My name is Benjamin Self.
I'm 28 years old, and I'd like to talk to you today about
something I call the weak 'connectivity' of my third-culture upbringing.
First, let me give you some background.
I was born in Florida, lived there for a year,
then we moved to Georgia, lived there for 5 years,
then my family moved overseas,
we lived in Cyprus for 2 years,
Denmark for 3 years, Germany for 3 years, and then Saudi Arabia for 3 years,
and that was where I graduated from high school.
And then I came back to the US, I went to college in Indiana for 4 years,
then I moved to DC, lived in DC for 2 years,
then I moved to Ottawa, Canada; lived there for one year,
then I moved to Toronto, Canada; lived there for one year,
then I moved back to Ottawa, lived there for one more year,
finished my graduate program,
then I finally came back to my home state of Kentucky,
lived and worked a year in Lexington
before making it back to Louisville last year
which is the closest thing I've got to home base.
So I've done a fair bit of moving,
and, in case you're wondering, both of my parents are teachers,
they teach in international schools.
So all of this makes me pretty much a classic case
of what's known as a third-culture kid, or a TCK,
sometimes referred to as a global nomad.
So what is a TCK?
"A TCK is a person who has spent a significant part
of his or her developmental years outside the parents' culture."
So TCKs are distinct from immigrants
in the usually temporary nature of their lives overseas,
and the term originally applied primarily to the children
of expatriate US military and foreign service personnel,
scattered missionaries, aid workers, that sort of thing.
But because of how the world has changed over the past half-century,
it now applies to a much broader swath of people.
So TCKs are a vast, highly diverse and still ever-expanding group
who have essentially been born
out of the interconnectedness of modern life.
Now, as you can imagine,
there are many, many benefits to this sort of an upbringing,
and I don't, in any way, want to discount those.
But at the same time, it does present a lot of challenges for a kid.
Social scientists talk about 2 different types of social capital
or 2 different processes for building social capital:
bonding and bridging.
So, in the image above me,
bonding is on the x-axis, and bridging is on the y-axis.
Bonding is what happens between similar people who are in close contact,
and it helps to build a strong sense of community, shared identity,
shared values, social trust, social support networks,
a culture of civic engagement, that sort of thing.
Bridging, on the other hand,
is something that happens between more dissimilar people,
and it helps those bonded communities to engage fruitfully and productively
with people who are external to them or different from them.
Ideally, we'd all be good at both, we'd all be in that top-right quadrant.
Unfortunately, that's not the case.
TCKs tend to be really good, as you can imagine, at bridging,
and that's a major asset in the world we live in today.
But because of the way they grow up, they tend to struggle more with bonding,
they tend to be in that top-left quadrant.
And it's the struggle with bonding, with this weak connectivity
that I really want to get at.
As wonderful as my childhood was,
it has left me feeling, well into adulthood,
a nagging sense of what might best be summed up as rootlessness,
and it's this rootlessness that I think is at the root
of this problem with bonding or this weak connectivity.
There are 3 aspects of this rootlessness that I want to touch on:
social instability, cultural instability, and an enduring restlessness.
First, the social instability.
This one's pretty obvious:
TCKs move a lot when they're growing up, and I certainly did.
And, every time you move, you go through this painful, stressful,
and, for a kid, ever-so-slightly traumatic cycle
of first saying a whole lot of usually pretty permanent goodbyes,
and then turning around and saying a lot of usually pretty anxious hellos,
and trying to muster the courage
both to not feel too sad about losing all of your friends,
and then put yourself out there and try to make all-new friends.
As you can imagine,
the more times you go through this process, this cycle,
the harder it is to maintain a healthy, nurturing social life.
And, at the same time, if you keep moving,
you don't get the benefits that can come with long-term friendships,
and long-term membership in a close community,
what I like to call a network of caring and sharing.
Second, the cultural instability.
On the one hand,
if you move a lot from country to country when you're growing up,
you always have the obvious issue of having to play catch-up culturally,
being ignorant wherever you go of local customs, local trends,
local knowledge, the local language, local norms,
like what's appropriate behavior, or what's funny, what's not funny,
and for a kid, this can be a significant social handicap.
At the same time,
this cultural instability can be a big problem
in the process of forming an identity.
