The New New
The Millennial Obsession With Starting Over
We pick up and move from city to city, trying on new identities but rarely sticking with them. It’s going to cost us.
The first time I moved, the first time I dove into the intoxicating lure of “new beginnings,” I brought few personal items with me to make my cinder-block-walled dorm room feel like home. No posters. No knickknacks to sit on our one window sill. No fairy lights. It looked like somewhere that could be wiped clean in minutes, whenever the next new beginning called, and no one would know I had been there.
I didn’t realize at the time how that would become a pattern in my life. I spent a good part of my twenties only half-unpacked wherever I happened to be. I was rootless; I was free. After freshman year of college, there was a stint in San Francisco, a month or two long, where I stayed in the spare room of a girl I barely knew, followed by a summer-long venture to the mountains of North Carolina, where I lived for three months. There was an apartment I decorated in Indianapolis and weekends spent driving around Nashville, which felt close enough to my hometown to be secure and like a big enough city to be cool, though I had no reason to move there. I was convinced that because I was supporting myself, I wasn’t…
