What I Spend in a Day in BALI
When YouTuber Brett Conti isn't photoshopping larger muscles on video thumbnails or "swapping lives" with billionaires for his 900,000 subscribers, he escapes to Bali. It's cold in December in New York City, and an açaí bowl can cost up to fifteen dollars. Whereas, in Canggu the coconut tastes like it fell from the tree that morning. In Conti's recent video, What I Spend in a Day Living in BALI, he says, "I truly love this island. Not just for its epic waterfalls or beautiful beaches, but because of the lifestyle."
Conti is not alone. In the past ten years, a love affair with Bali has been one of the requirements of being a young, upwardly mobile digital worker. Christian LeBlanc, a Canadian YouTuber who operates under the name Lost Leblanc opines, "I came here seven years ago. It was a time where I traveled, traveled, traveled. You start missing things like a closet, a lifestyle, stability. I found this place that had gyms, fast internet, coffee shops, coffee shops I could actually afford, especially when I was a broke backpacker at the start. It just had this amazing lifestyle. You're at a coffee shop working, and then the next day, you're up at a waterfall or a sunset at a cliffside."
Conti and LeBlanc don't deny that the island has changed over the past decade. An influx of tourism has brought rapid development, leaving a divided digital nomad community, with some welcoming the change and others wishing things could return to the way they were before. A quick Reddit search suggests that the island peaked in 2020 as a great place to escape stifling lockdowns. But it's been much too overcrowded since then. In Conti's video, after stepping out of an açaí restaurant populated with blond-haired computer-goers, he points to some buildings in front of the camera. "When I first came here," he says, "this was all rice fields. You could even see Mount Batur, the volcano in the background. Now, it's kind of like a mini-shopping mall. A lot has changed here in Canggu."
Conti came to Bali because he is starting a tea business. "I plan to try to go from 0 to 1 million dollars in sales, and I figured Bali was the perfect place for the next phase of growing this business." He continues, "It's not like this is a vacation... it's more a solo mastermind."
Conti was inspired by Richard Branson and the Virgin brand. The word Virgin represents a kind of purity, and it is funny because it makes you think about sex. When thinking of names for his tea company, he wanted to name them based on when you are at your best, something like "at your climax." "That's kind of the direction I'm going," he smiles. He continues, "You guys know that movie with Julia Roberts called 'Eat, Pray, Love'... For me, with starting this new business, I'd like to call it 'Learn, Ideas, Create'".
Throwing aside the verb, verb, verb rhythm of the popular Julia Roberts movie in favor of the much smoother verb, noun, verb is almost making me "Climax." Author Elizabeth Gilbert famously spent her novel's "Love" section in Bali, lost after a recent divorce and a string of preceding relationships, trying to find herself. It was there that she met her second husband José Nunes. In 2016, she announced they were separating because she was in a relationship with her best friend, Rayya Elias, played by Viola Davis in the movie. After Elias's untimely death, she began a relationship with Elias's close friend, photographer Simon MacArthur. Unfortunately, they have now also separated. For Conti, "Learn" took place in India, where he learned all about the tea business from local vendors. "Ideas" is in Bali, where he will think about business ideas. "Create" will be for when he returns to NYC and is ready to scale. He's already invested $60,000-75,000. He says, "I'd rather risk all that money than not go through with this idea at all" because he says, "The biggest risk in life is not taking any risk at all."
Though I have always harbored strong negative feelings about people who like Bali, and I generally consider it a good rule of thumb that you shouldn't visit the island under any circumstances, it can be challenging to talk about Bali without seeming like the morality police. Indonesia is the home of the largest US-backed genocide, so far. Between October 1965 and March 1966, the United States orchestrated a coup, replacing President Sukarno with the military officer Suharto. The following purge killed approximately one million communist sympathizers, Gerwani women, Javanese Muslims, and the ethnic Chinese people in Indonesia, with over eighty thousand killed in Bali, which at the time was a Communist stronghold. Suharto implemented a range of pro-business policies and initiatives. To this day, the Indonesian government operates as a successor of Suharto's military dictatorship, which lasted thirty years. This, of course, shouldn't preclude it as a good vacation destination. If we bound ourselves to that logic, we Americans would have absolutely nowhere to go when we left town. Most, importantly, when we rely on this kind of moral, historical logic, we lose sight of the most crucial fact: everyone in Bali is freaky and weird and has scary vibes.
I knew that murdered bodies had been dumped en masse on beaches that would soon become popular locales for silent discos and drinking a scorpion bowl while watching the sunset. However, I was having trouble finding any information at all online for this blog post related to the killings at all. No matter what I typed, all I could come up with were tourist guides about the best places to shop and eat around town. So, instead, I asked ChatGPT to tell me the names of the specific beaches where bodies were dumped. The robot happily obliged and spit out a few beaches, including Kerobokan Beach, Kuta Beach, and Sanur Beach. Then, I tried to search for those specific beaches on Google. I searched Sanur Beach and found a web page on earthsmagicalplaces.com titled: "WHAT INSTAGRAM DOESN’T TELL YOU ABOUT SANUR BEACH". I thought this would be perfect. I clicked and scrolled for a minute, but I only saw a description of the various things you could purchase on the beach.
I kept scrolling through the article and caught a sub-headline: "THE OTHER SIDE OF SANUR BEACH." I hoped this section would reveal some of the history. Instead, it details another section of the beach on the other side of the cove that the author disliked.
