Being an Anywhere in a place for Anywheres
By: Alexandra Kaschuta
Tags: Happiness, Meaning, Brexit, Philosophy, Belonging

David Goodhart coined two terms in the wake of the UK’s Brexit meltdown, to help explain the incomprehensible social divide that had seemingly sprung up overnight — the Anywheres and the Somewheres. According to Goodhart’s view, the Brexit referendum result can be understood as the long-awaited victory of the UK’s Somewheres over its Anywheres.

As the name implies, the Anywheres are people who could live anywhere and most often do. They are highly educated, universalist and have loose attachments to place or group. They’re individualistic, progressive and have an identity based on achievement rather than on belonging.

The Somewheres are people who can happily live in a specific somewhere, usually the place they were born. They are localists, often less educated and have strong ties to their community. They care deeply about group belonging, familiarity and place and their home is a strong part of their identity.

Leaving my Somewhere

Photo by Damian Park Kim on Unsplash

Though I’m from a very Somewhere place, I’ve been an Anywhere all my life. My childhood was turbulent and confusing, so I gravitated towards books and the escapism they afforded me. Though we were living in Romania, we were lucky to have a house full of books in English and German. That allowed me to live pretty much independently from the Somewhere of my surroundings, in a separate Anywhere of my own.

When I was 18, I did as Anywheres do, and moved abroad.

At 22 I moved once more.

At 27 I moved again, to London — the most anywhere place I’d ever seen.

And this city became as home as it ever got for me.

And understandably so — this place is an all-singing all-dancing amusement park for Anywheres.

You can see plays, concerts, speeches, go to symposiums, exhibits, galleries, museums or workshops. You can do 108 types of yoga, meditate in 34 ways or get yourself or others tied up in the traditional Japanese bondage art of Shibari on, all on a Tuesday night. You can forego your senses for an hour in a dark floatation tank or freeze yourself for a couple of minutes at -90 in a cryo room. You can (with the right profile) date anyone in the world for one night. You can be whoever you want to be, with the prerequisite that you’re not too caught up in who you already are.

The Big Divide

Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash

I often meet Somewheres from Romania in London, at coffee shops, in Ubers, in retail stores. They invariably tell me they hate it here. The British are cold, the weather sucks, everything is eye-wateringly expensive. They came here for the money, they say, and can’t wait to have enough to build a house back Somewhere. They’re surprised I’m happy here.

I sometimes meet fellow Anywheres from Romania here as well. They invariably don’t want to leave. They’re enjoying the rides. The 5 airports, the midnight sushi, and the £100,000 jobs. The conversation usually drifts to achievement — our jobs, our foreign universities, how off the beaten track and “experiential” our holiday destinations are. The question: “Would you go back?” gets its prerequisite: “No, but I might go somewhere else.”

The Anywheres are a diverse bunch, in terms of ethnicities and color schemes, that is. Intellectually, we’re hard to tell apart.

We’ve all been to the same 200 universities, listen to the same nerdy podcasts and work somewhere on the elegant continuum between well paid corporate safety and thrilling entrepreneurship. Politics and religion both have one standard answer as well: progressive and none — at least on the surface.

We’re the people who left our Somewheres because there was something better to do in the great apiaries of Anywhere. Here people would pay us to do the things that often weren’t appreciated back home, who would see something precious in us, who would reward our intelligence and teach us how to harness it for cash. Because make no mistake, the cruelest entry requirement for the Anywhere class is intelligence — this is not a simpleton’s game. We migrate to the big cities because these are the places where we can exploit our god-given resource the best.

But as a bona fide lifetime member of the Anywheres, I can tell you city life isn’t all bondage and £15 artisanal Ramen.

Anywheres still need belonging

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash

There’s something profoundly odd, something destabilizing about this exotic new version of life. Being an Anywhere in a place for Anywheres doesn’t fix the problem of belonging.

Cultivating immunity to belonging is a double-edged sword, it’s a talent and a curse. It enables you to live in a faceless hive, but living like a worker ant on a hedonistic trip isn’t doing it for most of us social primates. Depression and anxiety, burnout, loneliness all on an epidemic scale seem to be the price of entry to this new life. It turns out saying “Hi” to your doorman and weather-themed chit chat at the water cooler don’t count as sufficient social interactions. If you’re unlucky enough to be single and not have the privilege of dumping your neuroses on the one guaranteed friend you have, you’re in trouble. You can have as many lunches and museum visits and drunken hangs as you want, you always only seem to scratch the surface of the social. By the time you get home from meeting your friend for gelato at the new pop-up near work, the void is back to greet you on the sofa.

It might be that even us Anywheres, are just disillusioned Somewheres, looking for belonging. The problem is we’re looking in places where we just end up bumping awkwardly into each other.

And then we go anywhere else.