Hiraeth
The world you grew up in no longer exists
“A Welsh word with no direct English equivalent, embodying a deep, bittersweet longing, nostalgia, or yearning for a home, person, or time that is lost or unattainable. It blends homesickness with a sense of grief for a past, often idealized, that can never be returned to.”
Never in my life have I read a better description of what I’m feeling at this point in my life. Maybe some of you have experienced it as well when moving away from home, or a place you used to call home, or cutting out people who are no longer an asset in your life.
If not yet, then probably in the future. Right now the Western world is going through an awkward transition of replacing the old with the new while conservatives are fighting hard to stop the progression. But progression never stops; it only slows down.
Whether it be our generations being sold out for cheap labor from foreign countries, our homes becoming unaffordable to maintain because of taxes, our parents dying, or our friends moving away, we all end up in a world bleak compared to what it once was.
That’s why we stop ourselves in our tracks to think about what was once home. Where our father comes back to give us one-word answers about how his day went, the gym that’s a two-minute walk away, or a friend who is just a 10-minute bike ride away.
Only for us to wake up to the painful reality that our father is gone, the house is sold, everyone we knew got fired from their work at the gym, and our friends moved away. We now wake up to the fact that we are without a home. We wake up homeless.
Even if we were to go back from whence we came, we would find it to be empty.
We experience hiraeth.
How A Generation Deals With It?
