Armed with lap-tops, digital cameras, trendy clothes, vanity blogs, English-language certificates, and the odd trust-fund, Gen X-pat is the new global scourge.
The idea of the expatriate life evokes romantic images of the Lost Generation: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Henry Miller, living day-to-day, scraping together just enough francs for a bottle of Beaujolais, a hotel room, and 20 Gauloises. Some of the greatest novels of the time were scribbled onto café napkins in the pause between a bullfight and a date with a lady of the night, chased by a shot of absynthe and a swift departure to the mountains for a revolutionary battle alongside a band of Spanish anarchists.
But times have changed: gone are the days of waving handkerchiefs from the decks of ocean liners and correspondence through hand-written letters; nor do we take up grand causes and fight in wars of foreign idealisms, for the greater good, imbued with the conviction that the future could be changed through our actions. We live in the age of ATMs and e-mails, internet and jet travel, health insurance and relocation companies, visas and terrorism… and as a result, the expat life isn’t exactly what it used to be.
Whereas our expat predecessors created masterpieces like ‘A Movable Feast’, ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, ‘Under the Volcano’ or ‘Tropic of Cancer’, these days we are instead subjected to blogs about taxi rides gone wrong, foreign-language blunders at cocktail parties, and banal culture-clash anecdotes about how the Chinese spit, or how nobody in Paris cleans up after their dogs.
From Istanbul to Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, the expat life has become pretty much homogenous, with the same problems, the same kinds of stories, and the same clichés and generalizations. In a globalized world, even the phenomenon of difference has become the same standard of experience. So, in succession to the frontier-crossing generations of the Lost and Beat, we now have Generation X-pat: overeducated thirty-something Gen X’ers with Hemingway syndromes who travel for the sake of expanding their impressive BTDT (Been There, Done That) collection through self-indulgent blog rants and volumes of online JPEGs.
These BDTD Gen X-patters hog internet bandwidth as aggressively as they hog the chicest downtown suburbs in their temporarily adopted cities of choice; gentrifying like fashionable culture-moles until a neighbourhood achieves just the right balance of local authenticity and cosmopolitan faux-Village/SoHo convenience and trendiness. Whether you’re in the Condesa in Mexico City or Cihangir in Istanbul, you’re in the same place, paying the same inflated price for your canned-tuna salad and overcooked pasta at the fashionably gimmicky local brasserie.
But there are certain features that unite different generations of expats on a more fundamental level than certain superficial idiosyncracies might indicate: just as the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation were an intellectual minority who sought to escape the all-pervasive White Anglo-Saxon Protestant capitalist work-and-life ethic of the U.S. to immerse themselves in the cosmopolitanism of Europe in the ’20s, ’30s or the ’50s, today’s Generation X-pats also leave their countries with the hope of immersing themselves in something more than is offered in the homeland. Political, social and economic saturation has given rise to a hyper-competitive corporate totalitarianism and a generally deranged mainstream in the US, while the aging and sterile technocracy that is an emasculated post-post-WWII Europe, is teetering on the side of an over-regulated continental open-air museum.
In other words, choosing to leave one’s own country to become an expatriate is still a valid form of protest against the suffocating centrism of Western democracies that strangle any true avenue of dissent or change, and against a stuffy societal and economic system that has become so regulated as to demand either conformity or marginalization. Here are eight points that further define Generation X-pat, in Istanbul and beyond…
Cyclicality
a) Enchantment (the ‘WEEE, I’m in Istanbul!’ stage) b) Normalcy (the ‘Here I am, still in Istanbul.’ stage) c) Drudgery (the ‘Istanbul, schmistanbul’ stage) d) Annoyance (the ‘Why can’t anyone do anything right in Istanbul?!’ stage) e) Hope (the ‘I can always leave Istanbul if I want’ stage) f) Indifference (the ‘Fuck it, I’m used to it, I may as well stay in Istanbul’ stage) g) Rediscovery (the ‘Now that it’s not “exotic” to me anymore, Istanbul’s even more interesting… and besides, I can still always leave if I want’ stage).
Anomy
This word aptly sums up the Gen X-pat experience. The accepted rules and norms of conduct, ethics and social etiquette no longer hold. You’re free in the most terrible and exciting sense of the word. You can reinvent yourself, experiment with all the drugs you wanted, be promiscuous with exotic locals, get drunk on Mondays, work from home, and convince people (and yourself) that ‘Freelance Writer’ is a legitimate career path. (Speak for yourself – Ed.) The high point of anomy is having handed in your travel piece on deadline before taking an evening ferry ride across the Bosphorus on the way to seeing your girlfriend. The low point is a coke hangover on a weekday. Ouch.
