The Liquid People and The Brands

The philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called our era “liquid modernity.” A time in which the lasting gives way to the transient, need to desire, and necessity to utility. Bauman was describing all this long before smartphones, before remote work, and certainly before the word “nomad” became normal and lost its archaeological connotation.

The number of digital nomads has grown 131% since 2019. The global count crossed 40 million in 2025. But these aren’t just numbers. Beyond changing countries, people are changing languages, professions, relationships, entire versions of themselves. A good example — the average job tenure for workers aged 25–34 in 2022 was just 2.8 years, against 9.8 years for workers aged 55–64. Five years ago, this would have been an alarm bell for any CEO. Today, it’s a norm no one looks at twice.

Nomadism is a way of existing in time. These are people who live in permanent flux, where every place starts from zero, every encounter carries no history behind it, every apartment is a temporary camp. No one on the street remembers them at age six. The barista doesn’t know what they drink. The doctor hasn’t kept their file for ten years. All of this either has to be built from scratch every two years, or let go of as a category altogether. In other words, the nomad differs from the stationary person by a different physics of life — they are someone who has learned to live without an infrastructure of recognition.

What the nomad loses isn’t home. It’s continuity itself. That’s why they react so acutely to anything that feels stale or false. To a brand that has spoken in the same vague voice for ten years. For this generation, a brand has stopped being a service. It has become one of the few remaining agents of memory in their life. And in this permanent transit, a fundamental question surfaces:

How do you become part of someone’s life when that life keeps changing shape?

The answer is disarmingly old: story. Storytelling: the one thing people have always carried with them when they left a place behind.

The companies that understand this are quietly winning the market. Brian Chesky, co-founder of Airbnb, once put it this way:

That is the shift from product to feeling. Airbnb stopped selling places to sleep and started telling a story millions of people recognized as their own. Today the company is worth tens of billions of dollars and far ahead of its rivals — but it all began with that sentence.

If Airbnb shows how a single story can turn a company around, Patagonia shows how a story can hold one steady for half a century. It has been saying the same thing since its founding in 1973.

"If you can make a company of honest message and truth, customers will come to you to know what's right."

Consistency like that, through decades of change, becomes a form of ritual. In liquid modernity, community no longer forms around geography. It forms around a shared feeling. A shared story. The sense that someone else knows what it's like to live in between.

Brands that tell their own story honestly — their transformations included, without the corporate gloss — become something a product never can: a point of continuity. Something to hold on to when everything else is in flux.