The privilege and challenges of living in different places
How a road trip from New York to Boston brought back old memories with new insights 🚗🇺🇸
Happy Sunday!
This weekend I’m in New York, where my partner Stoyan and I are having meetings related to our fund work. We got here on Tuesday, and will be here most of the coming week as well. On Thursday, we hopped over to Boston, for two meetings with associates there, and I had the pleasure of spending a day again in one of the cities that were my home once.
It’s quite obvious now that growing up and living as an adult in different countries and cultures has been a massive privilege. I have lived in Russia (back then USSR), mainland US, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, and Bulgaria. Some of these places have been my home for decades, others for mere months. As I was showing Stoyan around the Boston suburb of Belmont, where I spent time as a kid, an interesting insight occurred to me.
Moving countries is generally appreciated in hindsight. When you tell stories of the places you have lived in, people are impressed and consider you an interesting person. However, when you make plans to move countries, most people around you don’t approve of it.
I’ve experienced this many times, both in my childhood and in my adult years. Most of my friends in the US and the Netherlands still don’t understand how and why I moved to Bulgaria twelve years ago. It’s generally seen as a less developed country, so why would you move there, they say. However, once they visit me in Sofia, they usually change their mind.
It’s much more the case when you’re a kid. I vividly remember how the announcement that we would move to another country would be met with sadness by teachers and classmates at schools I went to. Even more than sadness perhaps, with something almost like grief. Like if you’re announcing an incurable illness, a death foretold. What’s more, as parents you get a lot of negative feedback. Ripping a child away from their surroundings, changing schools, putting them in a language environment where they’ll be disadvantaged compared to local children, changing climates even. All of these are apparently considered highly irresponsible parenting. My parents got a lot of that when we were little, as they were moving us from country to country.
Looking back at my life so far, I think there’s nothing that had more positive impact on my outlook and opportunities today than growing up in different countries and cultures. I learned to adapt, to quickly make new friends and acquaintances, to learn languages naturally and playfully, to relativize many circumstances that people usually treat as intangible, to see things in a much wider context. It has provided me with a built-in ability to see life from a bird’s-eye view, and to intuitively identify which way things are developing, both on a personal and on a societal level.
I am of course forever grateful to my parents for this. And as I get older and witness how my generation is raising their offspring, I again often see how disincentivized parents of young children are to move countries and expose their kids to these opportunities. My advice: don’t listen to the naysayers. Especially in this ever more globalizing world, the skills our kids will get from a multi-local upbringing are invaluable and absolutely an advantage in their later lives. Even if they end up never moving countries again.
And finally, in the early 1990s, we obviously had no idea how modern technology would change everything just a few years ahead. Who would’ve known that social networks would allow us to stay in close touch with all these old teachers, classmates, neighbors. Or that open skies agreements would make long-distance travel to keep seeing them so much easier and more affordable.
Go out and explore this world. And if you have kids, take them with you, they’ll be forever grateful one day.