semi-nomadic lifestyle – After losing her job in New York, a young woman tried to find belonging by testing life in London, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC—living apartment to apartment for weeks. The experiment didn’t produce a forever address. Instead, she built a semi-noma
When the job that kept her in New York City disappeared, the city she once chased started to feel like a place with no reason to stay.
In her 20s, moving from the suburbs of New Jersey to New York City had felt like a long-earned milestone. She kept busy with a 9-to-5 job. but she also carved out time for restaurants and coffee shops. and she attended events where she could meet creatives. make friends. and enjoy what New York offered.
Then she lost her job.
To keep the life she’d been building. she leaned into networking events and social meetups while she rapidly checked items off her NYC bucket list. But without work tying her to the city, the momentum ran out. After almost a year in New York. she moved back to New Jersey to live with her family. telling herself it would be a pit stop before she returned.
It didn’t end up being that way. For months, she kept moving—just not to another permanent address. She tried living in different cities in search of a place she could truly call home.
While back in New Jersey, she cat-sat in different neighborhoods to make extra money and get out of the house. The experience reminded her how much she loved visiting new places. Within six months of being home in the suburbs, she found herself missing city life.
So she turned the search into an experiment. With her family’s house in New Jersey as her home base, she would test living in a few different places. She planned to travel, live like a local, and hope she’d eventually feel like she belonged.
First, she made a list of cities she’d always been curious about—places with a reputation for great public transit, amazing weather, or a rich cultural scene. She packed her life into a carry-on and began with four distinct cities: London, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.
Between April and July, she stayed for one or two weeks at an apartment in each, using cat-sitting gigs to find accommodations. Traveling from place to place was exhilarating, full of new people and experiences she said she couldn’t have found anywhere else.
Even so, none of the cities delivered the complete picture. Los Angeles was amazing, but she felt it wasn’t a perfect fit for her. Other stops didn’t work out either—she found they weren’t as walkable as she’d hoped. or they felt much too far from family. More importantly, none felt like home. She started to wonder if she was looking for something that wasn’t there.
At some point, she realized the experiment itself might be the answer. She didn’t need to focus on finding a forever address. Instead, she said she was happiest when she kept moving.
So she stopped waiting for the next opportunity and started building one.
For a while, she dreamed of finding a remote job that would offer consistent work while she continued exploring. Instead of waiting for that to show up, she began creating a way to support a semi-nomadic lifestyle. Over the past year. she kept using her family’s house in Jersey as her home base while traveling on a budget and pursuing freelance content creation.
She started her own magazine and began documenting her travels on TikTok. She doesn’t pay rent on a place of her own. She still cat-sits, too—partly to keep accommodation costs low.
The lifestyle comes with trade-offs. She’s always packing and unpacking, and there are stretches when she doesn’t see friends and family. Her income isn’t steady either.
Part of her still yearns for a sense of belonging in one of the cities she visits. But she said finding a forever home is no longer guiding her journey.
In the end, it took living in five different cities for her to land on a definition of home that isn’t about geography. “Home isn’t where your packages arrive,” she wrote. “It’s where you feel valued and motivated.”
For her, she feels at home when she’s on the move. Where she’s “supposed to be” matters less than whether she’s being who she’s supposed to be.
New York job loss semi-nomadic lifestyle cat-sitting freelance content creation TikTok travel remote work search London Toronto Los Angeles Washington DC cost of living housing decisions