works but I don't quite live here yet.

That's the part that catches people off guard. Not the logistics — sorting out the finances, re-establishing routines — but the specific disorientation of returning to a place that stayed still while you changed. The city is the same. The people are mostly the same. You're not.

Some relationships had moved on in ways that were hard to track from a distance. A few had deepened, sustained by years of video calls and the particular intimacy of following someone's life from far away. The map he'd carried of home didn't match the territory anymore.

It took about four months before Toronto started to feel like somewhere he actually lived rather than somewhere he was staying.

The question underneath the question

Marcus isn't the only one. Over two years in Mexico City I've watched a handful of people leave — some after one year, some after three, some after a month that made them realize it wasn't right for them at all. The reasons are never quite the same: a relationship, a family situation, a financial ceiling, a creeping sense that the next city wasn't going to solve what needed solving.

What's consistent is the thing they describe when they talk about it afterward. Not regret exactly. More like: a clear-eyed accounting of what the trade was, and a recognition that the trade was worth it even if the outcome wasn't what they imagined.

None of the people I've watched go back used the word "failure" to describe it.

The word they reached for was closer to a chapter ending. Some went home and never wanted to leave again. Some rested for six months and then packed their bags a second time. Some found something in between — a home base somewhere, with a few months a year spent elsewhere. None of those is the right answer. But they all had one thing in common: going back was a decision they made, not a conclusion that was made for them.

That distinction matters more than it sounds.

That framing — not whether it's worth it, but whether you can handle what it actually costs — is the more useful question. People who struggle with this life aren't usually struggling because the life is bad. They're struggling because they expected a different set of problems than the ones they got.

What they brought back

Marcus still freelances. He works remotely more than he works in-office, which surprised him — he'd assumed going back meant going back to the old structure. It didn't. The skills he'd built, the clients he'd kept, the fluency with working across time zones and without institutional support: those came home with him.

What also came home: a clearer sense of what he won't compromise on. He knows how he works. He knows what kind of environment he needs and what kind he doesn't. He knows how to build structure from nothing, which turns out to be a useful skill in places other than coworking spaces in Roma Norte.

Going back doesn't erase what happened. It just means the chapter closed and another opened.

I still have my desk by the window. Some mornings I look at the seat Marcus used and think about what he said.

Not because I'm planning to go back. But because knowing the door stays open — that this isn't a one-way passage — changes how I hold being here. The choice to stay is a choice, not a default. That's different.

If you're building toward this kind of life and thinking about what it means to make it moveable and sustainable — the gear, the setup, what you carry when everything needs to travel — the Work From Anywhere collection is built around exactly that kind of thinking.