I can promise you right now you will not finish this article without glancing at your phone. What if your best friend is mad at you? Your boss? Or worse, your mother in-law? These “binging” impulses are irresistible, wired to our brain becoming practically instinctual. It is our generation’s greatest weakness.
Dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction because we are searching for a better way to spend our time. Personally, I have always struggled with this. I constantly want more. Growing up in sheltered rural Connecticut, I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the fake politeness society produced and hungered for new people and experiences. I wanted to meet people who disagreed with me, who grew up with difficulties, who looked different than I, and whose parents did not work on Wall Street. I was distracted in the best kind of way.
When I read the Great Gatsby, in my 15-year-old height of craving difference, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby sang true to me. I became infatuated with a writer who came more than half a century before me. Fitzgerald’s beautifully structured words understood the desires I was feeling—“I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale”. And so I did. I applied for programs to study and do service in France, Guadeloupe, and Jordan. These experiences changed my life, but especially made me itch when I was home for more than six months. Change became the only constant in my life.
Then I moved across the country. 2794 miles away from my address in rural Connecticut. A place I never called home, all of a sudden “home” was the only label I could give it. As a freshman, “Hi, I’m Lena and I’m from Connecticut” was how people know you for at least your first week. A place I never felt described me, had to describe me because this was the only fact people knew about me. I was on the other coast, in SoCal, a place I felt would always fit me better than cold New England.
The scariest part of any change is hoping that your new change will fit you better than the last change you have made. Change is a process, and even though we might not admit it, there is an end goal. We hope to find something that will satisfy these empty gaps that have caused us to change our current situation in the first place. So now I’m here, in a place that I will either call my “new home” or constantly search for more.
