Moving around
When are you getting married? When are you going to get an apartment? Why don’t you have a car?
I’ve heard all three of these questions in the last 72 hours and I’m pretty sure that most of the people my age have also heard these questions quite recently. If you get a bit defensive or scared when you hear these questions just know that you aren’t alone. The good news is that you don’t have to do any of these things in order to lead a happy and fulfilling life.
Young people of my age like to move around. We like to explore different cities, change jobs every 3 years and … date around. No shame in that. We live in a time of overwhelming choice and it is sometimes (not always tho) difficult to explain this to our parents who grew up in a time when there was only 1 kind of TV set and only 1 kind of car.
Millennials don’t have assets. We don’t own houses — we rent. We don’t own cars — we walk, bike, use public transport or use Uber. We also can’t really be expected to retain the very same job for very long because things are changing fast and we need to keep up with this. A student that enrols in Engineering and Computer Science will have outdated knowledge by the time she/he graduates.
Banks don’t give us loans because we don’t have assets. States don’t give us preferential taxation because we don’t get married as early (or at all). By the time we will pay up our student loans we will need to study something new again. By the time we pay our first mortgage, we may want to move to another country…
So how should we cope with this? How do we survive in a world that expects us to fit in a box that we’ve outgrown?
I have no idea. Same as you… but, I’ve learned to deal better with not having all the answers. When you move to a new city, you’re expected to start from ground zero. You know NO people. You don’t have a phone number. You oftentimes don’t even have a job. Super survival skills need to be activated. The money that you have is running out fast so you need to learn to take decisions fast in order to secure housing, a job and new friends.
Housing is especially rough. A house needs to become a home and in order to create this ‘micro-universe’ of comfort you need to work really hard. First thing that you need to do is erase all of those high expectations of loft-apartments that you see in movies. Secondly, you need to learn to work with what you have. You need to learn to improvise A LOT.
There are however certain tips and tricks that you can use to make your ‘micro-universe’ better.
- Get a plant.
2. Get a small painting.
…and it doesn’t have to be a $ 2,000 work of art because we don’t have neither the budget nor the luggage capacity to carry around a Van Gogh from city to city every 2–3 years. Fortunately for us, now we can get some colour on our walls for decent prices.
3. Invest in pillows and good (but not too expensive) textiles.
4. Get some lamps.
… or you could just hold on to the Christmas lights for a few more seasons.
5. Books and magazines are a must!
Especially in countries such as Japan, where people can get apartments as small as 8 square meters (!!!) people learn to have a healthy relationship to things in their house. They learn to turn a house into a home with minimum costs… Also they measure every single object by its retention capacity (Will I be able to carry this with me from Tokyo to New York next year?).
Finding peace in your personal life will help you to manage better the stress of moving to a new place. A good meal, a relaxing reading spot in your house, a comfy second-hand sofa… all of these will help you keep your cool in a potentially ‘boiling situation’.
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What is the first thing that you see when you wake up? A plant, a stack of books, your coffee machine, a carpet on the wall? How do you spend your first 15 seconds of every day?
Starting your day with a positive thought will give you the energy to dive in… it will give you the answers that you need and allow you to live up to the answer that you want to give to all those difficult questions.
Why don’t you settle down?
Because I want to wake up every morning with a sense of eagerness to explore a new city. The eagerness to discover something new about myself. The eagerness to grow.
