Feature Photo: Sarah Menkedick Photo: goingslo
Existential migration is changing the way we think about home and belonging.
Leaving home can be a traumatic and exciting experience, especially if we are leaving to live in a foreign country. Research into the experiences of voluntary migrants has unexpectedly revealed that some of these people are actually using migration to express a deeply felt existential need. These ‘existential migrants’ discover more about themselves and feel more alive when confronting unfamiliar cultures. But by repeatedly exposing themselves to a vast range of different people and foreign places they can consequently end up living with a feeling of not being at home anywhere.
Photo: Sarah Menkedick
Alan is an executive in a large banking firm in the City of London. Six years ago as a recent business graduate, he left his native Maryland to ‘seek his fortune’. After a year in New York and two years in the Netherlands, he arrived in London where he’s worked for the past three years.
When I first met Alan he presented as an intelligent, curious and ambitious young man with a passion for travel. He was proudly self-sufficient and independent but this was mixed with a slight air of melancholy.
Alan came to therapy in order to deal with an increasing feeling of restlessness at work, mixed with a recurring anxiety about his plans to buy a property in London. For the past couple of weeks he has been feeling homesick for family and friends in America but also increasingly preoccupied with the idea of moving to Lisbon, where he spent an exciting three-week holiday last summer.
It may be tempting to simply view Alan as typifying a breed of young international executive moving around the globe according to the demands of 21st century capitalism. However, even a cursory examination of Alan’s experience and his motivations for leaving home begin to offer another story. An exploration of Alan’s life reveals that while growing up he had always assumed he would leave Annapolis, in fact he never really felt ‘at-home’ in his home. This is curious. Why would he not feel ‘at-home’ in the only home he’d ever known?
Looking back, Alan gradually realises that he made many choices, including education and career choices, based upon the likelihood that each choice would hasten his departure and increase his ability to live in other parts of the world. This was such a natural longing for Alan that he was shocked when he discovered that many of his friends had no plans to leave Annapolis but instead were happy to plan their lives around friends and family and the familiar streets where they had grown up.
Photo: Sarah Menkedick
In contrast, Alan always remembers being attracted to anything foreign. He experienced the familiar home environment as overly conventional, too homogenous, boring and even suffocating. Though he had good relationships with this family and a good social network, he always felt different from those around him and longed for the adventures he would have once he left his homeland. He remembers thinking ‘life begins when I leave home’.
Alan’s current experiences reveal his long-standing dilemma regarding the attraction and repulsion of belonging and settling in one place. He lives with ambiguous feelings regarding home, a deep longing to belong coupled with the panic of having to
conform to a quotidian life that he finds unconvincing and abhorrent.
Alan’s story illustrates a process of voluntary migration that has not been recognized until now. Unlike economic migration, simple wanderlust, or forced migration, ‘existential migration’ is conceived as a chosen attempt to express or address
two fundamental aspects of existence by leaving one’s homeland and becoming a foreigner. These individuals move cross-culturally, sometimes repeatedly, in search of self- understanding and adventure. Such people are actually seeking to resolve deeper ‘existential’ questions such as ‘who am I’, ‘how can I fulfill my potential?’, ‘where do I belong?’, ‘how can I feel at home?’
Photo: Sarah Menkedick
Most of these individuals leave their home cultures because they never felt ‘at home’ in the first place. For some, the choice to leave can eventually result in not being at home anywhere in the world, leaving these individuals to live within a sort of ‘homelessness’ that includes a complex mix of inconsolable loss as well as perpetual adventure and self-discovery.
These individuals raise interesting questions about our definitions of home and belonging. Is ‘home’ where we are most
ourselves or is home the very thing that exiles us from ourselves?
The research that revealed this process consisted of in-depth interviews with voluntary migrants from around the world now living in London. The study generated impressively consistent themes including the importance of independence, the need to
live fully, the need for freedom within belonging, the value of experiences of difference and foreignness as a stimulus to personal awareness. Among these migrants there is a marked preference for the strange and foreign and a consistent contempt for the conventional and easy life of the settled community.
The concept of existential migration fits well with themes in existential philosophy, especially concepts that point to the foreignness and mystery at the heart of human existence. The concept also challenges aspects of psychological research into
acculturation and relocation stress.
Even if an individual has relocated to a new culture solely for business purposes, he or she may find that their taken-for-granted assumptions about daily life are suddenly challenged, exposing a kind of groundlessness
to living. Upon return to the home country, that revelation is not always convincingly ‘papered-over’, resulting in a restlessness that needs to be acknowledged and explored.
Photo: Sarah Menkedick
As a process, existential migration may occur with anyone, though certain people seem more predisposed towards it as a primary orientation to life. But even for ‘existential migrants’ the day may come when their process becomes one of settling rather than migrating.
Talking about issues of home and belonging in therapy tends to be very emotional and poignant, but voluntary migrants value and even enjoy these dialogues. Paradoxically, voluntary migrants usually find that openly discussing their experiences of leaving home, often for the first time ever, results in a shift regarding their feelings of restlessness.
