Trans-Nationals and the New Nomads
In Thousand Network, I am called a “nomad.” In Seoul, where I currently live, I am called “foreigner.” In America, where I grew up, I am called “the one who lives abroad.”
Everywhere I am, there is a different word, a different label, something to try and explain the problem presented when the mold of nationalism and patriotism is broken. Always, it only tells part of the story, a word for a current context, one point of the shape. To be honest, as much as I identify with each, I also don’t identify with any of them.
The truth is, I live on Earth. On the outside I might seem like a traveler, but I don’t consider myself as such. I live here just as much as anyone else. I have an apartment filled with my things, I go to work. I might leave, I might not. There are some things I like about the culture and some things I don’t, a fact that’s perfectly consistent no matter what geographic location I find myself.
But in a world bound by borders and names for a certain three dimensional space on the surface of a sphere, that description is often not enough. People want to know where, where is home and where is most important. Sometimes it feels like they want to know where my loyalties are, like if it came down to it, whose side would I be on.
Frankly, I’d probably be on no one’s side, because choosing a side means participating in the fight. I’m not interested — I’m on the side of humanity.
This kind of “trans-national” interest is at the heart of what Thousand Network, and its so-called “nomads,” is, as well as its power.
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The concept of the global citizen and the vision of a borderless future is not a particularly strange idea these days. Much smarter and more influential people than me have been talking about it, and some of them even have some workable ideas for how it might come about. It seems impossible, but we are doing impossible things every day.
Still, though, this kind of trans-nationalism remains something that you can’t exactly pull out as a topic of general interest at a dinner party. The idea of “not belonging” is one of humanity’s greatest fears, and the life of a trans-national hits that fear right in the middle.
A friend of mine, half-French and half-Cambodian, told me once that “people like us, we don’t belong anywhere.”
He’s right. It’s hard to be foreign all the time. Even in America, after now almost four years of living in Asia, I am foreign. Neither here nor there, always inside but outside. Missing all of the cultural in-jokes, unable to understand certain strands of the cultural DNA.
Interestingly, however, when I’m around other people “like me,” that is, other trans-nationals, I feel very much at home. We have our own in-jokes, our own cultural DNA — it’s just not attached to a particular country.
People usually think of nomads as people constantly in motion, everything in a backpack for the next journey. That applies to some of us. It definitely doesn’t apply to me; leaving Seoul would be a complicated, messy, and heavy process that I’m not particularly interested in undertaking.
But “nomads” are also tribes, and that’s where, I think, the heart of it comes into play. The nomads — the trans-nationals — may be moving or not moving, but what’s important is that we don’t belong to a name, a country, a certain place.
We belong to each other.
