A viewer asks me how to deal with the homesickness and foreignness of traveling - but the the future will be foreign for all of us, whether we travel or not.
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I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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Not just the longing that you feel for friends and family and familiar locations, but the cultural homesickness, the political homesickness that you might feel for the place that you come from.
Because when you move to a different part of the country or a different part of the world, there's just so many differences.
There are going to be things that you like more about the new place, and there's going to be things that are very off-putting.
Even something as simple as grocery shopping.
You're going to find a different selection of goods available at the grocery store, different assumptions about when's a reasonable time to do this or that, styles of dress, speech, church attendance, you name it.
And I've moved around a fair bit.
Alberta, Ontario, I was in Vegas for a while, East Coast, British Columbia.
I've moved around a lot.
And yes, each time you go to a new place, there's things you like, but there's things that you miss about the old place.
There's something, it's an improvement, but it's also a degradation.
And so what are you supposed to do about that?
And, you know, in a certain sense, to ask the question is to answer it.
But let's take a circuitous route to get there.
The title of this video is a very old saying, you can't go home again.
And there's a movie that really illustrates this just perfectly.
World's End.
It's part of the Cornetto trilogy.
And the topic of that movie is about these Gen Xers trying to relive their last year of high school, 15 years down the road.
And so they're listening to Sisters of Mercy.
They're driving around.
The leader of the group is still dressing exactly the same as he dressed in high school.
He's still driving the same exact car as he drove.
And they're trying to complete the pub crawl that they failed to complete on their graduation night.
But when they go to all of these bars, all of these dingy, hole-in-the-wall, sloppy Joe dives, well, they've all been remodeled.
They've all been bought out by corporations.
They all have the exact same menu, the exact same lighting, the same light oak veneer on everything, the same faux friendliness.
And the whole thing's really a metaphor for what Gen Xers are experiencing with the millennial generation.
The millennials don't drink, and so the bars no longer have any character.
They're all corporate.
They're all friendly.
They're all politically correct.
And the frustration that Gen Xers find when they go to the bar, it's either a bunch of grumpy baby boomers that want to pretend that they did great things to make this world a better place, or it's a family-friendly, innocuous, you know, corporate product.
The world we grew up in does not exist anymore.
You know, you might find a little niche here or there, and I know a couple of them, but they're very few and far between.
And quite frankly, as we age, as we age out of the bar scene, there's just no market for it anymore.
And so, even if we go to that hole in the wall, it's now the preserved hole in the wall.
Listening to music from the summer of love on the oldie station is not the same as actually being there.
You know, typically they say the past is a foreign country in the sense of the historian, that to read about the past, to immerse yourself in it, to understand it, is to visit a foreign country.
But our own pasts wind up becoming foreign countries.
And so, when you move to another state, to another country, and you move because there's things you like about the new place, but there's going to be things you miss.
The tragic part is that if you go back home, might not be quite so obvious yet if it's only been a year or two, but give it five years, then go back home.
You won't recognize the place.
It's completely changed.
It's completely new.
It's completely different.
And that, brother, is just part of aging.
You can never go home again, and the past is a foreign country.
Your past is a foreign country that no longer exists.
So, what do we do about this?
Well, some people choose to endlessly embrace the new.
They live in the moment.
They have no sense of rootedness, no sense of tradition.
They go with the current trends, the pop politics, the pop opinions.
And I think you know where this winds up.
You wind up with somebody that's in their mid-30s or, you know, mid-40s, and they're living the exact same sort of lifestyle as all of the young people.
They've never put down roots, they've never grown, they've never gathered any moss.
They're still adrift with their lives going nowhere.
And so, this is what I meant when I said to ask the question is to answer it.
The question states: there's things I liked about my hometown, but there's things I really like about this new place that I'm at.
How do I reconcile the two?
Well, you can't go back to your hometown, it's not there anymore.
But what you can do is start forging an identity, forging a political and cultural identity for yourself.
And I don't mean in the grand sense of attending marches and rallies and making a big ruckus.
I mean you create your own culture.
You create a new hometown for your children.
You establish a career.
You establish some values, some work habits, some lifestyle aspects to yourself.
You know, are you a whiskey drinker or do you drink that mint-flavored schnapps that Aaron seems to love so much?
Do you go out dancing?
Do you become a movie critic?
Do you have a really nice home theater?
Do you have whatever it might be?
You start selecting a group of friends.
And granted, it's difficult nowadays because we are all so separated by vast distances.
But you know, travel's getting cheaper.
You build that.
You create that new synthesis.
You take what you liked about where you grew up.
You take what you like about the new place that you're living.
You combine the two.
You figure out how to suss out the way to put them together.
And you start putting that life together for yourself.
Nostalgia is not meant to be indulged in, in some sort of sappy or morose manner.
Nostalgia is there to help guide your path into the future.
That you should be looking to create a new nostalgia.
Same flavor as the old one, but a new arrangement.
Something that rhymes, something that echoes with your past without trying to relive the past, while embracing those new aspects that you enjoy.
a solid foundation, a rooted family and a rooted culture to grow off of.
So here's the thing.
The fact that you're aware of this question so young, at such a young age, early 20s, you've got a huge advantage here because everybody is eventually going to see their childhood home disappear.
You know it's not there anymore.
You know you're somewhere different.
And now you can get to the task of affirming the old and building the new.
