The Dark Side of Being a Digital Nomad

Thirteen years ago, my friend came to Bombay looking for a bigger life. She found success. But somewhere along the way, she lost herself.

Photo by Bhupendra Singh on Unsplash

Thirteen years ago, one of my closest friends arrived in Bombay with two suitcases, three thousand rupees carefully folded inside her wallet, and a heart full of dangerous hope.

Back then, we were young enough to believe cities could save us.

She came from a small town where people measured a woman’s future before she even had the chance to dream properly. A decent marriage. A stable life. A respectable existence. That was the plan everyone had for her. But she wanted more than respectability. She wanted meaning. She wanted movement. She wanted to become someone people remembered.

And Bombay, with all its noise and arrogance and impossible energy, looked exactly like the kind of place where reinvention could happen.

I still remember the first time she called me after moving there.

She sounded breathless all the time.

Not happy. Not sad either. Just overwhelmed in the way only Bombay can overwhelm someone. She told me about crowded locals, tiny rented rooms, office interviews where twenty people competed for one chair, and nights when she cried silently because she was too embarrassed to admit she was struggling.

But she stayed.

That city has a strange way of rewarding endurance. Slowly, life began changing for her. She found work. Then better work. She moved out of terrible, low-paying guest accommodations into proper apartments. Her clothes changed. Her accent softened around English-speaking corporate people. Her Instagram started looking expensive.

And from the outside, it genuinely seemed like she had made it.

Whenever she came home during festivals, relatives looked at her differently. People spoke about her with admiration. Younger cousins wanted to become like her. She had escaped. That was the narrative everyone loved repeating.

But somewhere inside those thirteen years, something in her slowly hardened.

I noticed it in fragments.

The way she stopped laughing freely.

The way every conversation somehow returned to work, deadlines, clients, networking, opportunities, growth.

The way she began apologising for resting.

At first, I thought that was adulthood. Maybe this is simply what happens when ambition becomes your entire personality. But then one evening, during one of her rare visits home, she broke down in front of me so suddenly that it scared me.

We were sitting on the terrace after dinner. The power had gone out for a while, and the whole neighbourhood was unusually quiet. She kept staring at the dark sky before saying something I still cannot forget.

“I don’t think I know how to feel happiness anymore without guilt.”

And for the first time in years, she started talking honestly.

Not the polished version people post online. Not the motivational “follow your dreams” speech everyone expects from someone who escaped a small town and built a life in Bombay.

The real version.

The loneliness.

God, the loneliness.

She said the city gave her thousands of contacts, but very few people she could call at 2 AM without hesitation. Friendships became transactional over time. Everyone was networking. Everyone was exhausted. Everyone was chasing something bigger than themselves. Relationships felt temporary because nobody had time to nurture them properly.

She told me there were nights when she returned to her apartment after corporate events, removed her makeup, sat silently on the floor, and realised nobody actually knew how badly she was mentally struggling.

Because successful people are not allowed to fall apart publicly.

Especially women who “made it.”

She spoke about burnout as if it were a living creature sitting permanently on her chest. The pressure to constantly upgrade her life had become endless. Bigger salary. Better apartment. Better social circle. Better body. Better vacations. Better everything.

Bombay had taught her that stopping even briefly meant falling behind.

And the cruelest part is that the city rewards you for destroying yourself.

People praise your hustle while your mental health quietly collapses behind closed doors.

She admitted there were months when she barely slept properly. Days when anxiety sat inside her stomach from morning till night for absolutely no visible reason. She said there were moments inside crowded office elevators where she suddenly felt like crying, but she would hold it in because there was always another meeting waiting upstairs.

I remember asking her something very simple that night.

“Then why stay?”

And she looked at me with tears in her eyes before saying something that felt painfully honest.

“Because after spending thirteen years building this life, I don’t know who I am without it.”

That sentence stayed with me for weeks.

Because I realised this story is not only hers.

So many people leave home searching for greatness without understanding the emotional price of constant ambition. We romanticise struggle while ignoring what prolonged emotional exhaustion does to a person. We celebrate independence while quietly becoming emotionally isolated. We glorify big cities for making people successful, but nobody talks enough about how they can also make people deeply lonely.

The saddest part is that my friend did achieve everything she once dreamed about.

Financial stability. Respect. A career people admire.

But happiness kept moving further away every time she thought she was close to it.

And recently, something has started changing in her.

Not dramatically. Quietly.

She stopped saying yes to every social event. She started spending weekends alone without guilt. She joined a pottery class simply because it made her feel calm. She calls her parents more often now. She cooks sometimes instead of ordering food every night. Tiny things. Ordinary things.

Human things.

Last month, she told me she finally sat beside Marine Drive alone without checking emails for two straight hours.

And do you know what she said afterward?

“For the first time in years, I felt present in my own life.”

I think that is what this entire journey was really about.

Not success.

Not Bombay.

Not ambition.

Just a human being trying desperately to find herself again underneath everything the world convinced her she needed to become.

If you are reading my story, Thank You!!!

This is Urna, a digital marketer by profession and an instinctive storyteller by passion. I write about myself, my life! And writing here is how I support my medical treatment.

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