“After years of chasing success, many of us are realising that true luxury is emotional stability and self-awareness. People – especially women – are becoming more intentional about how they spend their time.”
At 54, as a digital nomad who splits life between airports, islands, courtrooms and coffee shops, those words aren’t a slogan for me – they’re my daily reality. My life used to be about ticking boxes: money, career milestones, social media numbers, invitations to exclusive events. Now my definition of luxury is very different: a calm nervous system, a body that feels looked after, and people in my life who show up when it truly matters.
And strangely, this shift has happened not in five-star boardrooms, but on a massage bed in Thailand, in tiny museums no one Instagrams, over street food eaten slowly, and even on a hard bench in a Thai courthouse with someone quietly translating beside me.
Redefining “having it all” at 54
In my younger years, I thought “having it all” meant being everywhere, doing everything, saying yes to every opportunity. The suitcase was always open. The inbox was always full. My body was just the vehicle that dragged my brain from one obligation to the next.
Now, as a mid-fifties digital nomad, I still travel, but the goal has changed. I don’t want a life that looks glamorous from the outside but feels chaotic on the inside. I want a life where my emotional state isn’t at the mercy of my to-do list, other people’s drama, or my own old stories about “not enough.”
I want slow mornings. I want conversations that nourish me. I want my body to feel like a home, not a battlefield.
And Thailand, with all its contradictions – temples and traffic, incense and neon – has become the unlikely classroom where I’m learning all of this.
Massages as therapy, not a holiday treat
In tourist brochures, massages are sold as a treat: something you squeeze into a week-long holiday between cocktails and shopping. For me, living in Thailand, massage has become part of how I regulate my nervous system.
There is something humbling about lying on a thin mattress while a tiny Thai woman calmly rearranges your entire body. She presses on points you didn’t know were tight, and suddenly you realise how much tension you’ve normalised. That knot in your shoulder from years of stress. The stiffness in your hips from hours on laptops and planes. The jaw you’ve been clenching since… who knows when.
Massage here isn’t just “pampering”; it’s a reset button. An hour where my phone is away, my mind can’t multi-task, and my only job is to exhale. As a digital nomad, my office moves constantly. One of the few stable rituals I can create is this: show up, lie down, and let my body speak for once.
The more I listen to it on the massage bed, the easier it becomes to hear it in daily life:
- You’re tired, not lazy.
- You’re hungry, not “unmotivated.”
- You’re anxious, not “crazy” – something needs your attention.
That, for me, is emotional stability: a relationship with my body where it doesn’t have to scream to be heard.
Food as connection, not distraction
Then there’s the food. Thailand can seduce you with convenience – cheap fried snacks, sugary drinks, endless street temptations. In my busiest years, food was just fuel: something I consumed while answering emails, barely tasting it.
Now, I try to treat meals as tiny anchors in my day. Sitting down with a bowl of steaming noodle soup from a corner stall, I notice the herbs, the heat, the way my stomach responds. Spicy papaya salad that makes my eyes water reminds me I’m alive. Fresh fruit shakes feel like an apology to my gut for all the airport sandwiches I used to live on.
I’ve also started to understand how much my gut and my emotions are intertwined. When my digestion is a mess, my thoughts spiral faster. When I eat in a way that respects my body instead of punishing it, everything feels a little more grounded.
I don’t always get it right. I still have days of comfort eating and mindless snacking. But even that is part of the self-awareness: “Ah, today I’m not hungry for food; I’m hungry for reassurance.”
That’s a different kind of luxury – being honest enough with myself to notice what I’m actually craving.
Fire on my belly: a strange gut treatment in Thailand
If you’d told my younger self that one day I’d be lying on a bed in Thailand with actual fire hovering over my belly in the name of “gut treatment,” I would have laughed.
Yet here we are.
The first time I tried it, I was half curious, half terrified. A local therapist, recommended by a friend, explained that this treatment was meant to warm and stimulate the gut area, helping with digestion, tension, and emotional “blockages.” I lay there, my midlife body exposed and vulnerable, feeling the heat as she carefully moved the flame in a controlled way above my abdomen, with herbs and oils between skin and fire.
