The Liquid People

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. Not ads with funnels, and forgive my bluntness — not one-day content. But fundamental questions demand fundamental answers.

A story. The companies that caught this thread are quietly winning the market. Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky understood this when he wrote:

“For so long, people thought Airbnb was about renting houses. But really, we’re about home. A house is just a space, but a home is where you belong.”

That is the shift from product to feeling that changes everything. Airbnb’s new campaign brought their valuation to $86.5 billion, well beyond their closest competitors. Chesky told a story people recognized as their own and chose to believe in.

People shouldn’t be deceived — it never ends well. And people in motion are even harder to fool. They develop an extraordinary sensitivity to authenticity. They’ve shed too much — comfort, familiarity, certainty — to be tricked by a facade. Nomads can tell within seconds whether a brand is performing or actually present.

In liquid modernity, community no longer forms around geography. It forms around a shared feeling. A shared story. The sense that someone else understands what it’s like to be in between.

Brands that openly tell their own story, their own metamorphoses, without the corporate polish, become something a product can never be. They become that point of continuity. Something to hold onto when everything else is in flux.

Patagonia has held the same message since its founding in 1973. Its founder Yvon Chouinard puts it this way:

“If you can create a company of honest messaging and truth, your customers will look to you for what’s right.”

That consistency, across decades of change, is itself a form of home. A form of ritual.

I think about this constantly, working with brands across different cultures and industries, at the intersection of European and post-Soviet markets, between languages and systems of coordinates. And I keep seeing the same thing: the task has shifted. It’s no longer enough to produce another product, another piece of content, another campaign, another unit of noise. You have to create and connect. To build that point of assembly the person in motion returns to, not out of habit, but because it has become their ritual — the thing that helps them hold themselves together in all this flux.

And God forbid I suggest we abandon metrics for the exclusive comfort of text, visuals, and storytelling. But I am, very much, talking about a different logic for achieving them.

If KPIs matter to your company, and they undeniably do, otherwise there is no business — they have stopped being rows of numbers to be squeezed by the end of the quarter. Today, they have become a consequence. Retention rises not because someone optimized the funnel, but because a person recognized their own story inside yours and felt kama muta — that sudden warmth of connection that anthropologists describe as a universal human emotion. And inside that emotion, even mathematics takes on a human face. And it is precisely then that the math begins to count differently.

Movement has always been natural to humans, but only now has it become a way of life. The companies that hear this generation speak through their path, through their metamorphoses, through the honesty of shedding skin become a place people return to. And this isn’t about pretty pictures, but definitely about a story told with the same courage it takes to pack a suitcase and start over somewhere new. And to live through each new chapter of transformation together. In essence, it’s about understanding. And the brands that grasp this are a step ahead.