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Disturbanization — The Demographic Shift Nobody Is Talking About
A useful by-product of the great resignation and remote work
Ask an average person to name more than a couple of cities or places in some big countries of the world, and they’re bound to struggle.
To the not-so-well-traveled individual, America is New York and California, India is Delhi and Mumbai (or the erstwhile Bombay), the UK is London, China is Beijing and Shanghai, Japan is Tokyo.
If that.
Try it for yourself. Leave out the country you belong to — and name 10 cities in one of the other big nations I just listed.
You’d be surprised.
Beyond some of these iconic cities of each country, you’d find most people struggling to name a lot of rather important cities, which are home to most of the population of these countries.
When you look at the numbers, Delhi and Mumbai comprise ~3% of India’s population — a rounding error when you consider the size of the (well over) billion-strong nation.
Why then do we only know of a couple of major cities and forget the remainder of entire nations?
I believe all that is about to change. Here’s why.
The digital nomads aren’t an aberration
My cousin and his wife spent the last 12–24 months traveling from one hill station to another, spending a few weeks in each place.
They’d rent out an Airbnb or a cheap motel and ensure they carry their portable internet everywhere — and work from “home.”
Initially, it seemed like a nice way of combining work with fun and satisfying your inner travel lust. However, in a survey done in the early parts of the pandemic, America had already seen a nearly 100% increase in the number of traditional workers who describe themselves as digital nomads.
According to the report, the number of traditional workers working as digital nomads in 2020 had nearly doubled from 3.2 million to 6.3 million.
The traditional worker was defined as workers who had regular jobs and didn’t work independently or weren’t freelancers. That second category…
