I’m a Climate Migrant. Just Not a High-End One.

What an Italian columnist’s joke about “high-end climate migrants” says about remote work, seasonality and the places we choose to live.

There is a particular kind of article I have always loved: the one you begin reading because somebody else is being brilliantly mocked and finish, several minutes later, with the slightly uncomfortable realization that the specimen under observation is, in fact, you.

That happened to me with “Un laptop per salvagente” — roughly, “A Laptop as a Lifebuoy” — by Italian writer and columnist Michele Masneri, published in Il Foglio on August 18. I cannot reproduce the article here, obviously, both out of respect for copyright and because summarising a genuinely funny piece of writing is a little like explaining a joke to somebody who arrived late: you can preserve the facts, but there is a reasonable chance you will murder the thing that made it worth hearing in the first place.

Still, it is worth trying, particularly for an international NOMAG audience, because beneath Masneri’s very Italian — and very funny — social anthropology there is something much bigger going on, something that concerns remote workers, digital nomads and, increasingly, anyone fortunate enough to have some degree of geographical freedom.

So, first, Masneri. Then me. I promise to keep the two separate.

First: what Masneri actually says

Masneri starts from the seemingly endless summer, heatwaves, tropical nights and that increasingly familiar sensation that spending three consecutive months at around 35°C is beginning to alter behaviours we once took for granted. Out of this he identifies — or perhaps, more accurately, defines and gives comic form to — a small new social category: the “migranti climatici di fascia alta,” the “high-end climate migrants,” or MCFA in his acronym. These are obviously not climate migrants in the tragic and literal sense of people displaced because their homes or livelihoods have become unviable; they belong to the enormously more privileged part of humanity whose work can be performed with a computer and a decent internet connection, and who can therefore respond to unbearable weather with a thought that is at once absurdly fortunate and perfectly rational: perhaps I should simply go somewhere else.

Masneri describes this figure as the overheated 2.0 version of the old digital nomad, except that this new nomad may never have wanted to be particularly nomadic in the first place. In the old days, the city in August emptied, evenings eventually cooled down and staying home was still a perfectly viable option. Now the heat continues into the night, tourist cities remain full, and the reluctant MCFA begins looking at maps.

Mountains enter the equation. So do Latvia, Lapland, fjords and Norway, which Masneri jokes has become the new Porto Cervo — the famous Sardinian playground of the wealthy. Family second homes, once valued primarily through nostalgia, are suddenly reassessed according to a much more brutal twenty-first-century criterion: does the place actually have air conditioning?

This is one of the funniest underlying observations in the piece because it also describes a changing hierarchy of domestic luxury. The terrace, once an almost erotic component of the Mediterranean property fantasy, loses some of its charm when it becomes an unusable slab of heat, while fully ducted air conditioning starts behaving suspiciously like a new status symbol. The person who can remain comfortably at home while everybody else is fleeing the city has acquired a privilege that might once have been measured in square metres, views or neighbourhoods.

Then there are friends.

If a friend owns a house by the sea, in the mountains or simply somewhere cooler, the MCFA may find himself becoming unexpectedly receptive to invitations. The problem, Masneri observes, is that escaping summer used to mean perhaps a week or two, whereas now it can mean months. The climate migrant therefore accepts destinations, social situations and even friendships he might previously have avoided; he becomes willing to look after dogs, adjusts to other people’s habits and, in the most extreme evolution of the species, risks becoming the guest who simply never leaves — effectively a climatic squatter installed in somebody else’s holiday home.

And hospitality itself is work. You are no longer entirely free, because you must follow somebody else’s rhythm, converse, entertain and perhaps even speak at breakfast, which Masneri regards with approximately the enthusiasm normally reserved for a minor criminal offence.

Finally, the MCFA begins to investigate secondary areas: lesser-known hills, depopulated valleys, empty houses and villages that suddenly appear rather interesting when the alternatives are a boiling city or a prohibitively expensive summer resort. Inevitably, this leads to that glorious project so many groups of friends have entertained at least once: why don’t we all buy houses in some half-empty village and live there together?

Masneri’s verdict is merciless and probably accurate: it is one of those ideas with an extraordinarily low rate of actual implementation, a kind of personal bridge across the Strait of Messina that everyone carries inside themselves and almost nobody ever builds.

That, more or less, is Masneri.

If you read Italian, go and find the original, because the argument survives summarising but most of the pleasure does not.

And now my problem: I appear to be one of them

The reason the piece stayed with me, however, is that I could not maintain the comfortable distance of the observer for very long.

At NOMAG we spend an almost unreasonable amount of time discussing remote work, digital nomadism, mobility, temporary living, secondary destinations and what happens to places when work no longer forces everyone into the same geographical patterns. I have been professionally obsessed with variations of this question for years, through different magazines and projects, because beneath all the fashionable vocabulary there is one fairly radical change that still has not been fully absorbed.

What happens to the geography of your life when work stops deciding, every single morning, exactly where you have to be?

