No better training for the 21st century than being a third-culture kid.

An article in the FT by John Lanchester this week-end dealt with the notion of "third-culture kid": children who accompany their parents when they went to live in countries other than their own and then become hybrid (taking elements of the “home” culture from which their parents came and the culture of the place in which they were being brought up). The authors then use this as a metaphor for other purposes.

"being a European third-culture kid is an excellent training for modern life. As the speed of change increases, it gets harder for people to have a sense of rootedness, even if they are living in the place where they grew up. (...) Can we live like that? Can we live with the degree of change that a fully networked, fully competitive, economically “flat” world demands? I’m not sure. But I am sure that a sense of not quite belonging anywhere is an increasingly pervasive phenomenon (...) At some times and in some places it would have been a life-disadvantage but here, today, I think it’s the reverse. I live in London, a city that is full of people who feel as I once felt: that they never entirely fit in, often aren’t quite sure exactly what people are talking about, have a faint nostalgia for something they know they can never get back, and feel that they live in a place which is deeply familiar and yet slightly estranging. There’s no better training for the 21st century than being a third-culture kid."

Why do I blog this? this is intriguing in terms of describing a feeling people tend to have with social chnanges caused by technology.