I left London at eighteen for the Himalayas, long before phones tracked us, algorithms shaped us, and everybody became permanently reachable.

Back then, disappearing was real.

Travel meant stepping completely outside your life. No constant updates. No digital identity to maintain. No one documenting who you were becoming in real time. Just movement, instinct and the unknown.

I never really stopped after that.

Over the years I drifted between very different worlds — fashion sets and remote villages, luxury hotels and temporary shelters, campaign shoots and humanitarian work. I became fascinated by contrast. By how quickly identity shifts depending on environment. By how fragile the idea of “normal” really is.

Some people spend their lives trying to build permanence. Others spend their lives accidentally training themselves to leave.

And somewhere between those two things sits the modern idea of home.

Not the Pinterest version. Not property. Not location sharing. Not where your furniture lives.

Something far stranger than that.

Because the more the world opens up, the harder it becomes to define where we actually belong.

Maybe that’s why so many people quietly fantasise about disappearing now. About moving countries. Starting again. Living differently. Escaping the systems they built for themselves. There’s an entire generation performing stability while privately craving movement.

We’re more connected than any humans in history, yet many people feel increasingly unrooted.

Why?

Maybe because modern life has confused familiarity with belonging.

Maybe because most people spend their lives inside routines they never consciously chose.

Or maybe because once you’ve experienced enough versions of yourself, one fixed identity starts to feel impossible.

Travel changes more than geography. It alters your nervous system.

Some people return from the world craving security. Others return unable to fully settle again.

You begin noticing strange things: Airports become calming. Transit feels comforting. Hotel rooms start feeling oddly familiar. You become emotionally attached to movement itself.

There’s something psychologically seductive about being between places. Between identities. Between expectations. Temporarily freed from the weight of who people think you are.

Maybe that’s why reinvention has become such a cultural obsession.

People move cities. Change careers. Rebrand themselves online every six months. Delete entire lives and start again somewhere else.

Not always because they’re lost. Sometimes because movement itself becomes home.

The older I get, the more I wonder whether home is actually a physical place at all.

Maybe home is simply the environment where your nervous system softens.

Maybe it’s rhythm. Maybe it’s familiarity. Maybe it’s certain smells, certain music, certain people who remember old versions of you.

Or maybe home is the knowledge that you could survive almost anywhere.

There’s also another uncomfortable question underneath all this:

Are humans even designed to stay still for so long?

For most of history, people moved constantly. Across land, seasons, survival cycles, trade routes, migration patterns. Entire civilisations were built around movement. Modern permanence is actually relatively new.

Yet now many people spend decades inside the same routines, buildings, screens and identities.

And despite all our comforts, anxiety levels continue rising.

Maybe the soul was never designed for complete predictability.

Maybe part of us still longs for uncertainty, discovery and temporary freedom from ourselves.

Not necessarily to escape life. But to remember perspective.

Because movement does something profound: it interrupts autopilot.

It forces presence. Humility. Adaptation.

You realise how little you actually need. How quickly identity dissolves outside familiar surroundings. How kind strangers can be. How absurd status becomes once you leave the bubble you built it inside.

And maybe that’s the real shift.

Once the world has made you bigger, you never fully fit back into one version of life again.

So perhaps the question isn’t: “Where is home?”

Maybe the better question is:

What actually makes a human being feel alive enough to stay?