Tribal Workers

Here's an article worth reading. From Financial Times: Tribal Workers. ("The notion that one can do anything is clearly liberating. But life without constraints has also proved a recipe for endless searching, endless questioning of aspirations. It has made this generation obsessed with self-development and determined, for as long as possible, to minimise personal commitments in order to maximise the options open to them. One might see this as a sign of extended adolescence...Eventually, they will be forced to realise that living is as much about closing possibilities as it is about creating them.") The article hits close to home for a lot of people I know, including myself.

I've been planning to write a blog reflecting on this article, but I've been sitting on it too long. Instead, excerpts from an email I wrote about it to another American living and working in Ghana. (Read the article first or this might seem rather random.)


At this stage in my life, I’m a little angsty. I realize that I need (and want) more education, but I’m not satisfied that I’ve found the right program, as I think I’ve mentioned before [though I have just found a few promising ones in Sweden!].

I guess I need to decide what kind of job I’d ideally be doing in 10-15 years’ time and then figure out the best path there. Right now, it’s something vaguely like helping people while living abroad, though I’m not convinced I want to live an ex-pat life forever or raise my kids that way. And just what the vague concept of saving the world means in actuality, I'm not sure. There are competing priorities in my life, but making a lot of money has never been one of them. I always planned to have a job that didn’t feel like a job—I figure you spend so much of your life working that you waste it away if you’re in a position you can’t enjoy or don’t find fulfilling. At the same time, I recognize that there is life outside of work and wouldn’t want an all-consuming job that dominates everything else in my life. Like you said, it’s about balance.

My bounty-of-choices comes from an active imagination. I certainly grew up with the ‘anything is possible’ mentality and I’ve been lucky to have it work out for me so far, from getting into Yale, to being awarded a Fulbright, to deciding I’d just turn up in Africa and find myself a job. I’m ready to head off to South America, India, Thailand, etc. for the next big adventure. The problem is, I know that I need to be doing things that are good for my career (eg. staying at one job for a significant length of time, being promoted within that organization, learning a language, getting a masters, etc) and not just roam the globe. I’m not convinced those things are mutually exclusive, however. And so what if I never ‘make something of myself’ in the traditional Western climbing-the-ladder kind of corporate way, if I’m happy and doing something ‘good’? It's hard to break from that culturally-engrained yoke.

Right now, working at a refugee related NGO that allows me to travel on the job and take plenty of vacation, I’m in a pretty good place. Just have to hope my ADHD doesn’t get the best of me! Plus, all those people in the article are in a better position than me in terms of dream options that pay—for me, I know a hundred things I could be happy doing, but most of them would be volunteer without pay. (And then I think, maybe I should just marry rich… ; ) ).

As for dating, the last few years I haven’t dated any Westerners (most generally because I wasn’t meeting any and had the mentality that I wasn’t living abroad to experience what I could have stayed home for). The ‘relationships’ I did have tended to be a little superficial, in retrospect. I was never able to have deep conversations because of language barriers (they spoke English, but fluency is another thing) and because we lacked a shared cultural context. I learned a lot and had fun, but looking back I think I was open to those relationships because they were (emotionally) safe because they had an expiration date. In Egypt and Malaysia, I knew I’d be leaving after a year, so things were never allowed to get too serious. When I was visiting Egypt last year, I meet a guy that I really hit it off with and went back to visit him this winter. I went back to see if it was something I was willing to return to Egypt for long-term, to give ‘us’ a shot. In the end, it was a sacrifice I couldn’t make. But I’d like to hope that if the circumstances had been right, that I would have been willing and able to give it a go. I don’t see that kind of choice as one being made for that other person exclusively, but for oneself just as equally.