The approach in these sessions does not assume that anything is ‘wrong’ or pathological in these experiences; perpetual migration is not seen as less worthy than being settled. These sessions are simply an opportunity to have a facilitated dialogue that delves deeply into the motivations for leaving and the feelings that have transpired along the way.
The concept of existential migration also offers a re-consideration of the psychological effects of globalisation. As more and more of us are expected to have mobile lives, a kind of global ‘homelessness’ may be on the horizon; perhaps we are heading towards a time when no one really feels at home anywhere anymore, signaling the end of belonging. It is exactly these deeper issues that the study of existential migration has revealed as issues for us all.
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9 Comments... join the discussion!
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Greg, I think you’ve hit upon a fundamental piece of the traveler’s quandary by describing the existential dilemma as a “mix of inconsolable loss as well as perpetual adventure and self-discovery.” I don’t personally match your case study’s longstanding wanderlust–until age nineteen I had no desire (but rather, an aversion) to leaving my comfort zone: my home town, my tight group of friends, my familiar routines. But for several reasons I pushed myself to spend a year of study abroad, and those nine months completely reversed my approach to the outside world and to being viewed as an outsider. I’m writing this comment from my current, though impermanent, home in Cambodia, and my American hometown is nowhere on the foreseeable agenda. Thanks very much for illuminating this common but rarely discussed source of ambivalence.
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Thanks for this insightful and thought provoking article, Greg.
As someone who has been an expat for much of his adult life, I can relate to what you are saying. I’d like to add two points.
Firstly, I think there is an itch of dissatisfaction in many of our lives. Perhaps it is an intrinsic part of the human condition. Certainly in Britain, I think many people of my generation (I’m 31) are slightly lost. No longer religious, and dissatisfied with consumer culture, finding meaning in the daily grind is difficult. Add to this the ‘cult of the individual’, and it’s very easy for the foot-loose and privileged to cut ties to home, and seek meaning and adventure and exoticism elsewhere. Whether that actually works, is another question ; )
Second, it seems we are becoming increasingly less tied to place. This isn’t just about globalization, it’s about how we interact with others. Many of us spend lots of time in the virtual space of the Internet. We can connect with people all around the world, that we don’t even really know. Ironically, I probably spend more time interacting with people I know through twitter, than emailing and talking to my “real friends” back in Britain, and elsewhere. Perhaps that just makes me a very sad, and deeply unrooted individual!
I remember reading that we become friends with people simply through proximity; that it’s not actually anything to do with shared interests and outlooks, as such, but is simply down to sharing time. It seems social media could be changing this.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past 10 years, it’s that upping and leaving for pastures new is in some ways a stop-gap. It may temporarily scratch that itch of dissatisfaction, but it doesn’t kill it. Perhaps it is an internal existential migration that we really need.
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Thanks Greg. This is a very thought provoking article.
I believe I am going to one day become an existential migrant. I have lived in the same town for all of my 22 years, and fully intend to move abroad once I’ve earned a degree. It’s the goal that I am completely determined to achieve and the focus I seem to need to get through normal everyday life. It makes the mundane manageable
I cannot help but wonder about the type of person this condition is predisposed to. Reflecting upon myself, I have a strong need for independence and freedom, and I get bored very quickly. It’s this boredom which I think to be a strong factor. There isn’t one country that I’m drawn to; I plan to live in several countries, spending a few months/years in each. The novelty of frequently discovering and experiencing a completely new culture, I believe, will be fulfilling. But as mentioned above, it will come at a price.
Also, I get the feeling that the internet will play an integral role in my future travels. It will be the one constant which will stay with me that ties me to the people I leave behind.
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Wow… I’m a teenager now, and Alan’s mental situation seems a lot like mine, only stronger. This is really interesting – I’m glad I’m not the only one.
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Thank you Greg for your inspirational piece. You know, it is so interesting that I am a couch potato existential migrant. I yearn to travel. I read about travel. I feel part of the globalised world and yet I go nowhere. Home is here but I am pulled elsewhere to other homes, other lives that I will never have. Do I count?
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Thanks for the interesting article! For me, traveling and migrating has never been the source in itself of any “insconsolable loss.” I’ve been down, alone, heartbroken – but no more than I would be in any other place if I had not migrated. I share the human longing to belong, but find that desire in a less physical sense. As Nick pointed out, with today’s technology, proximity is just one of many considerations when creating your support system and maintaining friendships – we have all sorts of choices, for better or worse. Maybe it’s just the independence talking, but it’s enough to have a few strong bonds with those I’ve met along the way, and to know that there is always potential to meet more people trying to answer these questions.
To me, belonging for most non-travelers sort of implies a physical routine of comfort, which implies having to limit your exploration of things for the sake of staying within that comfort zone. I hate sounding like a hippie, but it really does seem to come down to redefining belonging in a less physical sense if you don’t want to lose your mind abroad.
As Pico Iyer put it, “…it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)”
And his follow up: “I am not rooted in a place, I think, so much as in certain values and affiliations and friendships that I carry everywhere I go.”
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