I lived in Chiang Mai for 2 years—here’s why so many digital nomads are leaving

I remember arriving in Chiang Mai thinking I’d found it. The place. You know the one I mean. That mythical city every digital nomad talks about at some point — the sanctuary where rent is cheap, smoothies are everywhere, WiFi is fast, and the lifestyle somehow feels semi-retired even when you’re working full-time.

And for a while, it was that. It was better, actually.

I’d walk down the alleys of the Old City in the morning with a coffee from a quiet laneway café, hearing monks chanting from temples still wrapped in the orange light of dawn. I’d sit in coworking spaces where you could hear five accents in five minutes — Germans building apps, Brazilians trading crypto, Australians editing vlogs. There was a sense of shared ambition in the air, like we were all quietly building something that would set us free.

But something shifted. And it’s not just me.

Talk to anyone who spent a chunk of time there — long enough to get past the honey-colored phase of romanticism — and you’ll start to hear it too. Chiang Mai, once the promised land of the remote work revolution, is bleeding digital nomads.

And it’s not for the reasons most people think.

It’s easy to point to pollution. Every year, from February to April, the air turns toxic with PM2.5 levels you can’t ignore. The locals call it burning season. The air gets so thick with smoke from crop burning that your lungs feel it before your brain registers the haze. You look at the mountains and they’ve disappeared. Your phone app flashes red warnings. You go inside. And stay there. For weeks. It starts to feel like being in lockdown again — but this time, nature is the virus. Check out the pollution in my video below.

But the exodus isn’t just about the air. It’s something deeper. Something harder to pin down.

For me, it began as a subtle feeling that I was outgrowing the dream I once had of what this life was supposed to be. Chiang Mai is a beginner’s paradise — and I say that with love. If you’re new to remote work, new to living abroad, new to freedom, Chiang Mai gives you a soft landing. It’s gentle, affordable, endlessly explorable, and incredibly forgiving.

But eventually, the very things that made it perfect start to become constraints.

The café conversations feel repetitive. Crypto, funnels, dopamine hacks, quitting your 9–5. The same scripts running in new voices. There’s an unspoken loop some nomads fall into — upgrading gear, chasing productivity, hacking happiness — but never really going deeper. Not into work. Not into themselves. Not into the country they’re in.

I started to notice how insulated I was. How little I really understood Thailand despite living there. Sure, I’d been to local festivals, eaten khao soi at street stalls, learned enough Thai to order coffee without pointing. But I wasn’t embedded. Not really. Most of us weren’t.

That’s the expat bubble no one wants to talk about. You can live in a place for years and still float above it. Especially somewhere like Chiang Mai, where the digital nomad infrastructure is so frictionless you never have to leave your curated world. Coworking. Coliving. Grab. Foodpanda. English-speaking dentists. Yoga studios. Kombucha. Community events with just enough eye contact to simulate connection.

Eventually, it started to feel like a spiritual bypass. Like we were all skipping a few necessary steps in what it actually means to live in a place. To be changed by it. To take on the weight of it, not just the pleasure.

And the city itself started changing too. Slowly. Then rapidly.

Rents went up. The cafés got shinier, but somehow colder. Visa runs got stricter. There was more talk of crypto conferences than meditation retreats. Developers began circling like vultures around Nimmanhaemin, turning old guesthouses into sleek Airbnb machines. Thai friends I’d made started moving out. The gap between the two worlds — local and expat — felt like it widened.

Somewhere along the way, the dream became an aesthetic. Chiang Mai was no longer just a place — it was a brand. #RemoteLife. Jungle vibes. MacBooks on wooden tables. It became something to be performed. And performance always requires a mask.

I don’t mean to sound bitter. Chiang Mai gave me so much. It’s where I built momentum in my work, where I met people who changed my thinking, where I learned how to live with less but feel more. It’s where I confronted a loneliness I hadn’t faced before — the loneliness of having everything you thought you wanted and still feeling like something was missing.

I think a lot of people leaving Chiang Mai are coming to the same realization.

That remote work wasn’t the answer. That life is not a video game of arbitrage. That healing doesn’t always come through optimized schedules and imported supplements. That belonging isn’t something you find in a Telegram group.

It’s not just about Chiang Mai. It’s about a broader disillusionment with what the digital nomad lifestyle promised. Freedom, yes — but freedom from what, and for what? That question haunts people after a while. The sunsets are still beautiful, but now they come with an ache.

Some people I know moved to Portugal. Others to Bali. Some gave up the road entirely and went back “home,” though no one really knows what that word means anymore.

As for me — I’m not sure I’ve found the answer. But I’ve stopped looking for a perfect city.

What I’m chasing now is a different kind of freedom. Not just the kind you can map out on Skyscanner. But the kind that comes from depth. From choosing presence over novelty. From learning to stay when it’s easier to run. From building something that doesn’t need to be posted to be real.

Chiang Mai gave me that lesson. It gave it to me slowly, gently, and then all at once.

And for that, I’ll always be grateful.

Even as I leave.

It seems this article touched a chord based on the amount of Instagram messages I’ve received. Also I’ve seen it critiqued widely in Facebook groups and on Reddit. So I decided to go a bit deeper on why I decided to move from Chiang Mai to Singapore. Read the article here.