“Going, walking, working, going with sword drawn, band of shy, reckless, indebted, desperate people” sang, mostly unheard, Piero Ciampi more than thirty years ago, but it could still be good now.
To work, of course, and to go, even in full swing if need be, but where, and how? To give certain answers you need faith, it seems, and it is thus that in the post-atomic West (I assume the crisis as the economic equivalent of a nuclear holocaust), which makes one timid or unconscious or indebted or desperate, one looks for glimmers of less rarefied oxygen, innocent escapes from a stale reality made up of closed rooms, and two new secular religions arise.
It is of "digital nomads" on the one hand and, on the other, of the ever-increasing use, by companies of all kinds, of oriental spiritualism courses for their employeesi, two trends effectively described by two articles published, curiously on the same day (September 13), by Corriere della sera and Repubblica.
Two very different trends, but united by the same basic need, a more or less brief escape from monotony and stress. Digital nomads have taken the concept of mobility to the extreme (overused word, and now reduced to a threadbare rag), finding, thanks to the web and its infinite ramifications, a way to maintain oneself, more or less well, detached from belonging to a physical place.
Nomads are a growing community, even if it is forced to define it as such, made up solely of Web workers who have made a very simple reasoning (at least to be said, much more than done), namely that, if all you need is an internet connection and a desk, then you can place that desk anywhere, anywhere in the world, dividing your life between various places at every end of the globe.
The Italian reference site, nomadidigitali.it, contains, in addition to some useful advice for those wishing to take this path, a programmatic manifesto in ten points which opens, to tell the truth pompously, with the phrase "We are the pioneers of a new era", then explaining, at the bottom, That “thanks to the internet we are free to travel and work anywhere".
And this is, in a nutshell, the meaning of digital nomadism, placing your desk, or perhaps your laptop directly on your lap, wherever you prefer, exploiting the substantial ubiquity of that non-place that is the web, to be, finally, travelers and workers, possibly free.
The other side of the same evasion coin, as mentioned, is instead that of the large companies that increasingly (starting from America and ending, passing through the City, in the heart of Europe) they seek relief in meditation, offering its employees dedicated courses, moments and spaces.
This practice, born naturally in Asia, has been massively imported especially to the West coast of the United States, in that Silicon Valley where Western capitalism expresses itself at its highest levels and at the same time seeks solace in Eastern spirituality.
And so, perhaps, that the need for change in capitalism after the crash is unfolding in an unexpected way, on the way (just to stay on the subject of oriental spirituality) towards a new reincarnation: stopping for a moment to meditate, relax for a moment, before going, again, sword drawn.
They say an hour of yoga a week can reduce the stress level among a company's staff by a third, making them sharper and more focused, more compassionate. And therefore, more and more companies, especially among the big names on the internet and in the world of high finance, are equipping themselves with meditation rooms equipped with mats and cushions, sanctuaries of an impromptu lay conversion to a new model of life, a brief spiritual parenthesis that lies on the paradox, quoting Repubblica, of "an ancient tradition that rejects materialism which would make Western capitalism more efficient, which makes materialism a religion".
It may be that work is like power and that, most of all, it wears out those who don't have it. The others, on the other hand, at least some, can always escape from stress by transplanting their PC to Thailand (a very popular destination, it would seem, among digital nomads) or by locking themselves in a room to meditate, imagining for a few tens of minutes that they are elsewhere.