Was it strange? Absolutely. Did I feel something shift? Yes.
It wasn’t magic. It didn’t solve my life. But it did something important: it made me pay attention to my gut, to the emotional weight I carry there – years of suppressed anger, worry, and “holding it all together.”
Lying there, with literal fire dancing above my stomach, I realised how much time I’d spent in my head, ignoring the quiet storms in my body. This treatment forced me back into myself. Into sensation. Into presence.
That, to me, is another form of emotional luxury: being willing to experiment, to listen, and to care for your body in ways that might look bizarre from the outside, but feel deeply right from the inside.
Museums and small moments of stillness
Digital nomad life often gets portrayed as laptops on the beach and endless freedom. In reality, it’s also visas, deadlines, dodgy Wi-Fi, and the constant hum of “where to next?”
One of my favourite ways to ground myself in a new place is by visiting small, sometimes overlooked museums. Not the big, blockbuster ones with queues around the block – the quieter spaces. Local history museums. Tiny galleries. Places that smell faintly of dust and old stories.
Walking slowly through these rooms, reading about people who lived and died long before me, I’m reminded that my worries are just one tiny thread in a much bigger tapestry. Someone once stood here fretting about things that no longer matter. One day, I will be that person too.
This doesn’t make my problems vanish. But it softens their edges. It gives me perspective. It reminds me that life is more than my inbox, my bank statements, or my latest crisis.
Emotional stability, sometimes, is just the ability to zoom out.
The real luxury: loyalty when life gets messy
For all the massages, treatments and beautiful meals, the moments that have moved me the most in this chapter of life haven’t been “Instagrammable” at all.
They’ve happened in fluorescent-lit waiting rooms. On plastic chairs. Outside courtrooms.
There is a special kind of loneliness that comes when you’re dealing with legal issues or conflict in a foreign country. You’re suddenly stripped of your roles and labels – digital nomad, entrepreneur, traveller – and reduced to a confused human clutching paperwork.
In those moments, the real luxury is not a five-star hotel. It’s the person who shows up.
The Thai neighbour who takes time off work to sit beside you in court.
The friend who quietly translates every word because they know you feel vulnerable.
The person who believes you when others have let you down, lied, or disappeared when things got complicated.
Loyalty, I’ve learned, is not loud. It doesn’t always post selfies with you. It’s the quiet presence of someone in the back row, ready to step in if you stumble.
After being let down by people I trusted, the ones who did show up shine even brighter. They remind me that no matter how independent or “strong” I think I am, we are not meant to go through life – or legal battles – alone.
At 54, that kind of loyalty feels like the rarest luxury of all.
Emotional stability as the ultimate status symbol
Massages, unusual gut treatments, great food, art, travel – they’re all beautiful parts of my digital nomad life. But they mean very little without emotional stability and self-awareness.
Because without those, the massages become another way to run away from myself.
The food becomes a numbing tool.
The museums become just backgrounds for photos.
Even loyalty from others can feel uncomfortable if I’m not willing to be honest about my fear and vulnerability.
Emotional stability doesn’t mean I never cry or overreact. It doesn’t mean life is suddenly smooth. It means:
- I come back to myself faster.
- I know when I need help.
- I choose where my time and energy go with more intention.
- I am less willing to negotiate my peace just to impress someone or fit in.
After years of chasing a version of success that looked good but left me exhausted, I now measure “having it all” very differently.
It’s the ability to sit with myself in a quiet room and feel okay.
It’s a body that feels listened to, not bullied.
It’s friendships that don’t disappear when things get difficult.
It’s the courage to keep choosing what truly nourishes me, again and again, even when no one is watching.
At this age, as a woman, as a digital nomad, that is my definition of luxury. Not the handbag, not the hotel, not the hashtag.
A regulated nervous system. A cared-for gut. A curious mind. And a small, precious circle of people who show up when life gets real.
Everything else is just decoration.
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