The Laptop Lifestyle Isn't the Problem - Here's Why You're Still Stuck

You built the thing. You have the laptop, the clients or the customers, maybe a few years of late nights behind you. And yet the laptop lifestyle you imagined - the one with money and freedom in the same hand - still feels like it belongs to someone else.

The laptop lifestyle is a way of earning a living from a business you can run from anywhere with an internet connection, untied from one location or one set of office hours. You already know this. You're not asking whether it's possible. You're asking why, five or seven or ten years in, you're working harder than you planned and feeling less free than you hoped.

I've been exactly there. Let me tell you what I think is actually going on, because it's almost never the thing you blame.

Why does the laptop lifestyle feel like a trap once you're in it?

When I started Cakes by Karen, it was an accident. I had a daughter who was eight weeks old, a Facebook page, and within 48 hours I had 100 followers and nine orders. It grew into a commercial kitchen, around 50,000 followers and multiple six figures.

I loved it. Until I didn't.

By the end I was working 70 to 80 hour weeks. Copycats undercut me until I was almost working for free. I had built a business I couldn't leave, which is a different thing entirely from a business that sets you free.

Here's the part most people miss. A laptop doesn't make you free. The structure of your business does. You can run a perfectly portable business and still be chained to it, because the chain isn't your location - it's how the money is made and who has to be present to make it.

If you trade hours for money, going portable just means you trade those hours from a nicer view. The view was lovely. The trap was the same.

The real reason you're stuck (and it's not effort)

You are not stuck because you don't work hard enough. If anything, you probably work too hard at the wrong things.

I struggled financially for years before any of this came together. I'm ambitious, curious, and I tried everything. I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2023, and suddenly the pattern made sense - I run on novelty and suffocate in routine, so I'd start, get bored, jump to the next shiny idea, and never let one thing compound.

The freedom only arrived once I finally focused. As I like to say, I did the right things in the wrong order.

So before you blame the platform, the algorithm or the market, ask the harder question: is your business actually designed to give you what you want, or did it grow into whatever paid the bills fastest? Most stuck businesses were never designed at all. They accreted.

That's the difference between busy and free. Busy is reacting. Free is when you've decided what the business is for and built it backwards from that.

Three signs your business grew you instead of you growing it

• You can't take two weeks fully off without income stopping or chaos starting.
• Your revenue is capped by your own hours, and you've quietly accepted that.
• You're still doing the work you did in year one, just more of it.

If you nodded at all three, you don't have a motivation problem. You have a design problem. Those are fixable, but not with more hustle.

What a laptop lifestyle is actually meant to buy you

Let me be specific about what this can look like, because vague promises help no one at your stage.

My family left Australia in January 2016, deliberately homeless. We sold a lifetime of possessions for $10k and sorted everything into Sell, Keep, Donate, Trash. Since then we've lived in 60+ countries, world-schooled the kids, and done more than 80 house sits that have saved us over $250,000.

We lived in a $250-a-month apartment in Fethiye, Turkey. We went skiing in Bansko, Bulgaria. My daughter Sienna ran a boutique hotel's front of house at ten years old. Our Panamanian street dog, Ella, is about to land in her fifth country.

None of that came from working more. It came from a business structured so the income didn't depend on me being in one chair at one hour. That's the actual product of a laptop lifestyle - choice over your time, not just a portable office.

The location-independent workforce isn't fringe either. The number of people describing themselves as digital nomads has grown sharply over recent years, with MBO Partners reporting more than 18 million American digital nomads in 2024. You're not chasing something rare. You're refining something a lot of people are doing badly.

How do you fix a laptop lifestyle that isn't paying off?

You stop adding and start subtracting. When I was buried in cake orders, the answer was never another offer or another platform. It was deciding what the business was for and cutting everything that didn't serve it.

Start with the money model, not the marketing. If your income only exists while you're working, no amount of better Instagram captions fixes that. You need at least one way to earn that doesn't require your live presence - a product, a retainer, a membership, licensing, something that keeps paying while you sleep or ski or sit on a plane.

The plane is where it changed for me. I was flying out of Bolivia reading The 4-Hour Work Week, and it asked: if money were no object, what would you do? I could only write two words. Travel. Help people. I realised I'd lost myself inside a business I'd built.

If you're somewhere similar, it helps to get honest about whether the model itself still fits you. I wrote about exactly this in whether this is still the freedom business you actually wanted, because sometimes the fix isn't tweaking - it's choosing again on purpose.

Get specific about the life first, then the business

Most people design the business and hope the life appears around it. Do it the other way. Decide the days you want, then build the income to fund those days.

This sounds soft. It isn't. When you can describe your ordinary Tuesday in detail, every business decision gets easier because you have something to measure it against. If a new offer wouldn't fit that Tuesday, it's a no.

I'm a fan of getting it out of your head and in front of you - I explain my approach in how to create a vision board that actually works. Not as a manifesting exercise. As a filter for decisions.

Don't rebuild on rented land

One more thing, and I learned it the hard way. I once had an online community of 13,000 families that Facebook deleted overnight. Gone. No warning, no appeal that mattered.

If your whole laptop lifestyle sits on someone else's platform, you don't own a business - you rent an audience and they can change the locks. Build assets you control. An email list. Your own site. Relationships that don't vanish when an algorithm shifts.

This matters more the more established you are, because you have more to lose. The fix isn't to abandon the platforms. It's to make sure they feed something you own.

The choice is still yours to make again

The thing I most want you to hear is that being stuck is not the same as being finished. I'm still building. I'm still in the middle of this. We're moving to Mexico next, and my son Brody is an adult back in Australia now, which tells you how long this has been a life, not a phase.

I got my husband Cam to agree to sell everything and travel by promising never to nag him about salad again, then upped it to carry-on only. The whole thing started as a yes before I was ready, the same way I said yes to being an exchange student in Bolivia at 17 with four sentences of Spanish.

You don't need to be ready. You need to be willing to redesign rather than just push harder. If you want a longer version of how I built this from nothing, I told the whole story in how I built my dream life from scratch.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a laptop lifestyle?

A laptop lifestyle is earning a living from a business you can run from anywhere with an internet connection, free of one fixed location or set of office hours. The freedom comes from how the income is structured, not just from owning a laptop.

Why am I not making money with my laptop lifestyle?

Usually because the business trades your hours for money, so income stops the moment you do. The fix is adding at least one income stream that doesn't require your live presence and cutting the offers that don't fit the life you actually want.

Is the laptop lifestyle worth it after years of feeling stuck?

Yes, if you're willing to redesign rather than just work harder. Being stuck is almost always a design problem, not an effort problem, and design problems are fixable without burning the whole thing down.

How do I make my online business location independent?

Remove yourself as the bottleneck. Build income that runs without your live presence, own your audience through an email list and your own site rather than rented platforms, and structure the work so two weeks off doesn't stop the money.

If you're a few years in and quietly frustrated, the next step isn't another tactic. It's an honest look at where you're actually stuck and why - which is exactly what I built The Reality Check for. Run your business through it, see what's really capping your freedom, and decide what you're going to choose next. You've already proved you can build something. Now you get to build the version that gives you your time back.