The irony of long-term travelers is that despite all the people they meet and the places they go, they’re often some of the loneliest souls in the bar.
————————-
No where feels like home to me.
The past few years have kind of been a whirlwind – when I get unhappy or don’t feel like where I am has a purpose, I just move. I’ve been to a couple places – New York, China, and home – twice.
The main reason I keep moving is not just that I used to say “what now?” where I lived but because of one main thing: no where feels like home.
And that’s one scary ass feeling. It feels like there’s no home base, it feels like there’s no where you’re meant to be, it feels like there’s no point in coming back anywhere.
It also feels like there’s no purpose out there for you – cities and places just feel like cities and places you see when you’re a traveler. It all feels like you’re a spectator.
It’s the traveler’s curse. Travel too long, or too far, and you’ve stretched yourself so far that the anchors and tethers have been broken to one place.
As a result, you’ve become a lost soul.
“omgggg Prague is so nice” and other shit white American girls say
I had traveled to 25+ countries before my 22nd birthday, and something was getting old.
I was tired of doing the generic tourist route, tired of just seeing a place to check it off the list, and tired of traveling just for sightseeing and for no other reason. It was like traveling just to brag.
“Wow have you seen Prague, Paris, Barcelona?” It was the American white girl bragging status that bothered me: “Omgggggg Prague is soooooo nice!”
Yeah, I was done.
So I started living in places longer. I studied in Switzerland, then lived in China, and have plans to live in a couple more places over the coming decade (even investing in an a place. French countryside? Yes, please!).
Problem was, at some point I started to get a little listless, the 4 hour work week lifestyle began to bore me, and I wanted to return home. Back to my roots. The Anchor.
Except when I came back home I felt empty. It was just another place, another city with more people I didn’t know. Most childhood friends had moved and left.
Sure I had my family and some other friends, but I felt just as lost as a tourist wandering around Rome. It was the strangest feeling of detachment, like I watched a scene unfold before me with no emotional interest or connection.
So what do you do when home isn’t home?
I’ve noticed a trend that is increasingly common in lost 20 somethings – generic, one-way ticket type travel.
Nothing’s waiting here, so why not go somewhere else, right?
For the majority of people, I totally agree. Book a one way ticket and just get out. Build your wings on the way down. Plan the next year of your life during the plane ride over.
But there is one big problem – 1 year, or 3 years or 5 years down the line, when you decide you want to stay in one pace, you’re setting yourself up for some massive internal breakdown because you’ve constantly uprooted yourself and spread your purpose, pieces of yourself, all over the world and not in one place.
The reason why no where feels like home is because in your head you’ve spent too much time changing your external circumstances (outside) instead of your internal world (inside). And you’ve placed all the emphasis on the external for your roots.
The consequences of just changing scenery
At some people during my moving around the world I realized it was totally pointless. Every city felt the same – like nothing. Home (where my parents lived) felt the same – like nothing. They were just.. places.. they held no allure. I didn’t feel anything special in them.
None of them felt like a place I was “supposed” to be in. And that feeling scared me shitless! The feeling of life, or a place, being meaningless is one of the scariest things I’ve encountered in my post-college years.
I was talking about this kind of long-term travel with some friends when a friend talked about the story of his dad. His dad is a very wealthy businessman who is constantly traveling around the world.
He’s self employed, so he sleeps and wakes up when he wants. And he can travel whenever he wants. But he travels so much that he’s rarely at his home base, and instead is often at his other places around the world.
After a few years he started to have this feeling of a cloud hovering over him. He traveled so much that no where felt like home and he felt totally lost. He had no idea where to go “back” to when he needed to recover and recuperate, so he sought the help of a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist told him one thing: Find an anchor and set some roots. Create some place that is your home base, or else you’ll get lost. That can be a person, family, a place, a job, or anything. It just needs to signify that it’s your safe place to come back to. And you need to give some place that significance.
It’s gotta be deliberate in other words. This place is my home.
