Dec. 9, 2024 | Demir Antay

Starting My Nomadic Journey At 25 Years Old

Hello, so my name is Demir. I just wanted to share my story somewhere. I am 25 years old and tired of living the way I used to live.

I started my nomadic journey 6-7 months ago when I decided to sell everything that I owned and right now I only have a backpack and a suitcase to travel around.

sold everything, got a bag pic

Accountability with this journey.

I just wanted to say hi and introduce myself, tell my story and hopefully keep myself accountable with these posts/journey stories.

I mean I am not trying to be a “woke” by going on a nomadic journey or running away from something unresolved back home.

It did not even start as a nomadic journey. I was just cleaning up because I was getting into the “minimalism” concepts and was trying to practice them.

However, the more I cleaned, the more I got rid of things and tried not to spend my money on anything. The more I realized I wanted to try out to travel and gain new experiences.

The more I wanted to challenge myself.

For me, this is a pursuit of challenge. Not an escape.

I mean just looking back at these past 7 months I have grown as a person at an incredible rate.

Starting this journey for a person who has OCD and “agoraphobia” (it is an anxiety disorder where you feel panic attacks if you are outside and are surrounded by other people).

Starting from trying to first get to the supermarket, then the next street, then the next neighborhoods in Istanbul.

I couldn’t imagine that I would travel to 3+ cities and now writing this from a coffee shop in Paris.

But as with every chapter, you need to fix/maintain a couple of things in order to carry on in a journey.

Istanbul-Eskisehir Train Ride Video

Paris pic

Things that I am changing

The things that I want to change right now, I have listed below and I hope they can be useful for you too.

• I kinda ran out of money. I mean I should be honest about it if I want to share my story.I didn’t really account for a lot of expenses even though I tried to be extremely frugal (only sandwiches, not buying anything ..etc).

  I wanna change this first and foremost, which brings me to my next step.

• I think the economy has changed. Especially after covid. No one is hiring 9-5 employers anymore and with ancient practices of management now they are asking everyone to return to the office.

  I think the future is a gig/freelance-based economy where we will be working contract-based roles a lot. From Uber eats tasks to software tasks. That is why I wanna set up my professional life in this way too.

• Since I have been living in Paris for the past 5 months, even though I made a constant effort to learn the language I have came to the conclusion that I need to try harder :D

  I am gonna dedicate 1-2 hours every day to learning the main languages to travel around comfortably, spanish-english-french-russian-asian languages…etc.

• I wanna lower my carry load. I just got rid of so many things even on the journey, especially clothes, I wanna change my setup from one luggage, one bag to one big, one small bag and that is about it.

  The hassle of carrying the luggage everywhere was a pain in the ass these past 7 months. Once I fix my money situation I will invest in a good bag with enough volume like a 50L one.

Thank you for reading. Have a nice day.

-Demir