The environment encouraged a fast, confessional intimacy. Remote freelance work was one of the few things we all had in common, and so it was a constant topic of discussion: how to stay motivated, entrepreneurial, sane. Sebastian tried to sell me, to no avail, on the benefits of “keto-clarity,” or the enlightened mental state that comes from a low-carb, high-fat diet.

Sometimes Roam felt more like immersive group therapy than tourism, because I wasn’t leaving the compound that much anyway. I didn’t have a rental car, and dense Miami traffic made even Uber a hassle. One evening, Marco Andrade, a young Brazilian software engineer, taught a group of us how to play the not-safe-for-work version of Bears Vs Babies, an overwhelmingly complex card game that involves genitalia, explosive diarrhea and fighting monsters. Then we moved on to Cards Against Humanity. More than anything else, it reminded me of high school in the suburbs without a driver’s license.

In this closed social system, roles and hierarchies develop much as they do on reality shows, just as Harrison had suggested to me at dinner. Long-term residents like Gregg Albert, the gregarious I.B.M. contractor, and a Bloomberg journalist named Nathan Crooks, who had each been living there for six months or more, acted out an earned authority, introducing new guests into the routine. Roam’s live-in community managers played camp counselors, urging on social activity in a pleasant albeit intermittently patronizing way. As Roamies arrived and departed, even in the week I was there, the social texture shifted in subtle and compelling ways, placating any incipient boredom: It was always changing and remaining the same.

Can you imagine a pair of noise-canceling headphones for geography? That’s how I started to think of Roam. When you want to, you can block out your sense of place entirely and exist in a hazy, calm, featureless space that could be anywhere. This nomadic bubble goes beyond a hotel in that it stretches around the world and is built to encompass your entire life; it promises to become your post-geographical home. Yet I found there to also be an anxiety to this hermetic placelessness, no matter how beautifully unburdened or minimalist it appears. Living anywhere is a lot like living nowhere.

Haid sees nomadism as a solution to our technologized, globalized lives, but it seems less like a fix than like an extension or intensification of the same condition. You travel in order to work, or vice versa, but the work becomes all-consuming. For better or worse, Roam has a way of removing what makes travel travel: culture shock, surprises and even loneliness, that feeling of being somewhere no one can find you.

I went to Miami anticipating a lifestyle shift. I could lie on the beaches the city was built to provide access to, get things done and explore a different place while being supported in my esoteric freelancer habits by a like-minded group. But the last of these goals was the only one I could ever seem to advance. I occupied most of my time at the bamboo Ikea desks of the co-working space, sweating over a coffee mug, trying to write — just as I do in Brooklyn. On the last morning at Roam, I realized I had barely even seen the ocean, so I took a car from Little Havana to Crandon Park Beach, an island nature preserve that used to be a coconut plantation. I left my bag on the sand and waded out into the warm, shallow water.

It was comforting to float there alone, moving with the gentle waves as they passed. It felt like what I should have been doing all along — embracing freedom, warm weather, the open horizon — but I had spent so much time being a nomad that I forgot to do the actual traveling. It’s not much of a solution to the predations of capitalism: You can go anywhere, as long as you never stop working.