Freedom Without Belonging Can Become Another Kind of Exile
Updated: 3 hours ago
Subtitle: From "We" Culture to "I" Culture — and back again!
By Anosha Zereh
We lived freely among the stars.
Now we roam like ghosts around our homes.
What Nomadic Life Actually Knew
There was a time when movement did not necessarily mean disconnection. To be nomadic was not simply to be rootless. For many people, it meant belonging to a larger rhythm: to seasons, mountains, animals, weather, ancient paths remembered by elders, and a night sky wide enough to remind us that we were never the center of the world.
A tent could be lifted. A camp could move. A family could cross valleys and high mountain passes. And yet the individual did not necessarily move alone. Life was carried in relationship: children moved among adults, not just their own parents; meals were prepared by many hands; stories traveled from mouth to mouth; elders carried memory, wisdom, history, and the maps of what had come before.
Home was not merely a building with locked doors. Home was a field of belonging. One belonged not only to a house, but to a people—to kin, landscape, animals, language, memory, and to the fire around which food was prepared and stories were told.
The Freedoms We Rightly Won
Of course, we should not romanticize this past. Nomadic and village societies contained hardship, hunger, exhausting labor, patriarchy, inequality, and forms of limitation from which many people—especially women—have fought hard to become free.
Those freedoms matter. The ability to study, work, leave an abusive home, choose whom we love, cross social boundaries, migrate, speak for ourselves, and construct a life beyond the expectations of family or tribe represents an extraordinary human achievement. I do not wish to return to a world in which the individual disappears inside the collective. But perhaps in gaining the "I," we have forgotten something essential about the "we."
What We Lost in the Trade
There was another form of wealth embedded in communal life: the experience of being held within a living circle of belonging. In a "we" culture, a person's life is witnessed. A child belongs to more than two exhausted adults. An elder remains part of the center. Grief has visitors. Joy has witnesses. A meal has more than one pair of hands preparing it.
And when someone suffers, the question is not only: What is wrong with you? We might also ask: Who is around you? Who is carrying this with you? What has been broken in the circle of care?
Today, many of us inhabit a very different story. We have more private space, more mobility, more devices, more independence and more choices than generations before us could have imagined. Yet the modern individual is also expected to carry an astonishing amount alone—career, money, parenting, aging parents, grief, trauma, marriage, health, emotional regulation, self-improvement, loneliness, meaning—while remaining productive, attractive, emotionally intelligent, financially secure, spiritually grounded and endlessly adaptable.
The Instruction We Keep Getting Wrong
When it becomes unbearable, the answer is often another instruction directed at the individual: Meditate. Optimize. Organize. Heal. Work harder. Buy the app. Take the course. Book the session.
There is nothing wrong with therapy, meditation, medicine, solitude, spiritual practice or personal development—I have spent much of my life exploring these paths, and they can transform us. But none of them should become another sophisticated way of telling a human being: carry your life alone.
The isolated mother may not need only another parenting technique. She may need a grandmother sitting in the kitchen, a sister arriving without being asked, a friend who takes the child for an afternoon, a neighbor bringing a pot of food. The grieving person may not need only another explanation of grief—sometimes they need five people willing to sit beside them without trying to repair anything. An elder does not need only efficient care management; they need to remain part of the human current. And children need more than perfectly managed schedules—they need to experience themselves as belonging to a world larger than the household in which they sleep.
Connected Technologically, Alone Socially
We once moved across vast landscapes and still belonged to one another. Now many of us live in comfortable houses and wander through them like ghosts—room to room, screen to screen, task to task. We send messages instead of appearing at one another's doors. We carry sorrow privately. We raise children behind closed walls. We age in isolation.
We may know what someone ate for breakfast through social media while having no idea who would sit beside them if their world collapsed tonight. Perhaps this is one of the great contradictions of modernity: we have never been more connected technologically, and yet many of us have never felt more socially alone.
This is not an argument for abandoning modern life, nor nostalgia for an imaginary perfect past. We cannot return, and we should not erase the freedoms that have been painfully won. The question is not how to recreate an old world. The question is: what did that world know about being human that we still need?
The Real Destination of the Journey
Years ago, my piece in my book "Nomad" continued as a spiritual journey. The wanderer follows love, loses the boundaries of the isolated self, and eventually returns. Near the end I wrote: Finally I came back to life. As I annihilated the opposing ego, hence transforming into the universal fiber of humanity as a whole.
I was a nomadic poet, rootless and traveling to the house of soul,
homeless in life-form, drifting from the residence of individualism...
Finally I came back to life.
I annihilated the opposing ego,
hence transforming into the universal fiber of humanity as a whole.
Today those words speak to me differently. Perhaps the destination of the spiritual journey was never the perfection of the individual self. Perhaps it was the rediscovery that the individual was never truly separate.
Human beings do not flourish as isolated units. Freedom without belonging can become another kind of exile. The self is real and precious in its uniqueness, but it does not exist independently. We are made of relationship—of ancestors and strangers, of land and language, of stories carried across centuries, of food grown and prepared by hands we will never meet, of the people who held us before we could stand. Even the breath we call mine comes from a world we share.
A New Kind of Nomadism
Perhaps, then, the new nomadism is not movement across geography. Perhaps it is movement back toward one another: a shared table, an elder returned to the center of the room, a child known and loved by many adults, a friend who becomes family, a neighbor whose door we can knock on, a community in which grief does not have to make an appointment before entering.
Not the disappearance of the individual. Not the return of oppressive traditions. Not the silencing of women, children, difference, or freedom. But something more spacious: a "we" large enough to hold every true "I."
Maybe this is what my nomadic poet was searching for all along. Not another home. Not another identity. But the recognition that beneath all our separate journeys, we belong to one another, in hope of finding our way back to one another, wherever we are in the world.
In hope of a collective tomorrow,
Anosha
"Nomad," from Who Am I? A Mindful Door to Finding Our True SelvesCopyright © 2021 Anosha Zereh · All Rights Reserved
If this piece moved something in you, I'd love to know: who is in your circle of belonging right now — and who is missing from it?
Share your thoughts in the comments, and if you know someone who needs to read this, forward it along.
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