I thought back to the previous years of my life and found an interesting trend.
The first three years of college I hated – they never felt right, meaningful, or connected. College just felt like scenery. I even applied to transfer twice and got accepted, but I figured if they made me stay an extra year I would hate college that much longer, so I stayed and toughed it out.
Around my junior year I studied abroad in Switzerland and had a crazy fun time exploring Europe, speaking French, yadda yadda yadda. It’s hard not to think study abroad is the best time of your life.
But I came back from study abroad and school still didn’t feel right. So I knew something was up, and I knew I needed to make changes.
I joined the crew team — long story short, after being in a community that felt meaningful to me, close friends I could see 7 days a week because we trained together, my life there took on a purpose. That one year became more meaningful than my entire college experience combined. And the only thing that changed? The people.
That’s it.
People are one form of purpose. And having no purpose in a particular place is why it feels “empty” and like you’re just watching it like a traveler passing through.
The life of most unemployed 20 somethings from the outside looks great to some people: partying, sleeping in, video games and movies all the time. From the inside, it’s often the most miserable, meaningless experience a person can go through. It’s just hollow, and those experience serve as tiny placeholders until meaning can come in and fill the void.
When nowhere feels like home
The irony of traveling a lot is that you can truly lose yourself. Some will argue the opposite: traveling is the easiest way to find yourself. Having traveled a lot, I can say it truly depends on the person and what they are coming back to after their travels.
After all, in all the stories the wisemen would go in search of enlightenment / everlasting happiness all over the world just to say that they never had to leave their home in the first place, right?
I don’t want to get too philosophical here and say that happiness must be internally created first and not found outside – since I don’t really have experience doing that.
But what happens when you travel to so many places and leave so many pieces of yourself all over?
Instead of begin able to say “that tree is where I had my first kiss” or “that corner is where I scraped my knees learning to ride a bike” , they just become more places, more places, more places.
In any case, if you’re lost and can’t seem to shake that uneasy feeling that no where is home, remember these couple pieces about getting unlost:
Get un-lost:
Think about home for a second. What qualities of a place make you think of home? Probably #1 is people. #2 is the ambience, the feeling of it being cozy, warm, where we’re supposed to be. It just feels like home, right? That’s the intuition behind purpose.
“Supposed to be” comes from the feeling of having a reason to be somewhere or do something. And purpose is often attained through your mission or your work.
The single biggest factor I’ve found that affects the feeling of listlessness, the feeling of a place just feeling like a place, is the people you surround yourself with. Aka what community you’re a part of.
But for whatever reason, just having friends doesn’t given people purpose. It’s being a part of a group of friends that have some kind of common goal or mission. It’s a group that helps you improve yourself and attain mastery of something, rather than just a drinking and gossip group.
For me, that was joining a sports team in college. And in China it was training with wrestlers and developing close relationships with two friends that suffered with me in our old-school Chinese training.
Common people + a common purpose = meaningful community. Assuming you’re living away from family, these people become your new family.
A close second to finding a community you belong in is finding work you can engross yourself in.
Think about going through a terrible breakup – what’s the best way to keep going? Yeah.. keep going. Pour yourself into your work, stay focused, and keep trucking along. Things will regain their meaning and their feeling over time.
Viktor Frankl similarly echoed 3 ways to find meaning, in his memoir Man’s Search for Meaning:
- Meaning through work
- Meaning through a loved one
- Meaning through the ability to rise above oneself; aka finding meaning in suffering and a greater purpose to live for
Roots take time to grow
Just like a tree’s roots, setting your own roots takes time. We are rarely born into a purposeful and meaningful life. Instead, purpose and meaning are consciously created.
In my travels, I’ve met several children of families that were in the foreign service, regularly moving to a new country every 2 to 3 years.
And, surprise surprise they all get along great with me. “Uhh dunno where I should go next. Doesn’t really matter… nowhere feels like home anyway.”
