A friend rattled my cage when she explained we all expats one way or the other

We are all on the move. We are looking for friends, allies, collaborators, colleagues.

We are forming search parties. Because we lie in a time when narratives fracture, and the traditions we used to guide our lives are no longer certain.

We are all literal and figurative expats. Those who move offline, those who immigrate and emigrate.

Living offline is the real luxury: something that is only affordable to elites and determined communities and cults.

It is only by logging off that we will ever escape the jail cell of our unwilling embrace of uncertainty.

Modernity is now oldernity, we no longer believe consumerism will solve our spiritual problems. The conceptual supports for the 60’s Dream are up for debate. Millennials have “learned helplessness” in pursuit of life.

Everyone is 14 going on 40 in this group. It’s the existential mood of the moment that prompts our collective soul-searching. For some, it’s all too much. They’re deer in the headlights, bedroom recluses transfixed by the cool screen glow. For others, the emphasis is on the verb. They want to find ‘something new’ all the time. Or ‘understand’ in quickly accessible in short form.

The spirit of the age demands all barriers be disassembled and so we nod along, sing homilies to an openness that is unachievable. But it takes a village to create a culture. Only a village. Anything larger and you get TikTok.

With ever more frequency, we come across improbably odd images. People increasingly send them to friends and ask, “Is this real?” “Did this happen?”

Boomers huddle in the safety of ill-conceived nostalgic experience, often imagined and exaggerated. Everybody of all ages want to feel part of the freedom of thought of a 60’s hippie, the Woodstock guitar player, the revolutionary thinker - or the surfers’ vivid expression of freedom that transcends mere physical activity.

Real free surfers are still pissed off that the digital morons stole the term surfing to describe time on the Internet and the masses stole our beach clothing and styles.

Boom, boom baby.