Life

Never Settle

Beguiled by the allures of the road, and endless choices, more twentysomethings are turning into professional nomads

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During seven moves over two years, Christine Leonard lived with French bugs, a pit bull, and a nine-year-old who let her take the bottom bunk. Owen Berliner can count 15 homes in at least six states, plus one abroad. Texan Megan McCurley pursued teaching jobs to North Carolina, Miami, and Cali, Colombia.

It’s a good bet that these twentysomethings have already lived in more places, and maybe even experienced more varied work, than their parents. Say hello to the young urban nomads: people carrying the mobility of their college lives deep into their twenties. Whether trying out a series of professions, or moving around in pursuit of a profession, they shift living arrangements, cities, even countries as often as every few months, as they pursue jobs, fellowships, adventures or just affordable places to live.

“I’ve slept on couches, on my little sleeping bag on the floor at the science center, in random hotel rooms, at the 4H center; I slept on a mountain in Greece once [every] year,” said Owen Berliner, 24, of the more than 15 places he’s lived in the two years after graduating from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

He can’t even remember them all. But he can tick off stints in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Massachusetts, Ohio, Washington, D.C. and Mycenae, Greece.

A wide range of interests partly drives his wanderings, making it hard for him to choose a career path — or even to decide which job to pursue.

“When I look at Craigslist, I can’t even narrow it down to the different categories,” he said.

Some put such habits down to the nature of the modern liberal arts education, which prepares graduates to be knowledgeable people, but not necessarily to be heavily invested in a particular career.

Alex Vorce, 25, gives himself a deadline of two years in any single place. Enroute to work at a ski resort in Colorado one winter, he abruptly opted out of his plan after his sister’s next door neighbor mentioned an earthquake in Peru. Within hours, Vorce was checking on plane tickets. He ditched his Colorado plans and spent the next several months volunteering in a Peruvian village devastated by the quake.

Megan McCurley, 25, a graduate student at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, has worked as a teacher in Miami and North Carolina, and lived in Cali, Colombia, where she has family.

She thinks her broader perspective has made her a better teacher. “I have to be more aware of the cultural spaces in which my students live,” she said. “Students living in New York City have very different needs than students in Durham, N.C., or Colombia.”

In college, Ian Weatherseed moved nearly as often as he registered for classes, and spent a semester at sea. Then after graduating from New York University, he delivered pizza, managed an indie-rock band, even donned tights to play Peter Pan at corporate events. He zig-zagged from suburban Connecticut to rural North Carolina, and passed through Thailand before landing in New York City, where he now has a –surprise—nine-to-five job at a media company.

“It’s this constant battle between stability and change,” Leonard pointed out.

Although she had to deal with quirky roommates – like the ones who locked their dog in their apartment for more than 12 hours, and the ones who forgot to pay the electricity —Leonard is sanguine about her trajectory. “On the other hand, we’re in the South of France or in New York, and we can just pick up and leave.”

Craig Dunham and Doug Severn in “Twenty Someone: Finding Yourself in a Decade of Transition,” explore the years between dancing the electric slide at the senior prom and dancing it at your wedding.

Dunham argues that people in their twenties are often searching for the answer to the wrong question.

“The question is not what do I do,” he said. “The question is who am I?” Since high school, young people are asked by parents, friends and teachers what professional lives they are going to choose—when in truth they are too young to know. The twenties, they argue, is about gaining new experiences and allowing them to lead you in different directions. Dunham’s own experience was instructive: he began the University of Missouri as a journalism major, but graduated with a degree in geography.

“We’re not just doing these things to say we’ve been there, got the T-shirt,” he said. He thinks Leonard and Berliner have the right idea, as long as they can evaluate their experiences. People in their twenties need to learn from whomever they can – and certainly not just from holders of Ph.Ds.

“What can we learn from the people at the drive-in burger joint?” he posited.

So much emphasis is put on finding the dream job – high-paying, respected professions many young people are pushed towards from an early age—that there’s not as much room left to live.

“We train people to jump through hoops, but we take away some of the humanity of doing so,” he said.

Yet some of the movers admit that to a stressful downside. “You’re desperate, at some point,” Leonard said, of scrambling to find living arrangements quickly. “You want to be able to buy a piece of furniture and take it with you.”

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