Below it, I saw another third headline: "THE HARSH TRUTH". They must be messing with me. It said, "I’ve since discovered that the soft golden sand found by Sanur’s resorts is imported and raked daily by staff, who also vigorously litter pick their ‘section’ of the beach to create the picture-perfect paradise visitors (myself included) expect to see."
To this day, there has been no official acknowledgment of the killings that took place on the island. Having never visited Bali, it's unclear whether these millennials are all unknowingly dancing on unburied skulls or if it's something commonly discussed amongst these new locals and the truth just doesn't quite bubble up to the tourist guides they're producing.
Here's an excerpt from Vincent Bevins, author of The Jakarta Method, on the killings in Bali: "Young Wayan Badra, the thirteen-year-old son of the Hindu priest in the Seminyak neighborhood, noticed that the two nice communist teachers at his school went away and never came back. Then he heard what was happening on the beaches. They were bringing people from the city to the east to kill them on the sand. It was public property there, and empty at night. The bodies were abandoned there. Some families came to recover them. Others were gathered by Badra’s village, to be given anonymous funeral rites and cremated by his father. For Balinese Hindus, the loss of a family member’s body is a deep spiritual tragedy of infinite consequence. So a few years after the violence ended, Agung went with his family to find his father’s body, and give him an honorable funeral and cremation. They walked four kilometers to the site where someone told them they could find his remains. They found a field of bodies. They began looking through bones, picking up skulls. Someone shouted, “This is Mr. Raka!” But no, that skull didn’t look right. Maybe the hair was wrong. Maybe that one? They kept sorting through decomposing bodies, desperately, for minutes, before someone realized it was impossible, crazy. There were just “too many skulls, too many skeletons.” They walked back home for an hour, processing the knowledge they would never lay him to rest, and sickened by the vast sea of humanity they had just entered. In total, at least 5 percent of the population of Bali was killed— that is, eighty thousand... A little bit later, the first tourist hotel went up on the very beach, Seminyak, that had been used as a killing field."
Pieter Levels, a Dutch Tech influencer, calls Bali the "magical voodoo spirit island of Asia." He says, "It’s a nomad mecca. Deus’ hipster mecca, and the ocean is full of hot surfer boys and girls." Levels is the creator of Nomad List, a social media site where digital nomads can connect worldwide. On Nomad List, he is both creator and user, and he travels worldwide reporting on the pros and cons of different digital nomad hubs. Of Bali, he says, "I was invited to go to villas where they had 10-people weekend orgies with mushrooms and LSD ... There were girls who told me they wanted to show me my tantric erogenous energy zones, naked (not going to say what happened next). I mean, what happens if you put lots of beautiful sexy people open to anything together on an island. Surprise, surprise! SEX! But it wasn’t tacky. Definitely not in Ubud. I know I just said orgies. Still! Hooking up here felt romantic. Spiritual. Like lots of holiday loves. I mean, there was palm trees! This island radiated spiritual love."
However, when Levels left the island, he realized that everyone he encountered was somehow lost. The cliche of "Eat, Pray Love" was true. "People come to Bali after their break-up, mental breakdown, mid-life crisis, burn out or just when they feel lost. And everyone staying here for a long time who isn’t lost yet, has high odds of becoming it."
This September, Levels was invited to the Network State Conference in Singapore, where he participated in a fireside chat with Balaji Srinivasan on the topic "How Digital Nomads Enable Network States." Srinivasan describes a network state as connected communities that blend the digital and physical worlds, starting as internet-based communities and potentially evolving into decentralized or geographically concentrated societies. Communities of digital workers, like in Bali are a example of how the real world could look if only we were all brave enough to see beyond the nation, and to let unpolitical corporate interests manage the hard decisions for us. In Level's Bali blog, he writes, "All these lost kids, the so-called “millennials,” dropping in and out of a bamboo building doing internet stuff, and just doing whatever they want. Not following traditional paths (at least for now), but choosing their own. It’s magical." Following the massive success of Nomad List, he leveraged its popularity to launch several other ventures, including a photo AI website where you can generates images of yourself with six-pack abs, and an online shop where you can buy "Make Europe Great Again" hats. He is also building a small cult of digital nomads in a Portuguese coastal town, where residents live together within minutes of each other.
After seven years of living on and vlogging about the island, YouTuber Christian "Lost" LeBlanc is finally ready to put down real roots. He is constructing a behemoth villa near Canggu called The Lost Villa. It's fit with an infinity pool, an artificial stream dug from the soil, an eight thousand dollar cold plunge, and an imported Estonian sauna. "This villa is a collaboration with the world," he says. He posted a YouTube video two weeks ago: part-house tour and construction log. The villa still needs to be completed, but he wanted to move in to encourage workers to finish up. In the video, he helps eight Balinese workers move the largest L-shaped sectional sofa I've ever seen into his stone living room. In Europe or North America, this couch would be $10-20,000. In Bali, he tells us, it's only $3500. "That's the cool thing about Bali; you have so many artisans on this island." Of these construction sites, a local Balinese worker interviewed by MinnPost says, “I have spoken to developers who frequently come across bodies when digging foundations for tourist hotels in Kuta and Sanur... They instruct the builders to ignore the skeletons and to keep on building.”
In What I Spend in a Day Living in BALI, Conti visits a $104/week gym overlooking the rice fields to get a pump in. He books a surf lesson with a new app on his phone. He visits a cafe/bar with "Tulum jungle vibes," where it costs an extra $25 to sit on lawn chairs near the beach. On his way to a bar called Pretty Poison, he asks a cab driver who doesn't speak English, "You're Balinese. Do you like that a lot of foreigners come to Bali?"