What if where you live matters more than what you do?
For most of us, career comes first and place follows: you go where the job is. Our latest guest, Christer "Chris" Berggren, a Swedish senior project and production professional, community builder and advocate for location independent living now based in Bulgaria, has spent three decades proving it can work the other way round.
Chris was living a nomadic life in the touring and events world back in the mid-90s, long before anyone had coined the term "digital nomad." Six years of it were spent on a sailboat, four square metres of floor space, working from wherever the boat happened to be.
"The security in that was that no matter where I am, the security is always inside of me. Not in the things around me or the walls or anything."
A country that feels thirty years behind, and thirty years ahead
Chris moved to Sofia two years ago and, by his own account, feels more at home there than he ever did in Sweden. Not because Bulgaria is easier, but because it isn't finished: the parks are full of people rather than architects' renderings, the chaos is real, and nothing has been smoothed over yet. He describes it as living thirty years in the past and thirty years in the future at the same time.
The gap between the fantasy and the job
This isn't an episode about laptops on beaches. Chris is candid about how many people quit the nomad life within a year or two, having mistaken it for a social media dream rather than what it actually is: running a business, 24/7, with none of the structure a job provides. The freedom is real. So is the discipline it demands.
What you lose when you stop performing a role
The conversation turns on a simple idea: that abroad, stripped of job titles and local context, people stop meeting each other as CEOs or specialists and start meeting each other as people. Chris tells the story of a Swedish accountant's wife who became head of office design for a bank across Asia, not because of her CV, but because someone at a community meet-up asked if anyone knew a bit about decorating. Away from home, he argues, you become something else. Whether that's who you always were is the question worth sitting with.
Redefining success on your own terms
Chris turns 65 this year and says he has never said yes to fewer things, or been happier doing it. Success, for him, stopped being about the story you tell at dinner parties a long time ago.
"I don't care about success anymore. It's not what you are saying. It's the outcome of what you are saying that matters, always. Am I successful? For myself, I am."
Community by choice, not by proximity
The episode closes on Bansko, the Bulgarian town 16 miles south of Sofia that's become an international hub for digital nomads, and host to next week's Bansko Digital Nomad Fest. Chris makes the case that this kind of community, chosen rather than defaulted into, is what makes a place feel like home. His advice for anyone weighing the leap is blunt: jump, fail if you have to, and trust that you can't learn this from a book.
Find Chris's work at gosso.se and his blog, Me and Bo Life.
