''We have a feeling like: If I was able to go abroad in high school, why couldn't I go even further away in college?'' a Macedonian girl tells me, sitting under the warm May sun 1000 kilometers away from her hometown. Like some others, she moved to Maribor to finish her secondary education with an international diploma, making escape easier - from there to here, from here to…
Maybe it starts way before high school. Perhaps when you learn the line between ours and theirs and see that theirs is a land (or a backyard) with another kind of fruit from that on ours, that it smells funny and nicer and that some people go from ours to theirs and don’t return. Or when ours becomes too crowded, corrupted or dangerous to remain ours.
But it might not be any of that. It might just be one of the things that make the generation Z, the need to share the world the way the web taught us to share information- instantaneously, rapidly and without any price.
We crave for new, be it better or worse than the previous, as long as it is new. We crave for the things we do not have, for those 14 places we haven’t seen in person but saw in twenty posts and vlogs and just need to experience ourselves. The irony is that even when we reach the 14th location, we aren’t really there. We look through the lenses of technological miracles (wearing the logo of our choosing) and forget about the natural camera obscura we were given that provides the highest resolution and widest angle. And when there, we notice a thing about the middle-aged locals - they seem happily settled. But how?
Aren’t we taught that happy and settled are words that just aren’t meant to be collocated?
You have to reach happiness by moving, constantly upgrading, growing. By travelling, at unease, unsettled. Always rushed. Why is there such an aftertaste of failure to staying in your home town, to raising children where you were brought up, to committing to one life, city, person or job?
The girl from the beginning had some valid reasons to move - some differences that made hybrid Slovenia (scented with Yugoslavian past and shaded with Western undertones) look like the better option from staying in Macedonia, a country she feels like brings little bright future for most. But why do we keep moving, even when we are cozy, even when we are satisfied? Ask yourselves, how many times do we keep moving just for the sake of it, and how many times do we keep moving for our own sake?