Meet the Gen Xer who lives on a boat—she supercommutes to California every few weeks for her $100-an-hour job. Just eight shifts cover all her bills

For Josie Lauducci and her husband Christian, home isn’t tied to a zip code-it moves with the tides, literally. For the past decade, the couple has lived aboard a 13-meter-long sailing yacht, traveling across the Pacific and at times raising their three children at sea . Their floating home has taken them from San Francisco to South America and as far as New Zealand . They aren’t retired early or backed by generational wealth . Instead, their nomadic life is powered by something far more practical: Lauducci’s flexible nursing job in San Francisco. About every five or six weeks, Lauducci flies from wherever the boat is docked-most recently in Mexico-back to the Bay Area. She works eight 12-hour shifts as a per diem neonatal intensive care unit nurse, making over $100 an hour. While per diem roles don’t guarantee shifts, they offer far more control over scheduling-and in Lauducci’s case, enough pay to cover her family’s expenses. “That rhythm is what makes this life possible,” the 44-year-old told Fortune from the airport, en route back to Luana , the family’s newest vessel. The arrangement might sound extreme, but it’s increasingly familiar at hospitals across high-cost cities like San Francisco. In fact, there’s a growing class of workers who live far from where they’re employed, compress their schedules, and travel long distances to make the math work. Lauducci is one of them: a supercommuter. The rise of supercommuting Lauducci has worked as a nurse for more than 20 years and started out full-time, with stints as a travel nurse along the way. But as she gained seniority at her Bay Area hospital, she began to notice a different path emerging, one taken by per diem nurses who traded predictability for flexibility. Some would fly overseas after completing their required shifts. Others lived out of vans, exploring the U.S. between work stints. What they shared was a willingness to reorganize their lives around compressed schedules. This idea of supercommuting has long existed across the corporate ladder, from interns to CEOs . But its popularity soared during the pandemic, when workers got a glimpse of a calmer, cheaper life outside major cities. Researchers from Stanford found that the share of workers in the 10 largest U.S. cities who commuted more than 75 miles each way had grown more than 32% since the pandemic. In the U.K., Trainline found that the number of Brits spending more than three hours getting to work and back has doubled since before COVID. Work-life balance also now matters more than ever. A report released last month found that it has overtaken both pay and job security as the most important factor for job seekers. The healthcare system-under pressure to fill critical roles while reducing burnout-has thus increasingly made room for flexibility, particularly for experienced nurses whom hospitals are eager to retain. For Lauducci, that means if she miscalculates time to port and misses her flight, preventing her from working a shift, it’s not the end of the world....

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