Our family has decided to take a family gap year and explore the world with a complete open mind and open to all possibilities including settling down in a new location for a short or long time period, embracing the Nomad Life, or coming back to America having had an amazing adventure. This step took a lot of contemplation and preparation and involved aligning many of our obligations to expire at the same time, pairing down most of our possessions to 2 suitcases and freeing ourselves up physically and mentally. Less is more has been a common theme in multiple parts of life for the past year and as we shed the less important that becomes more true than ever.
From a professional perspective this move has been something I have been thinking about for quite some time. The world around us is changing very quickly. The center of the world is moving away from New York City and the world is becoming multipolar. Technology has made it possible to live anywhere on earth while working globally. Every old stoic structure is getting disrupted and the future is decentralized, outsourced and the integration of the human creativity, analytics, intelligence and common sense and rapidly moving technology. Evolve or die is a motto that we all must embrace, and it seems that this evolution is happening much faster away from the established markets.
From a family and life perspective New York City and us have grown apart: These days NYC feels noisy, dirty and lacking Oxygen. The energy that once fueled us now feels suffocating and stifling. The value of being in the center of the universe, in exchange for sacrificing one’s mental and physical health is no longer there. Maybe we and our values and priorities have changed and maybe NYC has changed, or maybe both. Either way, we have diverged.
Do I feel the same about the USA? That’s unclear to me. I know enough to know that I don’t know enough. America is still a great nation. At its core it is a nation built on liberal ideals of freedom and optimism. But American values and society have changed a lot over the past 30 years…Do we want to raise our American born kids to be “American”? What does that mean these days? How do we even give them and us perspective without seeing and experiencing anything else?
And so, we as a family decided that we are done with New York, at least for the time being, at the same time I was ready to move on and open a new professional chapter and we are still within the window in which we can take our whole #travelingcircus around the world without disrupting their lives.
Thus the idea of The Big Trip was born.
We are leaving New York; we are unsure where to; let’s explore and experience for ourselves.
The downside: a year of our life spent away from all that’s familiar.
Possibilities: endless.
Upside: A place to call home in every possible way as citizens of the world
And so, all roads start in Rome…