I can’t help but feel like this process is not without consequences. With family or with a loved one, the process becomes easier and more bearable since you can kind of pack your family to go (meaning through loved ones). But what about the solo traveler? What about the person bouncing around and trying to find their purpose, their destiny, their life?
I would still advise most friends how I always have: if you are miserable and don’t know what step to take, book your one way ticket and plane your life on the way over.
Long-term travel and living abroad, including location independent work, definitely are skills. The art of purpose maximization can be tricky especially when where you live doesn’t matter. If you don’t have to live anywhere, what’s the incentive to sit down and actually try to invest in a life somewhere?
Just remember: purpose takes conscious work and investment to grow. It rarely magically appears at the most convenient time.
From one lost 20 something to another, all I can say is this:
Whatever you decide on, don’t forget to set some roots.
Snag my free report "What The Hell Should I Do With My Life?"
My guide will help you figure out:
- What the hell to do with your life
- Why life feels so unfulfilling - even though you might have it all
- Why pursuing success and searching for happiness actually make you less successful and less happy
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve only ever lived in the US, but I totally get this post. This year was the first since I left for college in 2001 that I haven’t moved at least once. I’ve lived in five different US cities in the past 8 years. I’m sure making an effort to put down roots would have helped.
The problem I’ve always come up against, though, is that I know I’ll just be moving again soon. It was my restless nature, being unable to figure out what I wanted to stick with, and now it’s my husband’s job. Each time I moved I would think, “I should join a club or volunteer or something, meet some people.” But the prospect of building a little community (being social is hard for introvert me!) only to abandon it within a couple of years max has always been disheartening.
I think that without school as a common thread, a place to meet peers, it can be really hard for us 20-somethings to build meaningful community. It takes effort, and I’m still trying to figure out how to motivate myself and make it work. I agree, though — it’s a vital piece of feeling “at home.”
Erin,
Yea that’s the interesting part. When you meet someone else you want to be with it raises the stakes a little and makes you think more instead of just ditching the issue and moving. The same thing recently happened to me, and it makes me wonder if all these years I’ve been moving I’ve just been avoiding getting to the core of the issue.
I’m just like you, totally an introvert at heart, and even though people would never guess when they meet me (it took a shit ton, and I mean a shit ton, of deliberate practice), like you the thought of investing so much just to lose it again leaves me as a lone wolf most of the time.
TOTALLY agree that after school building a meaningful community is bloody hard. I don’t think people realize how hard it really is. Without the guarantee of 5000 other students looking to make friends, all in the same boat and taking the same classes, it’s surprisingly not easy…especially for us introverts.
Like you I kinda do the “try new clubs and activities thing.” I started rock climbing again, quit and started new jobs, hung out with more friends and got more introductions, and plan on joining some new things soon (salsa classes, toastmasters, etc.).
It’s definitely work though, and the relationships are the most important part of feeling at home. At least you have your husband – for so many lost 20 somethings that are single it’s lonely all the time.
I’ve spent nearly two decades in the military and because of the frequent moves also find it hard to connect to a place. We just always connect to the people, because you can not see someone for a decade and then see them again, and it is like they were never gone. Great post!
Mike,
This is definitely a truth about life it took me way too long to realize. I wish I would’ve known sooner! It is without a doubt the people and not the place. An awesome reminder for people that are constantly uprooted.. you need to keep that crew together!
I really enjoyed reading this. I was feeling a bit down and sentimental and got to googling this whole concept of travelling and ending up not feeling home anywhere, so I found this post. I’m currently in my early twenties and while I never really took any elaborate tourist trips, I spent a lot of time living in other places, and always moved there alone, without knowing anyone when I arrived. That’s how I got to spending nearly three years of my life in small town USA, 4-5 months in NYC and another 4-5 months in Paris. I had a fantastic time in all of those places and I feel more alive than ever when I’m having “adventures” like that.