Limbo
The natural result of your state of deracination is Gen X-pat Limbo. Your life is on hold in a vacuum where time not only defies perspective, but you find that there’s somehow more of it, that you’re not rushing as much with yourself, your goals and your expectations, all caught up in the matrix of family, friends and colleagues back home. It’s a welcome relief at first, but causes you to lose touch after a while, making the transition when back home that much more unbearable, thus often leading to (re-)expatriation.
Alienation
Normality is on hold as you’re caught in a country, city, society where you’re an estranged outsider, where you have no say in politics, in how things are done, in what needs to be changed (or not). Every time you voice criticism you will be shouted down by the flawlessly myopic ‘It’s not your country, it’s ours, so if you don’t like it, go home!’ rant. Also, the language is a bitch to learn, and nobody picks up on your subtle sense of irony and sarcastic humor.
Monomania
The classic Gen X-pat affliction is getting caught up with an idea and spending an inordinate amount of time compulsively obsessing over it… like how everybody’s constantly hammering something around you when you’re trying to get some sleep, or how nobody respects your personal space, or how the girls are all either spoilt moody bitches or obsessive stalker sociopaths, or how the guys are all jealous insecure possessive poseurs, or why nobody ever pays you on time, if at all.
Transience
Just as you come and go, living here and there, so do others. It leads to a certain sense of stranded loneliness. Others come and go, but the original ones you knew and bonded with in the enchantment stage of your expatriation can never really be replaced, and you’re wondering if you’re being left behind in a rut, and whether people are moving on to bigger and better things without you. You close the curtains, smoke a joint, watch ‘South Park’, and suddenly find you don’t care if they are.
Vulnerbonding
This is an expat phenomenon that refers to the act of bonding that is brought about by a sense of vulnerability which consumes the expat in the first stages of his or her expatriation. Your new flat is still strange and unwelcoming with no fond memories to associate it with; the city is different and frightening; the language and people are strange; you don’t have a steady job yet and you don’t even really completely know how to buy a loaf of bread, or from where. Vulner-bonding at this stage is crucial until you acclimate to your new surroundings.
Wanderlust
Expatriatism is essentially a Western thing, born of that explorer/conqueror wanderlust. Non-Westerners also choose to live abroad, but in a different manner. They usually take their culture over to the host country and establish themselves in a little colony where their culture is fully recreated like a little replica of home. Their relocation is for mainly economic reasons and it’s done gregariously. But what defines ‘expatriatism’ as a Western phenomenon is that expats seek expatriation for its own sake, to experience difference and feed off it creatively; they do it in a solitary way as a self-enriching experiencing that’s anathema to any sense of community or normality, which is precisely what expatriatism is a revolt against.
The idea of the expatriate life evokes romantic images of the Lost Generation: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Henry Miller, living day-to-day, scraping together just enough francs for a bottle of Beaujolais, a hotel room, and 20 Gauloises. Some of the greatest novels of the time were scribbled onto café napkins in the pause between a bullfight and a date with a lady of the night, chased by a shot of absynthe and a swift departure to the mountains for a revolutionary battle alongside a band of Spanish anarchists.
But times have changed: gone are the days of waving handkerchiefs from the decks of ocean liners and correspondence through hand-written letters; nor do we take up grand causes and fight in wars of foreign idealisms, for the greater good, imbued with the conviction that the future could be changed through our actions. We live in the age of ATMs and e-mails, internet and jet travel, health insurance and relocation companies, visas and terrorism… and as a result, the expat life isn’t exactly what it used to be.
Whereas our expat predecessors created masterpieces like ‘A Movable Feast’, ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, ‘Under the Volcano’ or ‘Tropic of Cancer’, these days we are instead subjected to blogs about taxi rides gone wrong, foreign-language blunders at cocktail parties, and banal culture-clash anecdotes about how the Chinese spit, or how nobody in Paris cleans up after their dogs.
From Istanbul to Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, the expat life has become pretty much homogenous, with the same problems, the same kinds of stories, and the same clichés and generalizations. In a globalized world, even the phenomenon of difference has become the same standard of experience. So, in succession to the frontier-crossing generations of the Lost and Beat, we now have Generation X-pat: overeducated thirty-something Gen X’ers with Hemingway syndromes who travel for the sake of expanding their impressive BTDT (Been There, Done That) collection through self-indulgent blog rants and volumes of online JPEGs.
These BDTD Gen X-patters hog internet bandwidth as aggressively as they hog the chicest downtown suburbs in their temporarily adopted cities of choice; gentrifying like fashionable culture-moles until a neighbourhood achieves just the right balance of local authenticity and cosmopolitan faux-Village/SoHo convenience and trendiness. Whether you’re in the Condesa in Mexico City or Cihangir in Istanbul, you’re in the same place, paying the same inflated price for your canned-tuna salad and overcooked pasta at the fashionably gimmicky local brasserie.