For most of modern working history the answer was simple because there was barely a question. The office was there, the factory was there, the studio or shop was there, therefore you lived somewhere from which getting there every morning was possible, and then — ideally — attempted to enjoy the rest of the arrangement.

Once that link loosens, even partially, things become considerably more complicated.

Because you no longer ask only where you would like to live.

You begin asking when.

And I increasingly suspect that “when” is going to matter almost as much as “where” for a certain kind of mobile worker.

I apparently spent years migrating without giving it the correct name

For years I have alternated London with small Italian towns where work took me, while inserting into that geography long periods working either at high altitude in the Dolomites or at high latitude in Norway.

I never described this as climate migration because I had much more respectable explanations available. Remote work. Professional mobility. Being close to projects. Curiosity. A preference for changing environments. A perhaps constitutionally questionable inability to remain in the same place for too long.

All of those explanations were true.

But looking at the map retrospectively, there is something rather suspicious about repeatedly deciding, whenever geographical freedom allowed it, to place myself either considerably higher above sea level or considerably further north.

Perhaps climate had something to do with it after all.

And not only climate.

People.

Because over the years I have discovered something else about myself which may require the creation of a subcategory Masneri did not include: the moderately antisocial climate migrant, someone who is often attracted to exactly the same beautiful places everybody else loves, but finds them considerably more beautiful once everybody else has left.

The destination may be right. The season may be wrong.

The Dolomites are extraordinary. This is not breaking news.

But I find them even more extraordinary when a mountain road is functioning as a mountain road rather than an unusually scenic car park, when eating somewhere does not require the logistical skills of a military planner, and when it is possible to look at a mountain without a queue of people between you and the mountain, each waiting patiently to manufacture more or less the same photograph.

Norway is similar. It remains one of the places where I have found it easiest to work for long stretches, but I feel no particular need to demonstrate my affection for it by arriving precisely when everyone else does and paying the maximum achievable price for every available bed, meal and square metre of temporary shelter.

And many of Italy’s smaller towns work in exactly the same way.

I know quite a few of them not because an algorithm identified them for me as the “10 Secret Italian Villages You Must Visit Before Everyone Else Does” — which is usually the fastest possible route to ensuring that everyone else does — but because work brought me there. In July and August they can become stages. A few weeks later they become towns again.

Perhaps quieter, occasionally inconvenient, sometimes even slightly melancholy, but infinitely more interesting if your objective is not to consume the place in forty-eight hours but to live there for a while.

This is where climate migration starts overlapping with a question that I think is much more important than the usual digital-nomad fantasy of endless movement: seasonality.

Remote work does not only allow us to choose different destinations. It may allow some of us to redistribute ourselves across those destinations at different times.

And that is a far more interesting proposition.

We have spent too long confusing freedom with movement

There has always been something faintly competitive in the language surrounding digital nomadism: countries visited, airports crossed, cities worked from, passports filled, laptops photographed in places where no sensible person would willingly place an expensive electronic device.

Movement itself became evidence of freedom.

After years of moving around, I have arrived at a conclusion that is almost embarrassingly unfashionable:

perhaps I should migrate less.

Not stop moving. Move better.

Stay longer in the places that genuinely work for me, rather than treating geography as a collection exercise. Because if remote work gives us anything genuinely valuable, surely it should not merely be the ability to change airport every three weeks; it should also give us the ability to choose more intelligently where we spend meaningful pieces of our lives.

Perhaps the real luxury is not being able to say that you have worked from twenty-seven countries.

Perhaps it is staying somewhere long enough to know where to buy bread without opening Google Maps.

Long enough for the person behind the bar to stop asking where you are from.

Long enough to become, temporarily at least, something slightly more interesting than a visitor.

There remains one problem with Masneri’s diagnosis

I am prepared to accept the first part.

Climate migrant: guilty.

I may even plead guilty to the moderately antisocial subcategory, particularly because one of the great advantages of travelling out of season is that there are fewer human beings occupying precisely the same square metre you were hoping to enjoy.

It is the “high-end” part that creates difficulties.

Because being a genuinely high-end climate migrant would presumably mean being able to choose the Dolomites precisely when everyone wants the Dolomites: peak summer or the height of ski season.

I cannot.

And, increasingly, I am not even sure I would want to.

So over the years I appear to have developed a considerably less glamorous strategy, one which lacks the obvious Instagram value of perpetual peak-season mobility but compensates with lower prices, fewer queues and a surprising amount of peace.

Follow the climate, but travel against the season.

Perhaps move less often. Stay considerably longer. Choose destinations according to the moment in which they actually work for you rather than the moment in which everyone has been told to want them.

That may not qualify as high-end migration.

But you sleep better.

It costs a lot less.

And, occasionally, you even get the mountain to yourself.

So, kudos to Michele Masneri for an article that began by making me laugh at an amusing new social category and ended by making me realise I have apparently been living inside it for years.

The diagnosis, unfortunately, appears to be correct.