There are times when themes seem to emerge from nowhere in life, and repeat themselves beyond the point of coincidence. For me this is the year nearly my entire social circle left town at the same time.
Old friends left. Newer friends left. Acquaintances left. My boyfriend left. A number of my close friends commiserated with me, finished their drinks, and promptly left as well. It became a kind of running joke, and then it made me very boring to talk to. “How was your weekend?” people would ask with trepidation as I delivered story after story of leaving drinks, parties and dinners.
Hadley Donaldson: Left behind Photo: Illustration: Hadley Donaldson
Matters reached a peak when one day in late July I hung up from a phone call arranging a leaving party with one person, only to discover a text message inviting me to another farewell drinks that same evening. I went back to my hometown of Auckland for some midwinter respite only to find that it was similar there.
After a time it became difficult not to take this exodus personally. I sought refuge in statistics. Surely there was some sociological explanation, such as that hackneyed phenomenon of “the brain drain”, to account for my sense of desertion. Unfortunately for my self-esteem, some light research revealed it’s apparently reversing and if anything people are returning home.
READ Claire Adamson on returning home after an OE.
Be that as it may, people are definitely still leaving, if by “people” I mean select individuals known to me – and I wonder why. If my newsfeeds the day after the election were to be believed, anger at the status quo seems like a popular motivation. But there are reasons ranging from privilege to necessity: study, work experience, a desire to live the same life but slightly richer in Melbourne, which in Wellington is spoken about with a kind of dreamy inevitability, in much the same tone as my parents talk about retirement. Like an Orewa for 20-somethings, everything is easier and it is warmer there.
In general people leave because they are both ambitious and privileged enough to be able to have the option. There seems to be a sense of false reality about New Zealand remarked upon by my more successful friends, that their achievements are somehow due not to talent or hard work, but simply good odds against a small population size – the “big fish in a small pond” interpretation of imposter’s syndrome.
“A good city is like a good party – people stay much longer than really necessary because they are enjoying themselves”
I don’t think this social dispersal is unique to my generation or to me. “But everyone goes” was the comment I received from a number of people when I mentioned I was writing this article. “Yeah, when I was your age a bunch of my friends went to London,” my older brother told me via Skype in Tokyo. “I left for a bit,” my mother said wistfully, referring to a stint living in Sydney in the 70s. Whether it takes the form of joining “the brain drain” or that other cliché readily applied to 20-somethings, “the OE”, it seems leaving is a rite of passage for New Zealanders.
Whatever the reason for it, the effect of so many people going is surely destabilising for those of us who remain here. Architect Jan Gehl has quipped that “a good city is like a good party – people stay much longer than really necessary because they are enjoying themselves”. In my case, it seemed like no one wanted to be the last person drunkenly dancing alone in the lounge at 3am. Suddenly everyone had an exit strategy. People began talking as though Wellington was a kind of emergency – if being quiet, bureaucratic, pretty cold, and having somewhat limited dating options could be considered an emergency.
With the closing of not one but two bars enough to send the city’s delicate nightlife into a nosedive, my conversations in the city took on a fraught tone I can only imagine to be akin to that of Europe pre-WWI. “I am going to Zurich,” my friend Izzy Gchatted me. “Hopefully you can make it out of New Zealand soon too.”
“We had to go,” my friend Oliver emailed me from England, “we’re both 30, thinking about kids etc. I’m reluctant to say it was now or never… but it was approaching that scenario.”
Another person, someone I was sure would hold out at least until the end of the year, had a bad day at work, balked, and booked a one-way ticket to Melbourne. He apologised to me as though this was an act of cowardice. “I’m sorry, I just can’t handle staying any longer.”
Photo: Elle Hunt / The Wireless
In the face of such mass exodus, my remaining friend Matt and I considered our losses, as well as what it meant to stay. Over the past two years our circle had developed into the kind of clique that must be insufferable to anyone observing it from the outside, ridden with injokes and cemented by a rich shared history of lying on lounge floors, stomachs too full of snacks and drinks to go home. I can only facilely relate our behaviour to a trope so glib sitcom writers realised it years ago: that for twenty-somethings friends become a type of family.
“Let’s just do quiet things,” Matt said, “In September I can picture us meeting up on Sundays, wearing jackets, drinking coffee and saying nothing to one another.” I knew what he meant. It was a time for low key, jacket-wearing, coffee-drinking mourning. This moroseness wasn’t so much about our departed friends themselves (‘departed friends’ makes it sound as though they have died; in reality most of them have simply been talented and fortunate enough to be accepted into foreign graduate schools), but an acknowledgement that their leaving would only result in more change.
Pip Howells: Table for one Photo: Elle Hunt / The Wireless
As has certainly been pointed out in relation to the brain drain before, the cumulative effect of people leaving is that there become fewer and fewer reasons for those left behind to stay. The social fabric was looking like an increasing frayed sheet where each hole puts more pressure on the remaining material. “Do you think you’ll go too?” we started asking one another edgily, in code for “Will I still have someone to drink with?” If what was occurring to our group was akin to the end of Friends, the grim question arose as to who would receive the Joey spin-off.
But, as I had to remind myself, I have reasons to stay, like the fact that I currently have a job I love, and that I’ve slowly accumulated all the items necessary for a functioning household (the upshot of my late 20s appears to be that I finally have a really good food processor). I’m aware of how my close friendships formed in the first place – in the benign spaces of an easy, lazy city where sometimes so little was happening we had few options but to talk to one another.
I think optimistically that I now have plenty of places to stay on holiday overseas, and that at home it is always possible to rebuild. There might also be something to be said for not suffering the peer pressure to leave; that, in the face of depleting peers, making the choice to stay is in some ways as ambitious, meaningful, and assertive as the one to leave.
Cover illustration by Hadley Donaldson.
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