Stepping Outside My Bubble

I have been thinking recently about how much of our lives are shaped by the people we happen to meet. For most of my adult life, I have lived in a fairly small bubble. I have almost exclusively been an academic. I completed my bachelor's degree, then my PhD, followed by a postdoc. Most of my friends have been academics. I have spent my lunches with academics, gone to conferences with academics, and even gone to university gyms where many of the people around me were from the same academic environment.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with that. I enjoy talking about science. I enjoy discussing ideas and politics with smart and curious people. Academia has given me many wonderful friendships. But recently, I have started to realize how limited my experience can become when almost everyone I meet has a similar background.

Perhaps my wife has helped me see this more clearly. She works in the corporate world, and sometimes she tells me about conversations with her colleagues. Their discussions can be quite different from those I typically have with academic friends. They talk about buying a house. Investing money. Career progression. Managing everyday life. Things that, in some ways, feel more immediately connected to the practical realities of life.

Academics, on the other hand, sometimes live in a strange bubble. We often say that we went into science because we fell in love with it, not because we wanted to make money. And I believe that is often true. But sometimes I wonder whether we also tell ourselves this story because it fits the identity we have built around being academics.

Perhaps every profession creates its own bubble. And perhaps we don't always realize how much of the world exists outside it. One of the things I have enjoyed most since moving to Sweden and living in the capital city of Stockholm has been the opportunity to step outside my usual social circles. This summer, I started attending Swedish language classes for immigrants. It has been one of the most interesting social experiences I have had in recent years. Suddenly, I was meeting people from completely different backgrounds, countries, and generations.

One person I met was a 19-year-old guy from Iraq. He was actually born in Sweden, but his parents later took him to Iraq. As he grew older, he came to resent that decision. Being a Swedish citizen, he felt that he had been separated from opportunities and a life that could have been his. Now he was back in Sweden, starting over. He was learning Swedish from scratch and trying to build a new life at just 19 years old. He had recently found a job as a barber. And he had a dream of becoming a doctor one day. I found his story incredibly inspiring because of the determination behind it. At an age when many people are only beginning to think about what they might do with their lives, he had already experienced displacement, migration, and the difficult process of rebuilding a life in a new society.

It made me think about how many stories like this exist around us. Perhaps there are people in academia who have equally extraordinary stories. But we don't always talk about them. Professional environments often encourage us to present a certain version of ourselves. We talk about our achievements, our research, and our careers. We don't always talk about the struggles and experiences that shaped us. The same may be even more true in business and professional settings, where people often have strong incentives to maintain a particular image.

Meeting people outside my usual circle has made me realize how much I don't know about the lives of the people around me. I have also experienced this through something as simple as group exercise. I started attending group training classes, including yoga and CrossFit, and found myself meeting people from completely different walks of life. I met a yoga teacher of Italian origin who now lives in Sweden. Before becoming a yoga teacher, she worked a variety of jobs, including in a call center. During the COVID pandemic, while spending more time at home, she became interested in yoga. She practiced, learned, and developed her skills independently. Eventually, she changed careers completely. Today, she works as a full-time yoga teacher and online content creator.

I have also met people through CrossFit with completely different careers and life paths: a German physiotherapist, a full-time fitness coach who had previously worked repairing escalators, a gym owner, and many others. I find these stories fascinating. Not because any one career is better than another. But because there are so many different ways to live a life. Academia is one path. Science is one path. But there are thousands of other paths that I rarely encounter when I spend most of my time surrounded by academics.

Living outside my home country has perhaps made this even more noticeable. When you move abroad, you naturally lose some of the social networks you grew up with. You have only a limited amount of time and energy, so it is easy to rebuild another small circle around your workplace or profession. In my case, that circle was academia. I am beginning to think that it is important to consciously step outside it. Not because there is anything wrong with being around academics. But because meeting people from different backgrounds reminds me that my experience of the world is only one small part of it.

A scientist may spend years thinking about a difficult scientific problem. A barber may spend the same day building a new life in a foreign country. A yoga teacher may completely reinvent her career after discovering something new during a pandemic. A fitness coach may have once repaired escalators. A young person may be trying to become a doctor after having to rebuild his life from scratch. These stories are all around us. We just have to step outside our bubble long enough to hear them. Perhaps that is one of the most valuable things about meeting people who are different from us. They don't necessarily teach us something new about the world. Sometimes, they teach us that our own version of the world was never the whole story to begin with.