Hey guys, finally done with this piece after taking me ages trying to put them into words. Anyway, I just made that Post-Nomadic Stress Disorder term up as a wordplay inspired by the term PTSD. That said, I suspect that PNSD is similarly a very real condition that has been embedded in our water supply ever since societies began to form ~10,000 years ago. If there's one thing that I've always felt deeply strange about modern life, it is our tendency to stay put in one place for long periods of time - be it in the same country, home, and in traditional workplaces.

Of course, centralisation of stuff provides stability and certainty that modern society is, and, has been operating in since the dawn of agriculture and irrigation. I can't speak for everyone.. but have you ever felt like there's something missing in life, but could never really tell what it is? If so, you are probably feeling the effects of PNSD.

This is the reason why some of us turn into online-workers, hippies, and frequent travellers. After all, modern humans actually lived as nomads for 99 per cent of our history.

Living the life of a traveller – a nomadic life – meant people had few, if any, actual possessions. All they had was what they could carry.

These people needed little else. The whole idea of owning anything at all was completely alien to them. Their habit was to share things with each other, because it meant there was less to carry. There was no need for money, because they hunted and gathered whatever and whenever they needed. They had no use for storage areas or farm buildings. They had no property, and no one could tell them "PRIVATE – No Hunting Here", because no one owned any land. It was, like the air we breathe today, something common to us all, a resource to be shared between all living things: plants, animals and people.

Well, I don't expect us to go back to full-blown old-school nomads, giving up property and ownership. There are certainly great reasons why society is the way it is today, and we just need to replace our dependencies with something better. Perhaps we can share more as well. Which is why I think the up and coming wave of the sharing economy and decentralisation technologies, could in fact, turn us back into free creatures again with all the added perks of modern society. New world nomads. Humanity 2.0. Insert some other bigass words here.

It's not going to be a quantum leap overnight, but it could certainly be an epic transition over the course of decades, if not sooner.

But first, why have we settled down?

Whatever the reasons are, settling down just happened to be the meme that ended most of humanity's nomadic past. Instead of trying to ask why (because it's a chicken and egg problem), let's investigate the unique properties of large groups of people staying put in cities, towns, and villages:-

• Efficient, concentrated places for a mass of people to expend energy and getting stuff done. Division of labor and specialisation.

• Shared facilities and stability of life - we no longer have to be hunters and gatherers looking for food all day long. We can now pursue higher goals - but of course, not universally applicable.

• Workplaces are mostly geographically static.

• Works well for mainstream society with nuclear families.

• There's just no better way to organise groups of people without being in the same place, throughout most of our post-nomadic era.

Interestingly, our transition away from nomadism has a lot to do with the concept of (leveraged) work, family, and stability - all of which are pretty definitive of modern society today. Permanence. The whole setup is built upon layers and layers of dependencies, authoritatively from parents to businesses, leading up to governments.

Settled and disengaged - a sign?

According to a series of worldwide surveys conducted by Gallup over the course of the decade, it was found that only 13% of employees are engaged at work. The rest are either disengaged, or actively disengaged. I think this is somewhat ironic, going against the grain of efficiency (the holy grail of employment regimes). An organisation with a whopping 87% employee disengagement is just bad for business, especially for all the individuals involved. It is a very telling situation - a majority of people are spending most of their time doing something they would rather not. Maybe they're onto something. There's just a lack of solutions.

It is a huge problem and in my opinion, also one of the biggest business opportunities in recent times. It's a real world problem. Perhaps then, we should start focusing more on empowering our inefficiencies as human beings. In other words, we should start shifting our attention away from Adam Smith's efficient, but ultimately dehumanising pin-factory. Efficiency is something that should only belong in the background, driven by technology. Our attention - the foreground layer of our lives - should allow for inefficiencies for us to be free. This is why we have "fun" companies today, pioneered by Google and the likes.

New world nomads

It's quite difficult imagining a future where nomadism is a global phenomenon. Some of us are already doing it right now to a certain degree, but will we see a day when it becomes possible for way more people to go around without the rigid limitations imposed by passports and visas? It's a lifestyle choice, of course. To truly understand this matter, one must begin to imagine the concepts of decentralisation and distributed ownership to see where we're heading. While I'm not sure at all if national borders and territorial disputes will ever dissolve, I think there are certainly signs of public trust shifting away from the old, and into the new: tech-driven peer-to-peer trust networks.

@onceuponatime recently shared a document with me about something seems relevant to what I'm trying to express here. Here's the abstract of the paper:-

This paper presents a model of partial internal exit that captures the competitive dynamic between incumbent and potential governments in a non-territorial political system. This model particularly applies to the case of ‘cryptosecession’ that appears the most likely avenue for non-territorial decentralisation to ever eventuate. It demonstrates how fiscal exploitation is reduced and eventually eliminated as the capability of citizens to move to non-territorial jurisdictions increases. When interpreted as a model of cryptosecession, it shows how the balance of citizen opacity and government legibility determines the balance of fiscal exploitation versus equivalence.

Have a read - Cryptosecession and the limits of taxation: Towards a theory of non-territorial internal exit. To be honest, I didn't understand much of it, but it was still an interesting read. Additionally, here's a post that you should check out to understand the breadth of applications that we can tokenise and organise: https://steemit.com/steem/@paxmagnus/the-blockchain-conversation-prism

There are also other advancing technologies that are combinatorial and could make the free market way more efficient than it is today. Think about a distributed economy powered by renewable energy, 3D-printing, drones, sharing applications (Uber, Airbnb, etc), work applications, mesh-networks, sustainable hubs, and automation. Stuff like that. I think a "free flow" society will be made possible and sustainable over time as peer-to-peer trust networks mature. If you have time, check out this short article: The Future Organization is a Porous Organization. Also, I want to make it clear that all of these doesn't imply that we should end urbanisation, and leaving it all behind. The best part about new world nomadism is that we can leverage on existing infrastructures.

May we have the choice to roam free like horses, again!

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Supplementary video
Co- creating value: Future Business Trends by Stefan Hyttfors