Tom Slater was staying in a hut on the dreamy white sands of a beach in Ko Pha Ngan Thailand with no plans for the day, no responsibilities and no commitments.
He had friends around him and the sun was shining. But even so, he could feel the black fog descending yet again.
‘I was in paradise. The biggest choice I had to make that entire day was what I was eating for lunch, and I just felt empty and unfulfilled,’ Tom, remembers.
The 52-year-old had spent his life travelling from continent to continent, disconnecting from the digital world while taking opportunities as they arose and making money where he could. But the lifestyle left him thoroughly depressed.
‘I was dogged by this constant sense of unease. I wasn’t happy and I didn’t know why,’ the online coach and mentor, tells Metro.
Growing up in St Andrews, Scotland, Tom often got into trouble and clashed with his father, who was a succesful academic. So he dropped out of school at 17 with just a handful of qualifications to his name and a plane ticket.
‘I didn’t have any money so my dad bought me a one-way trip to Australia with £150 and said: “Go and become a man”. I think he was just desperate. He didn’t know what to do with me,’ he remembers.
Tom was both terrified and hungry for adventure, but when he got off the plane and headed for the job centre, he was dismayed to find that the nation was in the grip of the hottest winter on record and the farming jobs he’d assumed he could get, were posted as being ‘not for foreigners’.
Having never travelled alone before and not having a clue how to cook, the teenager soon ran out of money and ended up drifting up to the north, sleeping rough and hunting for work.
He found himself a job with a travelling funfair, setting up the dodgem track. ‘I slept in the back of a lorry and woke up with diesel oil all over my body. I felt out of my depth and really homesick. I thought I’d made a huge mistake. But at the same time, I was enjoying the freedom,’ Tom remembers.
His fortunes changed when he found a job picking cantaloupes and worked for four months straight until he had enough money to fly out of Australia and to the Pacific Islands, where he had a wild time exploring the jungles of Indonesia.
Nine months later, Tom came home – long-haired, skinny and unkempt. His parents thought he’d got everything out of his system and was ready to go to university, but their son had his sights set on Borneo.
He got a grant with the World Wildlife Fund with a botanist friend and started traveling with the Iban tribe as they travelled through the rainforest collecting medicinal plants – even discovering one unknown to western science.
‘I was living in the jungle hunting and eating bush animals having this big initiation. It was incredible; like travelling back in time. I matured a lot. We were eating deer, snake and monkey, which is pretty horrible. Very chewy; sinewy and muscly. We caught them with a poisoned dart and blowpipe.’
For the first time Tom was happy. ‘I had this romantic idea that I could just vanish into the jungle and be involved in a really simple culture where I didn’t have to get a job or be berated about not going to university,’ he remembers.
After a few years of travelling around the globe, Tom thought it was time to come home and join the rat race back in Scotland.
‘At 22, I got a job in an office pushing a trolley around handing out photocopies, getting files and distributing pencils and Tippex. I had to wear a suit and I f***ing hated it. We had to go to these stupid team meetings once a week where we were given these motivational speeches. There were posters on the wall that said “Team Work Makes the Dream Work.” It was soul destroying. I hated it. I left after two months.’
Tom was one of the earliest digital nomads; people who travel through most of the year while working remotely. He would come home for months at a time before heading off again, funding himself through job in call centres, scuba diving and film making.
Using his earnings, Tom went searching for adventure again and spent his 20s and 30s travelling the world, settling in Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia, Honduras, Thailand, Guatemala, Mexico, India and other far-flung spots, following the hippy trail and making new friends.
But despite these dazzling locations and life changing experiences, dark shadows followed Tom. He would find himself bored and gloomy even though he was scuba diving all day every day.
‘There were periods where I literally didn’t get out of bed for three months, apart from to eat. That was a real struggle,’ he remembers. ‘There was just exhaustion in the body, you can’t move – the curtains are shut.’
On one trip back to see family in Scotland Tom asked for help from his GP who suggested medication – but he didn’t want pills, he wanted to fix what was eating at him.
At the same time he started to see commercial success. In Varanasi, India, he worked with street kids and discovered a bank run by children for children. The bank manager was eight and the security guard was five – so he started to pitch a documentary idea. Film executives loved it and money came rolling in from production companies across the world; he’d amassed approximately £110,000 to make his movie.
‘I thought I’d found my thing. Everyone was saying how talented I was. But I just felt so much stress’, he recalls. He’d also witnessed friends in the industry feeling unhappy despite achieving amazing things – like his friend Malik Bendjelloul, a Swedish filmmaker who won a host of prizes, including an Oscar, and went on to end his own life.
‘It made a lot of people, including myself, think more deeply about what I was doing and why I was doing it,’ he explains.
Eventually, Tom abandoned the filming project – despite being offered another £30,000 to stay on – and came to England where he settled in a house share with people in their late teens and twenties. By this point, he was knockin on middle age and still didn’t know what he was doing with his life.
‘I was nearly 40, my relationship at the time had ended, my film project had collapsed and I was in this house share. I looked around and thought: “Wow. I’ve really made a massive mess”,’ he remembers.
Tom isn’t the only digital nomad to discover the lifestyle isn’t it’s all cracked up to be. Recent research has found it can be a tough life, with one in threestruggling with their mental health according to bunq’s recent Global Living Report. Nearly 1 out of 5 (19%) of respondents said that missing loved ones is the hardest part of their lifestyle.
In a bid to fix his problem, Tom resisted the urge to take off again and instead started learning about somatic therapy, a practice that focuses on how emotions appear within the body, through friends.
He started to practice himself and had an epiphany; that he hadn’t been travelling or exploring so much as running away.
‘I realised I’d felt so lost. I was trying to get away from my problems, and every time I slowed down, I felt s***,’ he remembers. ‘So I was alone a lot, I didn’t stay anywhere long enough to establish any kind of intimate partnership and I just didn’t know what to do with myself.’
Tom continued with therapy until, for the first time since he was a teen, he felt the fog lift. Then he decided to start using what he’d learned to help others and for the past ten years has been coaching others through his business Sapience holding retreats to help others find peace.
With the depression long gone, he started travelling again. This time he could enjoy the sun and new sights fully, because instead of escaping his past, he was building a future.
Tom now regularly witnesses people who, from the outside appear to have it all, but like he did, feel lost and depressed. His experiences have taught him that material success and the trappings of wealth don’t always bring happiness.
He explains: ‘Among my clients, I have seen a lot of people who are very successful, who have made a lot of money, who still feel crappy. They’re living in a huge house that feels empty. Or they think if they get all this stuff, they will feel great. And they don’t. I’ve got a number of billionaire clients who feel this way.
‘I blame this idealised lifestyle that is being sold today. This ultimate optimisation thing that says you have to work yourself to the bone, just push through and never give up.’
But the digital nomad life is a social media lie, insists Tom. People are sold experiences that don’t match up to reality because Instagram and the like promotes influencer lifestyles that are heavily curated, filtered and edited and that by no means represent real life.
‘This culture of crushing it is really unhealthy. We’re wondering why so many men die by suicide and why there’s so much depression, so much medication and one of the reasons is all this pressure to succeed,’ he adds.
Today, Tom is settled in South Devon, but plans to move to the States with his partner soon. He has no regrets over his adventurous past or the struggles he has experienced.
‘I have never owned a house, had a mortgage, a car or an overdraft. But doing what I do now, I have so much purpose and community. I work for about four hours a day and have a thriving business working with amazing people,’ he says.
‘It took me 20 years to realise that you can’t outrun unhappiness. In the end, I just stayed still until happiness found me.’
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