Sarah and I made a conscious choice to come and live in The Netherlands. The most obvious other option would have been to stay where we were. Or would it?
Thinking about it today, I’m compelled to consider that we really had very little choice at all. Eloïse’s birth alone would have forced us to leave the US, since she would not be able to receive the type of upbringing she needs and deserves whilst part of American society.
Besides that, things were reaching a natural conclusion in Mountain View.
I had been at Google for four years. All of the people I knew socially and considered my friends were my colleagues from work. One by one, they started to cash in their stock and leave the company to enjoy the good life. Before long, Google was starting to feel less and less like the Google I’d known over the past few years. It was also growing like wildfire, increasing my sense of estrangement.
A catalyst in that estrangement was the birth of Eloïse and the ensuing paternity leave. After seven weeks at home, I already felt like I’d left Google and had adopted a new lifestyle.
That new lifestyle was an odd fit. I was no longer working, but Eloïse did not fill the void in the same way. Fatherhood was wondeful, of course, but routine was lost and intellectual fulfillment was at a low ebb. I realised that this was not a lifestyle that could be maintained indefinitely; not by me, anyway.
My friends who had left Google started to travel, play golf, hang out on the sets of TV shows; whatever. I began to see less and less of them. It started to feel as if our established lifestyle was fragmenting, crumbling away, piece by piece.
With all of our friends based around work and now off doing their own thing, there was little social life outside of the work sphere. Thanks to the absence of the same people from Google, plus the changing face of the company and my own department, my sense of belonging at work was also evaporating before me.
It was all ending. I could see it happening. It was natural and inevitable. Google was entering a new phase in its history and my friends — all of them normal, down to earth people — were now rich and adjusting to their new lifestyles (with impressive ease in some cases!).
Sarah and I were still living in rented accommodation, with very little of our own furniture and few possessions beyond gadgetry, CDs, books and clothes. The only way forward would be to buy a house and rebel against the natural unrooting process that we had found ourselves now subject to.
Happily for us, it all felt so right that everything was drawing to a close. The transition felt like a force of nature, like summer passing into autumn, like an old and fulfilled man’s life coming to an end. This was natural, something to embrace and accept, not resist. Eloïse was a tangible figurehead of this sensation, heralding a new phase of life for all of us, shepherding out the old and ushering in the new.
It was all quite poetic, really. We had to leave; our new baby necessitated it. But there was nothing to stay for, anyway. The sands had shifted and the set of circumstances that had nurtured a life in Silicon Valley for many years, affording us a superficially convincing sense of establishment and security, were now dissolving, leaving only a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, so we naturally enacted our long-harboured plan to commence the next phase of our life.
And now we’re here, a country, a continent — no, a world — away from where we were. Small wonder that I sometimes feel myself suffering from feelings of disjointment and detachment. From Mountain View to Amsterdam. From working to retirement. From carefree life to fatherhood. It’s often hard to pinpoint which detail or complex permutation of details is conspiring to provoke feelings that are nebulous and hard to comprehend.
Too much change within too short a period of time. Are those the boundaries of my own ability to change and adapt coming into view? Can the old dog no longer learn new tricks?
Life’s an amazing thing. Just when you get used to one particular chapter of your life, the tectonic plates of destiny grind together, raising mountains and gouging gorges, and you awake to a new and unfamiliar landscape. And you adapt, because life neglected to provide any other option.
This time in 1999 — just six years ago — I’d just met a girl called Sarah, who I thought was very nice. I allowed my imagination to run riot and constructed castles in the sky, picturing what could be if logistics and hard physics were not factors in our lives.
Long live the romantic heart, with its ability to overpower the intellect and plunge one headlong — before one is able to rationally throw a spanner between the spokes — into a personal revolution. Thanks to an all-consuming belief in the nobility and poetry of romance, I now find myself married, father to a daughter, retired and wondering what the hell is coming next.
At the end of this week, we receive the keys to our new house: another new beginning. What’s in store for 2006? I think it will be more tranquil than this year. I think we will continue to travel around Europe, but not do too much else. We might need all of 2006 just to get used to all of the events of 2005; there were that many of them.
We’re all master of our destiny; after a fashion, anyway. It’s easy to exert influence over your own life; it’s just not always possible to predict the dramatic consequences that will result from a seemingly tiny action.