Find More Ways to Be an Outsider
 

subtitled: Doing so may feel painful, but it’s one of the best investments you will ever make.
This is an article in The Atlantic, and I thought it really struck home for travellers, especially those of us who have lived for years in more countries than one. (We're at 5 1/2 - the half being two weeks in two weeks out.)

What do you think? Make sense to you?

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/a...e-kids/627011/

Absolutely resonates. We're "permanent expats" - left the US in 1995 for what was supposed to be a 2 year posting ... Now on (new) country #5. It's a wonderful life.

That article doesn't work for me I'm afraid. Partly because I spent my childhood moving continuously (15 different places (UK, not 'abroad') before I was 21) so I was the permanent newcomer, and as a child that's not what you want to be.

Yes, in later life move to improve your lot - new job, new relationship, new start etc. It can give you an incentive to make something out of nothing and there has to be something unsettling about spending your whole life in one place doing the same inherited job (eg my 1921 census coal mining ancestors). But saying that being an outsider is a feature rather than a bug is a step too far for me. That style of article is only one step removed from the kind of mindless 'inspirational' slogans that litter social media - 'Be resilient', Never let your colours fade', 'Bend perhaps, but never break' 'You gotta take a risk or you'll be doing the same sh*t for the rest of your life'. Quite.

I also get the feeling that the author could have penned exactly the opposite article if the muse (or the money) had pointed in that direction - 'Why feeling you belong is the secret to success' (or something like that). No, I'm afraid some glib, gin soaked motivational essay based more on rhetoric than research is not something I'll be taking to heart. It may touch on a mile wide part of the human experience but as advice it's only an inch deep. :(

I'm with BofB :thumbdown:

It reads almost like it was written by an AI that had been handed a list of the current buzz words. Resilient this, well being that....

I'm struggling what he's saying that isn't just the obvious? Maybe I missed it having turned off and started my own game of buzzword bingo.

Andy