The crazy thing is that every time I’m home and every time I visit one of these places, I completely change my mindset and what I want out of life. Where I want to be, who I want to be with, etc. I started to realize that no matter where I am, I cannot feel complete and I never know what I truly want, what will really make me happy. When I’m in NYC I miss the country roads, the music, the food and the vibe of small town USA. When I’m in Paris I miss the big city feel and the energy of NYC and when I’m in small town USA I miss the culture and history of Paris. To top it off, I miss home (Europe) in all of those places. And while I do have a clear home with family, there are always things I will miss, and worse, people I can’t see.
Another problem for me is that while I have family here in my home town, my friends are spread out over the world. I have old and good friends here, but no real close friends that I see on a regular basis. I guess that’s where I can take your advice. While I do have clear roots, a clear home, I will always miss other things and other people and I can never “have it all”. Working on meeting new people and becoming close with (new) friends may be a good place to start feeling more comfortable with my situation in my hometown. Thanks for the insights on how you experienced all of this, I loved reading it!
Hey Vicky –
I sent you an email, your experience totally reflects my own and I’d love to talk about it more –
Alex
It was refreshing to here this from someone else. For me, I have no choice but to travel and live between two worlds…and no choice but to do it alone. My husband is in the military.
Everytime I go back to my home city it feels less and less like home. In fact, this last visit felt so empty. Now, I can’t stand both cities I am living between. Even having people in each city doesn’t make it better.
Lauren – when did your hometown start feeling less and less like home?
To be honest I haven’t quite figured out why that is. Maybe the people have changed, the places, etc. Maybe it’s just because we’re in a new phase and we feel like we need change, and that “hometown” was a childhood we can’t go back to. But my feelings were exactly like you mentioned – it felt so empty. It just felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there.
You split your time between two cities? My suggestion would be this: find some kind of activity you can bring wherever you go that will become a calling. That can be a business (With the internet it’s easier to be location independent these days), it can be a hobby, or it can just be something simple like learning a new skill or new city.
One routine I always do is the coffee shop routine. The highlight of most of my days is when I spend a couple hours in a coffee shop reading on my kindle or doing work. No matter where I go, I can usually find a coffee shop. I have a friend who does something similar with Tai Chi. Since he just uses his body he can bring it anywhere.
Stuff like that – activities that you can do that are inherently meaningful to you – should make things better. Let me know how things go !
Alex
I’ve moved 21 times in the last eight years. I’ve lived on three continents. I have lost all feeling of home.
Phil I totally hear that. What about the place you currently live?
I have previously lived on three continents too and I’ve had something weird happen twice – I hated half my time in one place, and also loved the other half. Nothing changed but the people.
Once was at college in the southern USA – hated hated hated the first 3 years, couldn’t wait to graduate. Finally found a really good crew of close friends and my last year was living in paradise.
The second time was when I lived in China – hated the first 6 months, but once I got a really close crew of friends, and we ended up becoming roommates, it easily became the best year of my life. How would you rate the crew you’ve got where you live now?
I am glad I have found this. I was actually googling “why I never feel like home” and found this post. It happens to me what happened to afheyne that when I am living with bunch of nice people I feel much more like home.
Hope it helps, Ponti!
Thank you for sharing this beautiful written article and your insight. I myself have travelled for several years, immigrated from Austria to Australia and now am a father of a 2year boy and five month old girl that mean the world to me and call myself fortunate that I’m truly loved by my wife since the the very first day we met.
My wife is From Thailand and we both miss our families very much at times, especially when we want to share our kids happiness with all of them.
Although there is something I came across while travelling in India that had a profound change of circumstances regarding – not feeling home anywhere in this world.
Its a 10 day silent retreat called “Vipassana” which allows you to stay in one place but go travelling far deep in the insight and boy what a journey that can be.
If anyone ever has a chance to dedicate 10 days to this technique than I can really recommend it to anyone who feels lost and alone in this world.
