Jan 1, 2026 Dec 31, 2025 2026-01-01

When you become location independent, your network of people changes drastically from what you had when you lived in a stable place.

You no longer have access to your high school friends. You lose touch with colleagues. Those decade-long neighbors, the people with whom you’d established solid contacts over years of shared proximity—they fade into occasional messages, random encounters or annual catch-ups.

Your social life becomes significantly more frail.

This is why networking for location independent people should be a priority. It’s how you discover, nurture, and maintain social contacts that will literally help you maintain your mental health.

Here’s what worked for me, real insights from more than 10 years as a digital nomad.

1. Be Available

Being available means going out and actively pursuing social activities.

When you live in a stable environment, you take this for granted. You don’t even think about networking unless your job requires meeting new people. Otherwise, you’re fine with what you have. The context provides everything you need—the office water cooler, the neighborhood barbecue, the school pickup line.

But here, in the location independent life, you need to maintain an active approach.

Being available means putting networking in your top five priorities, alongside generating income and aggressive budgeting—your financial resilience activities. Social resilience deserves the same intentional effort.

2. Be Useful

Every time you interact with someone, go out of your way to provide useful information.

Whether it’s about job opportunities, how to navigate the neighborhood, or how to find promotions at the grocery store on the corner—you’re better off if you provide real advice, real data. Something actionable that people actually need.

Every interaction is an opportunity to show you have something in your backpack. Some discovery. Some new coffee shop. Some local insight.

For instance, I share a lot of insights with my friends about the jjimjilbang—the Korean bathhouse—in the neighborhood where I’ve been living for the last six months. It sounds small, but it helps strengthen relationships and bonds in surprisingly meaningful ways.

Don’t just take from the network, try to give something back to it.

3. Pursue Both Formalized and Unformalized Meetings

By formalized, I mean: meetups, organized groups, things through your job context, or anything set up in a structured way.

By unformalized, I mean: coffee shops, bars, live events, impromptu gatherings like concerts—anything that isn’t a specific networking event.

In my experience, the impact of both is about 50/50. Both are important. Both are necessary.

Don’t only try making friends with the barista from your favorite coffee shop. And don’t rely solely on the regular meetups you find on apps in your local neighborhood.

You need both.

A Word of Caution

I’ve found that unformalized events work better for long-term emotional support, while formalized events work better for long-term business support.

This makes sense when you think about the context in which you meet people. At a meetup, everyone’s there with some agenda—learning, networking, professional development. At a random bar or concert, people are just being human. The connections form differently.

Build both types of relationships. You’ll need them both.

4. Build Beyond the Couple

Let’s say you already have a location independent lifestyle within a couple. Your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, or husband travels with you, and you function well together as a unit.

This is already a big step forward. Having a partner will greatly reduce the feelings of isolation, the sense of being lost, and the lack of social connection that can otherwise erode your mental health.

However, even with a solid couple life, you still need to go out and meet new people.

New people who help you regulate different parts of your activity—the business level, the sport level, the intellectual level. You may have a group you play padel with, a group you play Scrabble with, a group you go hiking with. You might only see these people every four or six months as your travels loop back through certain cities. But they need to be part of your life.

The strength of a couple unit is significant. It’s vastly better than traveling alone.

But in time, even this can be crushed. The pressure of loneliness—when you have no one but each other—can make the whole structure implode from within. The relationship starts carrying weight it was never designed to bear. Every social need, every intellectual conversation, every moment of external validation flows through one person.

Take care of the social health of your relationship by building connections outside the couple. Your partnership will be stronger for it.