Hubbed
hub | hʌb |
noun
A center around which other things revolve or from which they radiate
dictionary.com
From The Sovereign Individual:
“Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.”
In the 2020s knowledge workers will move akin to corporations in the past. They will choose to live whatever location best suits their needs on the globe. They don’t have to live where they work. They might want to live where there is great infrastructure, good schools, low rent, taxes and crime rates, or just very little of anything.
They will merely regard their place of living as a hub. From that hub they can pursue their interests and business activity. For a long time now corporations have their headquarters somewhere, but then sell to next to anywhere on the globe. Their headquarters were located where they were initially founded and often they have been initially founded where conditions favored their thriving. But even for corporations the situation is changing. Access to capital and funding is much less restricted by location as it used to be.
But let’s focus on what this means for the individual and how thinking in terms of becoming a hub maps to a new set of attributes of the successful knowledge worker in the 2020s.
Sovereign
The 1997 book The Sovereign Individual lays out how the human of the future will adjust to the ever changing world. The authors predicted a cybereconomy and a world in which individuals will look for multiple streams of income in order to be more resilient to changing job markets. Furthermore, they believed in the obsolecense of the nation-state. While that prediction might not have come to fruitiion, we definitely observe a more flexible moving of first capital and now individuals between nation-states. Especially since the pandemic, when remote working became the norm among tech workers, many asked themselves why remain in San Francisco if you work from home anyhow. Why not move to somewhere more affordable and better, while still working for the company in San Francisco? This brings us to the question of being bankless.
Bankless
An important part of the crypto movement (or call it DeFi or Web3) is that more financial activity can happen without banks. You can pay and get paid through decentralized exchanges that don’t rely on the legacy finance systems. For most people, we are not yet in a place where you can live completely without a bank account. We still need to pay bills in cash or wire transfers and bank issued credit cards. However, I believe we are moving towards a bankless world.
Hubbed
What does hubbed mean?
Hubbed means that you can live anywhere you want and you don’t have to work there. You just consider it your hub. Why not work for that startup from the country side where things are cheaper? Why not live in Costa Rica while you work for a San Francisco company? Why not work for a company in London from Valencia and enjoy the mediterranean, low prices and plenty of direct flights every day between the two cities?
An overlap of timezones still helps, but even that becomes less of an issue as remote work moves towards asynchronous collaboration.
Plan to move to a new place? Let me know.