The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Millennials)

Why do millennials feel so nostalgic of something they haven’t even lived yet?

In the past few years, there was an ongoing conversation about the fear of missing out, or FOMO, which was mainly triggered by seeing other people having fun or attending events without you.

Overall, the whole deal was tossed into the cauldron of the negative impact of social media on people’s lives but I can’t shake off the feeling that in a way, it affected people at different stages in their lives, including myself, on a much deeper level than what it was initially assessed.

For what concerns my own personal experience, I’ve often had the feeling that I should’ve been somewhere else in terms of the country where I was living.

In 2014, I moved to Europe, London at first and Milan later on, the following year.

When I first went to London, I was unsure whether I would stay for good or I would go back to LA but at the time, London seemed like the perfect place and I ended up staying there and speding the most miserable year of my life.

Why did I move to London in first place? For reasons that did not depend on the city itself, or the people around me, I was growing increasingly unhappy in the City of Angels and felt that I was wasting my life in a limbo of uncertainty. I moved to London to be closer to my mom and sister who were living there at the time and because I felt I missed “old Europe”.

I won’t get into details on the reasons why I left LA or what I realized only years later that was really going on in my head at the time, it’s not the topic I’m trying to focus on right now but the fil rouge linking the reasons why I moved from a place to another in such a short period of time was the recurring feeling of being in the wrong place.

When the following year I moved back to Milan because of a job opportunity, I felt like a failure: I was going back to the place that I had run away from and where supposedly “nothing special happened”.
This wasn’t true and I still believe it isn’t in the same way that LA wasn’t the place where “everything happened” and London wasn’t “the perfect balance between new world and old world”.

In Milan, I had the opportunity to build a career as I couldn’t do in London or LA until that moment because by that point, I was forced to stay and stick to something for long enough. I guess that being in a place where I had no restrictions limited to my immigrant status helped of course, but what I learned was that just like in school, results are a matter of consistency, drive and hard, sometimes boring, work.

It’s been quite a ride anyway, I’m not saying I had it easier, but I guess I had to learn that being a functioning and working adult had presented its challenges regardless of the place where I was.
I still have that impulse to get up, pack my bags and leave, throwing it all out of the window, but I’ve learned that life doesn’t work that way and I’m now aware that I can achieve the same goals of moving and working somewhere else, applying the same dedication and discipline that brought me where I am today.

I believe that FOMO is real and has crawled under the skin of many of my generation onwards but maybe, it isn’t necessarily a negative think once you come to terms with it, tame it and learn to use it for your own good.
If on a hand it has the potential of making your life miserable, driving you to feel like a loser for things ranging from not taking part to social events to wishing you were living in California or New York instead of your hometown, I believe that it can be used as a driver for taking more control over your own life.

If you’re reading this and can relate somehow, I hope that you’ll learn to recognize the pattern of it, and use it as a weapon to make yourself aim higher but at the same time, focus on what you need to do day by day in order to get there. If you get lost on the way, perhaps it wasn’t the right thing for you but maybe on that same path, you’ll discover new wonderful things or meet people you would’t have otherwise.

My suggestion for what I’ve learned so far, is to enjoy the ride.