Please have a read:
http://www.dhamma.org
–
Satisfying one thousand desires
or conquering just one?
Hi Werner –
Thank you for your insight and recommendation to check out the Vipassana retreat. I will definitely check it out
Alexander
This piece really hit me. I completely agree it is about the people not the place. And, that is the tough thing about travel you never know if you will land in a situation with a good community. Or if your roommates will be warm and friendly etc… I have traveled a lot in my twenties. Lived 2 years in Italy, 8 months in Chile, and 4 months in Argentina. Currently I am living in a small town in Brazil teaching English. And have never felt more lonely. I don’t know what is wrong, but unlike my other travels this time I haven’t been able to connect with people. I think a lot of it has to do with the logistics of my situation. Where I am living, my work hours etc…, and just having bad luck in that I haven’t connected with my roommate. In the past I have always had such good luck with roommates and they have always been my best friends and served as my family while abroad. This time it has been devastating not to have that connection or someone to fill that role. Living alone or in an apartment with someone who doesn’t care about you is the worst. I lived alone for one semester in college and vowed not to do it again. The best times of my life I was always living with a lot of people. Anyway I am rambling. But you are right it is the people not the place. Right now I am trying to figure out what I will do next. Unfortunately I think I will keep moving. I haven’t made the connections here to have any desire to stay as sad as that sounds. Also I am starting to feel that as I am nearing 30 my life is becoming sadder. Feeling like I don’t have anything, and feeling like all my traveling has alienated my family that I care about most. Also moving all the time I haven’t had any meaningful romantic relationships either. Even more depressing my career path is very unclear. I have an architecture degree, but not a tremendous amount of passion for working as an architect. Although I love languages and teaching. I have realized that I much prefer teaching English to doing architecture. I have toyed with the idea of starting my own English teaching company. In closing this article really hit me hard. But I know it won’t always be like this. I hope to put down roots very soon. I need to.
Hey Benjamin,
I totally hear you there man. Many people like us (who spend their 20s traveling a lot, rather than setting down roots) get this uncomfortable feeling about being alone. Like nowhere is home.
I agree with you the best times in my life have always been when I was living with a lot of people. I think it’s that community aspect that makes us human, and makes us feel so lost when we don’t have it.
Let me ask you this: what’s preventing you from staying in one place for a bit longer, or just setting up a “home base?”
And why not start your own English teaching company, or better, take your english teaching online – so you can move wherever, which gives you the freedom to set down roots (and stay in one place) or travel as much as you want?
I’m with you there man. I need to find a way to set down some kind of roots. The irony is that traveling becomes less fun without roots (for me) unless you’re a full on nomad.
For me university and travelling in my late teens/early 20s was the pinnacle of what life is all about; learning new things, passing tests, challenging yourself, meeting new people, partying, seeing new places…those years at university and those years spent travelling will never be bettered.
The problem, the way I see it, is returning ‘home’ once all that’s done to find things haven’t changed one bit; you as a person have changed, but the people you’ve left behind haven’t.
You therefore enter a spell of deep depression while you sort your life and finances out, spending years planning your next move; “What do I want to do with my life?” etc…
You can’t sit still, but you have to. And you get drawn into the mediocre existence of the people you left behind and you start questioning everything…they have the mortgage (shouldn’t I be thinking about a house?), they’re having kids (maybe I need to meet someone and settle down?), they have a decent career which they’ve built up (why did I waste my money on education and travel?). The problem is, you see; reality. Home life when you return to it after doing everything you wanted in your youth is just as dull as when you left it. As travellers/dreamers/idealists we can never be comfortable with mediocrity, and seeing others accept their fate fries our brains, and we start to question whether or not we should accept that fate of paying the mortgage on time.
These roles will however, be completely reversed when us ‘lost 20-some-things’ reach 40/50/60 and we can look back and think “You know what? I did good”, while the people who have never left ‘home’ will think “You know what, what did I actually DO?”.
It’s just for now, reality bites.