But there are certain features that unite different generations of expats on a more fundamental level than certain superficial idiosyncracies might indicate: just as the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation were an intellectual minority who sought to escape the all-pervasive White Anglo-Saxon Protestant capitalist work-and-life ethic of the U.S. to immerse themselves in the cosmopolitanism of Europe in the ’20s, ’30s or the ’50s, today’s Generation X-pats also leave their countries with the hope of immersing themselves in something more than is offered in the homeland. Political, social and economic saturation has given rise to a hyper-competitive corporate totalitarianism and a generally deranged mainstream in the US, while the aging and sterile technocracy that is an emasculated post-post-WWII Europe, is teetering on the side of an over-regulated continental open-air museum.
In other words, choosing to leave one’s own country to become an expatriate is still a valid form of protest against the suffocating centrism of Western democracies that strangle any true avenue of dissent or change, and against a stuffy societal and economic system that has become so regulated as to demand either conformity or marginalization. Here are eight points that further define Generation X-pat, in Istanbul and beyond…
Cyclicality
a) Enchantment (the ‘WEEE, I’m in Istanbul!’ stage) b) Normalcy (the ‘Here I am, still in Istanbul.’ stage) c) Drudgery (the ‘Istanbul, schmistanbul’ stage) d) Annoyance (the ‘Why can’t anyone do anything right in Istanbul?!’ stage) e) Hope (the ‘I can always leave Istanbul if I want’ stage) f) Indifference (the ‘Fuck it, I’m used to it, I may as well stay in Istanbul’ stage) g) Rediscovery (the ‘Now that it’s not “exotic” to me anymore, Istanbul’s even more interesting… and besides, I can still always leave if I want’ stage).
Anomy
This word aptly sums up the Gen X-pat experience. The accepted rules and norms of conduct, ethics and social etiquette no longer hold. You’re free in the most terrible and exciting sense of the word. You can reinvent yourself, experiment with all the drugs you wanted, be promiscuous with exotic locals, get drunk on Mondays, work from home, and convince people (and yourself) that ‘Freelance Writer’ is a legitimate career path. (Speak for yourself – Ed.) The high point of anomy is having handed in your travel piece on deadline before taking an evening ferry ride across the Bosphorus on the way to seeing your girlfriend. The low point is a coke hangover on a weekday. Ouch.
Limbo
The natural result of your state of deracination is Gen X-pat Limbo. Your life is on hold in a vacuum where time not only defies perspective, but you find that there’s somehow more of it, that you’re not rushing as much with yourself, your goals and your expectations, all caught up in the matrix of family, friends and colleagues back home. It’s a welcome relief at first, but causes you to lose touch after a while, making the transition when back home that much more unbearable, thus often leading to (re-)expatriation.
Alienation
Normality is on hold as you’re caught in a country, city, society where you’re an estranged outsider, where you have no say in politics, in how things are done, in what needs to be changed (or not). Every time you voice criticism you will be shouted down by the flawlessly myopic ‘It’s not your country, it’s ours, so if you don’t like it, go home!’ rant. Also, the language is a bitch to learn, and nobody picks up on your subtle sense of irony and sarcastic humor.
Monomania
The classic Gen X-pat affliction is getting caught up with an idea and spending an inordinate amount of time compulsively obsessing over it… like how everybody’s constantly hammering something around you when you’re trying to get some sleep, or how nobody respects your personal space, or how the girls are all either spoilt moody bitches or obsessive stalker sociopaths, or how the guys are all jealous insecure possessive poseurs, or why nobody ever pays you on time, if at all.
Transience
Just as you come and go, living here and there, so do others. It leads to a certain sense of stranded loneliness. Others come and go, but the original ones you knew and bonded with in the enchantment stage of your expatriation can never really be replaced, and you’re wondering if you’re being left behind in a rut, and whether people are moving on to bigger and better things without you. You close the curtains, smoke a joint, watch ‘South Park’, and suddenly find you don’t care if they are.
Vulnerbonding
This is an expat phenomenon that refers to the act of bonding that is brought about by a sense of vulnerability which consumes the expat in the first stages of his or her expatriation. Your new flat is still strange and unwelcoming with no fond memories to associate it with; the city is different and frightening; the language and people are strange; you don’t have a steady job yet and you don’t even really completely know how to buy a loaf of bread, or from where. Vulner-bonding at this stage is crucial until you acclimate to your new surroundings.
Wanderlust
Expatriatism is essentially a Western thing, born of that explorer/conqueror wanderlust. Non-Westerners also choose to live abroad, but in a different manner. They usually take their culture over to the host country and establish themselves in a little colony where their culture is fully recreated like a little replica of home. Their relocation is for mainly economic reasons and it’s done gregariously. But what defines ‘expatriatism’ as a Western phenomenon is that expats seek expatriation for its own sake, to experience difference and feed off it creatively; they do it in a solitary way as a self-enriching experiencing that’s anathema to any sense of community or normality, which is precisely what expatriatism is a revolt against.
