32. | I love what I do

Besides choosing the digital nomad lifestyle, a very important factor for me is that I love what I do. The fact is that my whole life has been spent at the computer. So I don’t have to choose a new form now, because my everyday life is intertwined with digital life.

I will tell you about my connection with IT.

Me and the computer

I was born in the heroic age. Neither computers nor mobile phones were part of everyday life. We were probably around 1987. The computer as a phenomenon was then starting to infiltrate our lives. I am talking about Hungary. At that time, we were still a country on the COCOM list. The COCOM list was a multilateral trade embargo that hit the countries of the Eastern Bloc. The list got its name from the abbreviation of the first two words of the committee that coordinated the embargo, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, founded in 1947. Although computers existed earlier, they only started to reach the population of Hungary during these times. Sometimes people managed to get them by smuggling.

Around 1987, my brother and I got a card game called Ace Basic. Its slogan was “Programming is child’s play – even for adults”. It was a pack of cards that taught the basics of programming. If I remember correctly, I didn’t go far with it.

My father asked me a question at that time. I still remember that I was working in the bathtub. I was 11 years old. What else would I have done? I was writing my thesis about the prehistoric man, Samu from Vértesszőlős. You did things like that in the bathtub, please calm me down! Dad came in and asked me what I would say if we bought a computer. I didn’t really understand the concept. He said he meant a Commodore. I only knew the Komondor breed of dog, so after we finished the conversation, I was actually thinking about buying a dog.

In comparison, the family soon acquired a Commodore VIC 20 computer. We bought it from a young guy, and we went to get it together. The boy showed me an impressive program he had written. A three-dimensional donut was spinning on the screen. He showed me the program. It was magical. I immediately felt that I wanted to write programs too.

The decision remained, but I couldn’t make it happen. At that time, I didn’t know that I was capable of self-taught learning. There was no internet back then (oh my God!), and without help I couldn’t do anything with a computer. Even though I went to a school club at the age of 13, where they taught us the Basic language, I simply didn’t understand it. I didn’t attach much importance to it.

Then, when I was 14, my dad brought home a 286 AT PC. This was also the heroic age, but this computer was somehow more serious. Such niceties as a Winchester and a mouse weren’t even in this machine yet. It came with a Hercules monochrome monitor. And 2 pieces of 3.5” floppy disks. One disk had the operating system (DOS). This started the machine, and then you could remove this disk. The other disk had a development system called Quick Basic.

The real story actually started here for me. The computer was serious. I was already a serious person myself, at least that’s what I thought about myself at the time. Basic, on the other hand, was child’s play. Of course, that’s not true, that’s what I thought at the time. Even though I didn’t succeed with it, the card game was still just a game, and my incorrect conclusion from this was that the program itself was a game.

I needed something more serious!

So I went to my dad’s workplace to the IT guys and asked them if they could give me something serious, not this toy. They looked at me strangely, but after a short conversation they gave me a third floppy disk with Borland’s Turbo Pascal on it and as a bonus a 600-page Turbo Pascal university book. And the advice “good luck!”

That summer, at the age of 14, I learned to program in Turbo Pascal. Life’s strange little surprise was that I went to an economics high school, where I graduated as a computer programmer. In the first year, it turned out that we would learn programming in Turbo Pascal. In other words, I arrived at this training with almost the same level of knowledge as our teacher, who had just graduated from university. For a while, I basked in the experience of getting a few looks from the teacher asking for my approval during classes.

I started writing complete programs very quickly, just for my own entertainment. Within a few years, the moment came when I could ask for money for what I was doing. This was still the early nineties.

By the end of the decade, the internet was available. Accordingly, my first job was web design, which is why I can say that I have 25 years of experience in web design. Visual Basic development was also my first job.

I almost forgot that I was introduced to Excel around 1995. My God, it is my friend for almost 30 years…

Before I remembered, I already had a complete second job in addition to my regular jobs. It was an excellent income supplement, I often worked instead of sleeping. But I always enjoyed doing this kind of work.

Since April 2002, I have been keeping an Excel spreadsheet in which I can find the exact time spent on all my personal work. It’s like a block clock: I sit down to work and press the button. If I get up for some reason, I press it again. I know exactly to the seconds how much time I spent on my second job on the computer. The table now has 25,000 rows and 6,861 hours of work recorded…

Summary of my digital past

For the past 35 years, computers have been my learning, my recreation, my work, my second job. Whatever I have done professionally, it only exists digitally. It probably occurred to me 20 years ago that if we turned off all the computers in the world, there would be no trace of my professional work.

Besides that, of course, I have done a lot of things that can remain. I have built walls, built a garden, built parts of my apartment and house. I made a play castle for my children. I planted trees. But these are not the results of my professional work.

What do I still love about it?

Despite having been typing for so many years, I still love doing it. The computer is my companion, the one I can always count on.

I still enjoy listening to the keyboard click under my hand. It is an experience to see the lines of my writing come to life on the monitor.

I love that I use the computer to create order in my own chaos. I enjoy the fact that my computer is in order. It gives me confidence that I work with methods that maintain the illusion of dominance. I feel this world as my own within my own framework. This is knowledge that I can pass on to others.

I love that by the end of the day, there are no more than ten emails in my mailbox. I love that there is no more than one icon on my Windows desktop. I love loading and consuming my to-do list program. I enjoy having all my tasks in my Google calendar. It feels good to know what email addresses I have and what I use them for. I look into the password management program with feelings like I’m entering Ali Baba’s cave. I use the programs I’ve chosen over the years with satisfaction. Using none of them is an obligation. They simply help my life.

I like that I can experience creative experiences with the help of this tool. For me, creating a well-done Excel table is a joy. Whether I make it for myself or for someone else. I’ve met many grateful looks after handing over a solution or after creating it in front of the user’s eyes.

Every website I’ve created has been a joy in the end. I’ve created more than a hundred, and I’m sure I still have a few more waiting for me.

When I want to switch off, I sit down next to my computer. Assuming I’m at home, because I’ve designed my life so that I’m not a geek. I walk a lot in nature, ride a bike, travel. I’m in company a lot. But if I’m not doing these things, I can sit down at my computer at any time.

I turn to this tool for planning and studying. Google has been making our everyday lives easier for many years. And for a while now, AI has been turbocharging our everyday lives. I welcome every change.

This is how easy it is to become a digital nomad

When I said that all the events of my past life have led me to make a complete lifestyle change, I also have the facts in mind that I just wrote about.

I actually only add the adjective nomad to my digital life so far. I want to continue doing what I have been doing. I simply want to travel while working.

The digital world is not for everyone. I have met many people who claim to be anti-talented when it comes to IT, and I have to agree with them. I have seen many who think they are prepared to use the machine, but they are not. And of course, I see a lot of professional around me. Everyone does it differently. That is why the digital lifestyle cannot be right for everyone.