Because we have a reductionist, mechanistic concept of human nature,
we often tend to talk about culture, primarily,
in terms of the surface-level stuff that you might see on the Travel Channel.
The reality is,
to use Gary Weaver's famous metaphor,
culture is more like an iceberg.
So, most of a culture,
and what constitutes an individual's identity,
is below the water surface.
It's invisible to outsiders,
and it's learned implicitly and largely taken for granted by insiders.
So the problem for TCKs and cross-cultured people of all kinds
is that, because of their confusing,
contradictory, diffuse experience of culture,
there are these massive cracks all through their iceberg
so that their whole identity,
and by extension their sense of belonging, of purpose,
their sense of meaning for life, all of which comes from culture,
is highly tenuous and unstable,
at least until the cracks are sealed.
And so this can be the cause of a lot internal struggle
growing up and on into adulthood,
and combined with the other things that I've already mentioned,
it can be the cause of a lot of insecurity.
And for me, this insecurity manifested in three different sorts of behaviors.
'Performancism': obsessive attempts
to prove your self-worth through all manner of performance;
attention-seeking, acting out, over-sharing, that sort of thing;
and, of course, self-medication:
unhealthy coping mechanisms and/or withdrawal.
The saddest thing about these sorts of behaviors
is that they all tend to make us feel more isolated rather than less.
And yet they pretty much reflect
just a massive, frustrated desire to connect deeply with others,
to be known, and accepted, and loved for who you are.
The third issue: an enduring restlessness.
A lot of TCKs - certainly this was the case for me -
move a lot when they're growing up and so, when they become an adult,
this habit of moving tends to stick, they tend to continue to follow it,
moving every few years, not out of necessity, but out of habit.
At the same time, I think this restlessness,
this urge to keep moving or to make a change,
is also grounded in a kind of an addiction to novelty that you develop;
an addiction to the thrills and constant stimulation
of new people and new places,
so that anything less than what's novel
quickly starts to feel difficult and boring.
So, moving becomes just another coping mechanism.
And so when you take these 3 together,
on the one hand, because of all the cultural and social instability,
it makes it difficult to form and maintain deep, long-lasting connections.
But then, because of this enduring restlessness,
the problems with instability extend well into adulthood.
In fact, for me,
since I graduated from college in 2008, I've now moved cities 6 times in 8 years.
But finally, within the last few years,
I've started to realize some of the problems with this,
I've started to realize what I've been missing in life
because of the rootlessness that I've been experiencing,
and in fact how sick it's been making me.
And, as this woman puts it, I've started to realize
that all this moving and traveling is like flirting with real life.
It's like saying:
"I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station."
I've realized that, in part because of my wonderful childhood,
I've nevertheless been suffering from a kind of debilitating condition,
which is what I call
a weak local connectivity or network connectivity.
And that is both a limited capacity and a limited inclination
to fully connect, participate, and invest in local networks of caring and sharing,
which, it turns out, are exactly what we all need
for our own long-term health and happiness.
So what I realized is that what I need is not ever-more-fleeting stimulations
and weak, short-lived connections,
but relational and spiritual depth,
a stronger connectivity
which can only come through a sustained commitment and experience
of both culture and community.
And yet, I wonder…
I wonder if my experience of weak connectivity
is not just kind of an amplified version of what most people experience nowadays.
I wonder how different growing up amid the social anonymity
and extreme cultural diversity of major modern cities
actually is from a third-culture upbringing.
A couple of years ago,
this guy named Stephen Marche wrote an excellent article in The Atlantic
about our epidemic of loneliness:
"For many of us, our web of connections has grown broader but shallower.
We're living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors.
We live in an accelerating contradiction:
the more connected, or interconnected we become, the lonelier we are."
Well, that contradiction is one of the defining contradictions of my life,
and I think, for a whole host of reasons, it's increasingly becoming
one of the defining contradictions of our time.
I think clearly what we all need are better communities,
cosmopolitan villages, you might say,
a stronger connectivity.
And my hope for TCKs and for cross-cultured people of all kinds
is that we will increasingly learn
to bring the many benefits of a multicultural upbringing to bear
in sustained ways in our communities,
wherever we ultimately decide to take root.
Thank you.
(Applause)