By AKPK
New year, new goals, same restless journey—we are all nomads in the story of our own lives.
The calendar turns, and we do, too. Another year arrives, and with it the familiar rituals: resolutions, spreadsheets, budgets, promises to our future selves. We plan as if life can be paused, as if the road will suddenly straighten, as if arrival is possible. But life rarely waits for our intentions. In this restless motion, financial planning is less about reaching a final destination than learning to navigate each bend with purpose, patience, and grace.
Each year arrives with the promise of arrival.
A new calendar. A new role. A new leader at the helm. A revised set of goals… personal, professional, financial. All neatly listed as if life itself could be coaxed into order by intention Alone.
We tell ourselves that this year will be different. That once we reach this point (this salary, this title, this number), we will finally feel settled.
But the feeling rarely lasts.
The narrative of nomadland is not about escape or drift. It is about this recurring discovery: that life does not organise itself around our sense of arrival. It moves. And we move with it. Year to year, role to role, goal to goal, leader to leader. Often without acknowledging that movement itself is the permanent condition. What unsettles us is not change, but our insistence on treating each phase as if it were the last.
The Comfort of Imagined Destinations
Much of modern planning (especially financial planning) is built on the arrival fallacy: the belief that happiness, security, or peace waits at a specific endpoint. We plan as if there is a moment when striving will cease. When income stabilises. When leadership steadies. When the plan, finally completed, will take over from effort.
But life in nomadland offers no such ending. Each stopping point is temporary. Each rest is earned, but never final.
We move from one manager to another, one organisational vision to the next. We adapt to new strategies, new markets, new expectations. Even when we stay in the same place, the ground beneath us shifts.
Financial goals are often framed the same way. Save until this amount. Invest until this age. Pay off this obligation, then life will begin. But what happens instead is familiar: one goal achieved reveals another. One responsibility completed gives way to two more.
Arrival recedes.
Life Between Milestones
There is a quiet anxiety in living between milestones. We are taught to celebrate promotions, bonuses, completed goals. Less attention is given to the long stretches in between, where most life happens.
This is where the nomad metaphor becomes instructive. In nomadland, meaning is not derived from reaching a destination, but from learning how to live well in motion. How to carry what matters. How to travel without excess. How to pause without assuming permanence.
The gig worker understands this instinctively. His livelihood does not progress in neat stages. It ebbs and flows. Income arrives irregularly. Costs do not. Saving is not about a final number. It is about buying time, fuel for the week, repairs for the motorcycle, school fees for the children. His planning is continuous, not cumulative. He does not wait for arrival to feel secure; he builds security through readiness.
But even those with stable roles are not exempt. Titles change. Teams dissolve. Leaders rotate. Economic conditions shift. The illusion of permanence dissolves just as quietly.
Now consider the retiree, decades beyond the point most of us imagine as “arrival.” She has accumulated savings, disciplined herself over decades, and carefully navigated promotions and investments. Yet her life is no less nomadic. Medical costs rise unexpectedly. Family responsibilities shift. Investments fluctuate. Even after decades of planning, there is no moment when life simply stops demanding attention.
Both move through life, one at the beginning of the road, the other further along, yet neither truly “arrives.” Each day is a recalibration, a negotiation between circumstance and choice.
Moving from Leader to Leader
Leadership changes often feel disruptive because they expose the fiction of arrival. We attach our sense of stability to individuals, strategies, or structures; believing that once the “right” leadership is in place, things will settle.
Yet leadership, like seasons, moves on. We adjust our expectations, our working styles, our ambitions. We learn new languages of priority. Each change asks us to recalibrate. Not just professionally, but financially and psychologically.
The nomad metaphor reminds us that this recalibration is not an interruption to the journey. It is the journey.
Financial Planning in a Moving World
Traditional financial planning often assumes a static self moving through a predictable world. But nomadland suggests the opposite: a changing self navigating a changing landscape.
This does not make planning futile. It makes it dynamic.
A humane financial plan does not promise arrival. It anticipates revision. It allows for pauses, detours, and restarts. It recognises that goals will change as roles change, and that leadership transitions (at work or in life) will alter the terrain.
For the gig worker, arrival is an illusion from the start. For the retiree, it is a promise long deferred. Both discover that life, in nomadland, bends the road just as they think it’s straight. Financial planning, then, becomes cyclical rather than linear. It’s closer to navigation than construction. Both the gig worker and the retiree understand this, each in their own way: one out of necessity, the other out of experience.
The danger of the arrival fallacy is not that it encourages ambition, but that it delays contentment. We postpone peace until a future version of ourselves exists. One who has fewer obligations, more certainty, more control.
But that version rarely arrives.
Learning to Travel Well
In nomadland, there is dignity in knowing how to travel lightly. In understanding what is essential and what is excess. In accepting that continuity comes not from staying put, but from staying capable.
Applied to financial life, this means building buffers instead of fantasies. Flexibility instead of rigidity. Literacy instead of luck. It means recognising that starting anew is not an admission of failure, but an expected rhythm. That recalibrating goals is not weakness, but wisdom.
We do not move through life in straight lines. We move in seasons. In phases. In response to people who lead us for a time, then pass the baton.
The Only Real Arrival
Perhaps the deepest lesson of the nomadland metaphor is this: there is no final arrival, only ongoing agency. The road does not end when a goal is met.
It bends.
What matters, then, is not how quickly we reach milestones, but how well we move between them. Whether our plans allow us to adapt without fear. Whether we measure success not by how fixed our lives appear, but how navigable they remain.
We will continue to move. From year to year. Role to role. Goal to goal. Leader to leader. The mistake is believing that the next stop will be the last. In nomadland, the wisdom is quieter, and more enduring: do not wait to arrive before learning how to live.
From the gig worker to retiree, from the first pay cheque to the last withdrawal, the lesson is the same: the road keeps bending, the map keeps changing, and the only goal is learning how to travel well.
As the new year arrives, it is not a destination. It is another bend, another moment to check our bearings, and another opportunity to travel thoughtfully, wisely. With dignity.
Because the story never ends…
