Everywhere, but Nowhere

Image credit: Deloitte

By Elisabeth Simaibang

One of my favorite professors at Columbia said in his last lecture of 2025: “Be willing to go places in order to go places.” Pun intended and true. Universities and workplaces celebrate the globe-trotter as a symbol of resilience and ambition. It is an appealing narrative. It is also incomplete.

As a student who moved from the Global South to the North, I understand how globalization captures opportunities. But beneath its shiny facade lies the truth that rarely enters public conversation: In moving constantly, people become performers. Each move demands a new script of how to speak, behave, and belong, pushing individuals into constant code-switching that carries real cognitive and emotional costs. What begins as adaptability hardens into reflex, until the line between the performed self and the authentic one starts to blur.

This is not just a personal struggle but also a structural one: Universities and corporations increasingly promote mobility, yet the systems meant to support those who live it have lagged behind. The result is a generation expected to keep moving while absorbing the psychological weight of that movement largely alone.

Universities are one visible part of this story. Over the past twenty years, international student mobility has more than tripled worldwide. Schools eagerly promote study abroad programs, global campuses, international fellowships, and cross-border internships. Many universities frame global experience as essential to 21st-century education.

Nevertheless, research on reverse culture shock has found that returning students—wherever they’re from—can experience significant distress, sometimes greater than what they reported when first going abroad. A study of American students who returned from overseas programs found that higher levels of re-entry shock predicted lower psychological well-being and greater depressive symptoms. Another study revealed that 59% of international students are dealing with heightened anxiety, stress, and depressive symptoms tied to isolation and academic pressure in intercultural settings.

Universities acknowledge these issues, but support is often fragmented. International offices handle visas and logistics, while counseling centers address stress as a general symptom. Orientation focuses on departure and not return. The overall structure still treats mobility as a one-way upgrade, and re-entry as an afterthought.

The workplace replicates this pattern. Employers increasingly honor adaptability and polyvalency. Surveys by Deloitte show that executives consider flexibility to be workers’ most valuable skill. Those who relocate for their jobs or operate across time zones are expected to adjust instantly. They translate tone for clients, switch humor for colleagues, and maintain stability—even when their own lives are unstable. 

The professional instability that mobile workers face further compounds this strain. Globally mobile professionals are more likely to occupy short-term assignments, contract roles, or positions bound by visa cycles. Younger workers often accept this uncertainty as the entry fee to opportunity. Only later do they realize that their resumes become harder to stitch into a coherent story, accompanied by a chronic sense that life has never quite had time to settle.

For decades, the dominant narrative framed mobility as an unquestionable good—that cultural exposure produces cosmopolitan maturity. But this belief was shaped by institutions that benefit materially from mobility while ignoring the personal costs individuals have to bear. If universities and employers want to sustain mobility in the future, they must recalibrate the balance of responsibility. The burden of mobility should not rest entirely on individuals.

Universities can begin by treating re-entry as seriously as departure. Reintegration programs should be a key focus for students, and counseling centers should be trained to address identity layering and cultural fatigue. For employers, acknowledging mobility as labor would start with measurement. Firms already track turnover, burnout, and engagement. Because vulnerability is often interpreted as a lack of resilience, people underreport strain. That silence should not be mistaken for its absence. Employers could instead examine whether employees who relocate or work constantly across cultures show different patterns of disengagement or attrition, and whether targeted support can reduce that burden.

None of these changes would erase the tensions of a mobile life. Globalization has produced extraordinary connectivity and has given many of us a chance to go places our parents could not imagine. But it also produced a workforce that has learned to perform multiple selves to meet institutional expectations. These performers help keep the system running. Some pay with identity fragmentation. Some pay with emotional fatigue. Some pay with a sense of belonging that weakens with each move.