I Wish I Didn’t Have To Change My Friend Circle All The Time, But…
World travelers tend to see their friends come and go all the time.
Every time you move abroad to a new country, it’s like starting your life over again from scratch. You are finding places to visit on a regular basis, you are starting a new job, you are learning a new language, and you are making new friends.
But it’s not just that.
Serial expats also tend to have a lot of friends who are living similar lifestyles like they themselves do. After all, people tend to associate with people who are similar like them.
So even if you are staying in a single country for quite a long time, you see people come and go on a regular basis. Sure, some of your friends stay — especially those who are local from that county. But the large majority eventually moves on to somewhere else.
Seeing the lifestyle of my childhood friends feels so strange to me
Quite a lot of my childhood friends stayed in Germany for most of their lives. But not only did they stay in Germany, but they also stayed in close proximity to my hometown.
Most of them stayed in places perhaps one- or two hours away from my hometown.
It is so interesting for me, because they spend quite a lot of time with the same people they were friends with during our school years.
Of course, I also stayed in touch with some of my childhood- or teenage friends. In fact, I consider them as among closest friends in my life. But I only see them every couple of months when I go for a vacation back home. Other than that, my life is a continuous circle of people coming and going.
At the very minimum, once in two years my life goes trough a complete restart in pretty much all of its aspects.
A restart almost feels like the beginning of a new life
Pravina Chetty has recently mentioned to me in an e-mail that whenever she is moving to a new country, it is an opportunity for her to rid herself of bad habits that used to be a part of her life.
There are a lot of aspects like this which are very important:
- New habits
- New friend circle
- New work environment
- New learning opportunities
- New language
- New routines
In other words, moving to another country is a chance for us to be “reborn” in the sense of living almost a completely different life as compared to the one we were used to until that point.
And this is the thing that makes me feel so strange if I think about the idea of what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Germany. It feels to me that my life wouldn’t be so different from the time that I was still going to high school.
It seems very difficult to me to make real progress when you are staying in a single environment for a long period of time.
Personal growth always depends on the limitations of the environment that you are in
Eventually, you reach the limits of the growth that you can achieve when you are staying in a particular environment for a long period of time.
Actually, this doesn’t have to be true. I do accept the fact that you can grow very far even in one single environment. But in most cases, the growth starts slowing down significantly after a while.
At that point in time, you would be better off to change your environment once again in order to get a quick boost of progress, rather than staying there and waiting patiently for it to develop slowly over time.
Just think back to your experiences of working in a new company.
In the beginning, there is a very steep learning curve. But after a while, work starts becoming repetitive and your growths starts slowing down significantly… until you reach the point where all that’s left is stagnation.
Recently, I have come across research which was basically talking about the expertise of medical doctors. It said that the performance of doctors fresh out of uni is increasing dramatically, but only until about 8–10 years or so after the beginning of their working career. From that point onward, their growth starts to either slow down significantly, or even stagnate.
This is against the common perception that with age comes expertise. Yes, people who have been practicing their work longer certainly have more experience. But on average, that experience doesn’t tend to translate into an improvement of skill from a certain point onward.
Of course this research has been talking about average growth and is not reflective of every single case.
In fact, it is very much possible for a person to continue improving their skill-set until a very late age. Rather, we are talking about what happens on average. And the average seems to indicate that people tend to sub-consciously no longer see the need for improving their skill-set once they have achieved a certain level of performance.
Experts performing on world-class level tend to increase their performance until old age, but the average person stops improving eventually.
For any aspect of life, a changing environment is nourishment for the mind
Changing your environment on a regular basis in different aspects of life ensures that you are always exposed to new challenges, new ideas and new opportunities.
Of course, friendship is not a tool for growth.
Friendship also includes feelings of belonging, enjoyment, happiness, love and support for one another. And I certainly agree with the idea that these aspects of life should be separated from simply thinking about one’s own personal growth.
But then again, I personally like to have friendships in which both of these factors play a role — these feelings of belonging as well as well as a feeling of constantly being exposed to new ideas and challenging one another.
But then again, this approach also includes a risk to be mindful of.
Changing your environment on a regular basis for the sake of personal growth can also turn into an addiction. Eventually, you will get bored if you are staying in one place for too long, and you keep moving purely for the sake of moving in itself.
Perhaps you are saying to yourself that you are moving because you have already “learned everything about the place there is to learn”.
But oftentimes, this is not true at all.
Instead, you become nothing but a restless person. Somebody who simply moves from one place to another, but doesn’t really identify with any of them. Somebody who has been to a lot of different places, but doesn’t know anything about any of them.
My conclusion:
Learn to recognize when your life starts to stagnate. And only then move on to a new environment.
One risk that world travelers, serial expats, digital nomads (or whatever you want to call them) face is that they become so hungry for new experiences that they simply jump on every single opportunity which comes up in their lives.
This is just as bad, if not worse, than being stuck in a single environment to the point of pure stagnation.
All it leads to is restlessness, addiction, anxiety, as well as feelings of being overwhelmed and deprived of energy.
Consequently, balance is the key to all of this.
In order to maintain that balance, you will need to develop self-awareness in regards to two factors:
- the point when you no longer are capable of making any progress in any particular environment.
- the feeling of wanting to move for no reason other than the urge to move and experience new things in itself.
Lastly, I would like to hear from you. What is your experience in terms of changing your environment on a regular basis versus staying in one single place for a long period of time? What is your experience in terms of changing your friend circle on a regular basis?
Let me know in the comments below.
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