I Haven’t Rented an Apartment in Years. Here’s What Replaced It.

There’s a small moment that keeps repeating itself, in different cities, different countries, different hotel rooms that all start to blur together after enough of them. A front desk clerk stops asking for my passport somewhere around the third or fourth night. She slides the key card across the counter without much conversation and asks if I want the same room again. I always do. The room is never anything special, a kettle that works, a shower with decent pressure, maybe a window that actually opens, but by that point in a stay those small things start to feel like a personal win.

I get some version of the same question almost every time I tell people how I live. Where’s your apartment? Do you have a place back home? The honest answer is that I don’t rent anything, anywhere, and haven’t in a long time. I live in hotels. Not resorts, not anything glamorous, just ordinary rooms booked a few weeks or a month at a time, in whatever city I happen to be working from.

Said out loud, it sounds like the expensive option. Rent a place and you’re paying for space you actually use. Book a hotel and you’re paying nightly rates dressed up to look reasonable, right up until you add them up over thirty days and realize you’ve spent more than a month of rent on a room with no kitchen. That was my assumption too, before I…