The New Lost American Generation

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DAY 163: “So what brings you here?” my American dormmate Hunter asked me at the outdoor table as we were eating the breakfasts we prepared ourselves.  I started telling him the usual spiel about may lay off the summer before.

“Let me guess,” he continued.  “You got laid off from a dot com which allows you to take an indeterminable amount of time off, and you figure it’s cheaper to be in Namibia than look for work back home.  And you’ve managed to save enough money to be here for a while.”

I smiled.  Hunter had it right on the money.  “Yeah.”

“Just like the last Americans I met.”

“Yeah, there are a lot of us out here.”

ALTHOUGH I’M A LATE BLOOMER BY TWO YEARS—I was laid off in 2003 while most of the dot comers were laid off in 2001—I’m still part of a lost generation of former internet twenty- and thirty-somethings wandering the world without full-time work, seeing how long a little savings and a severance package goes.  Most of the AmericanS I’ve met on the road are in the same boat as I am, taking a year or so off from the corporate world, a world of Microsoft Outlook and chain e-mail forwards.  Perhaps the American Generation-X was eased into this technological life, growing up with Atari 2600s and Commodore 64s.  (Remember LOAD"SPACETAXI",8,1 ?)

Only time will tell whether or not this new lost generation of traveling former American dot comers will be written in the history books like Ernest Hemingway’s Lost Generation of the 1920s, but, at the time of this writing, I must say it’s all been a trip so far.

Now not every American backpacking the world comes from Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley.  Hunter the San Franciscan, like San Diego Sean in Cape Town, had just finished his term in the Peace Corps in Zambia (Sean was in Romania) and was wandering around Africa to prolong his unwanted return back to “American normalcy” without any plans of what to do exactly after re-entry.  Living in Zambia for two years, he was far removed from the advancements in Western technology and laughed when I complained that the dial-up connection in the backpackers was too slow.  I eventually adjusted to the “slow connection”—typing up my last story secretly in my dorm so I could just upload it in one shot—until “slow” came to a halt when the power went out in Windhoek for about half an hour.

The power went out mid-day during a pretty heavy hail and rain storm (picture above), the same kind of rainy season storm that put a damper on any of the outdoorsy day trips I tried to organized out of the city that day:  either a cave expedition through the bat- and scorpion-infested Arnhem Cave (Namibia’s largest), which was closed due to flooding; or a mountain bike game drive through the nearby Daan Viljoen Game Park, which was too muddy.

Instead, it was another day in the Chameleon Backpackers’ lounge watching videos with others also trying to keep dry—The Ninth Gate, The Professional, Twelve Monkeys and two Time/Life wildlife safari videos.  I also read a chapter in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which I bought in town the day before.  The sun finally came out in the late afternoon, and I inquired about things to do in Windhoek—but as Morne at the bar put it, “There’s not much to do here, man.” Two other locals agreed; it was more or less just a town to get stuff before moving on to the countryside.  (I still had two more days to go before my safari.)

THAT NIGHT AT THE POOLSIDE BAR, I befriended Michael, yet another one of The New Lost American Generation of former dot comers, from Chicago.  Burnt out from working crazy IT contracts for CBS and AT&T Wireless’ mLife campaign, he took an indefinite leave of absence (it had just been over a year when I met him) to go to developing nations to attend and facilitate programmer workshops so that less-technological countries—like Namibia with its dial-up connections (even in internet cafes)—could play a little catch up to the modern Western world.  He was at the end of his stay in Africa and was also trying to postpone the inevitable re-entry to the job that he technically never quit. 

Rosa, the native Namibian tending bar, and I were chatting about the usual things you talk about at a backpackers bar, travel and life goals amongst them.  She told me she had been working at Chameleon for the past two years—maintaining the hostel, bookkeeping, tending bar, etc.—but was certain that she wouldn’t want to be there forever like her co-worker Sam, who was going on five years.

“What would you want to do?” I asked.

“My dream,” she said in her African accent, as I waited for her to finish the sentence with something lofty in my mind, “is to work on computers.”

Confused, I asked, “Like programming and stuff?”

“No, just to set up accommodations and reservations and things like that.” She told me she wanted to work in an office.

Perhaps Rosa was part of an unwritten lost generation of Africans that wanted the exact opposite of The New Lost American Generation.  As the saying goes, “The grass is always greener on the other side”—especially when it had been raining so much that day I stayed indoors.


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This blog entry about the events of Tuesday, March 30, 2004 was originally posted on March 31, 2004 on the blog, "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World (Or Until Money Runs Out, Whichever Comes First)," hosted by BootsnAll.com. It is one of over 500 entries that chronicled a trip around the world from October 2003 to March 2005, encompassing travel through thirty-seven countries in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. It was this blog that "started it all," where Erik evolved and honed his style of travel blogging. (It starts to come into focus around the time he arrives in Africa.)

Praised and recommended by USA Today, RickSteves.com, and readers of BootsnAll and Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree, The Global Trip blog was selected by the editors of PC Magazine for the "Top 100 Sites You Didn't Know You Couldn't Live Without" (in the travel category) in 2005.





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