The Bubble You Don’t Know You’re In

How much of who you are did you actually choose?

There’s a question that doesn’t occur to you until something forces it: how much of who you are was actually chosen by you?

For me, that question didn’t come from a book or a meditation retreat. It came from meeting up with old friends and realizing I had nothing in common with them anymore.

I grew up going to an American school in India. It was a very specific environment — international, American in outlook, driven, and performance-oriented. But we also loved having fun: playing sports, partying, living in a very American sort of way. My friend group was close-knit, and we shared the same values, the same worldview, the same assumptions about what a good life looked like. It never occurred to me to question any of it.

The idea of examining my identity, or thinking about what I valued and why, just never crossed my mind. You go with the flow, you do what everyone else is doing, and you don’t think twice about it.

Most of them ended up going to the US for university. I went in a completely different direction. I ended up in Europe, and eventually settled in Spain. At the time, I didn’t think of it as a turning point. But looking back, it was the moment the bubble broke — I just didn’t understand that until years later, when I saw them again.

The American university system has a way of keeping you comfortable. My older brother and many of my friends lived in a world structured around campus: dorm rooms, mandatory cafeterias, student groups, campuses often far removed from the city. It’s convenient, and it’s designed that way on purpose. But it can also keep you in a kind of extended adolescence, where the shape of your daily life is still being decided for you.

My experience at university in Rotterdam was nothing like that. You’re thrown into adult life from day one. Everyone around you already seems to know how to be independent, how to organize their own lives, how to function as a regular member of society. There were no cafeterias, no common amenities, no one easing you into anything. I had to figure it out.

Gradually, that forced a transition I didn’t even realize was happening — into real life, into independence, and slowly, into becoming a different person from the one who had left that American school in India.

But it wasn’t just the university structure that was different. It was the entire relationship to what life is supposed to be about.

The culture I grew up in — and the one most of my friends went deeper into — seemed built around work and progress. You grind, you achieve, you climb. Vacations are short, careers are long, and success is measured in titles and income. Even the way people socialize can feel tied to that. I’ve heard friends talk about going to a party mainly for networking, where the fun is real, but there’s also an underlying sense of purpose beneath it: further the career, make the right connections, keep progressing.

I don’t think everyone operates that way, but it was definitely the energy I grew up around. And when you’re inside it, it can feel like the only way to live.

In Spain, I found something that felt very different. People don’t really lead with what they do for a living. Socializing seems to be more about simply being together — food, conversation, culture, presence. Travel isn’t something you earn after a hard quarter; it’s just part of how people live. Life doesn’t seem to be organized around work so much as the other way around.

And I think that’s what I mean when I say my environment changed me. It wasn’t that I read some philosophy and decided to reprioritize. I just started living in a place where the things I had been taught to value — the grinding, the constant performance, the idea that your job is your identity — weren’t really reflected back at me anymore.

And slowly, without even realizing it, I started to question whether I had ever really believed in them in the first place. Which was strange, because even though I’m half French, those weren’t the values I grew up with. The American school, the international bubble — that had always been the dominant force.

I didn’t notice any of this happening. Not in the moment. It only became clear when I saw my old friends again after about five years apart.

It felt completely off. I felt like they hadn’t changed at all — they still had the same personalities I associated with our teenage years, and what now felt like a disconnected outlook on the real world. Our values, our lifestyles, the way we thought about the world — all of it had diverged. And the strange part was that it wasn’t because of some big philosophical awakening on my end. I hadn’t sat down and deliberately re-examined my beliefs. I had simply lived in an environment that no longer reinforced them, and over time, they shifted.

That’s when the uncomfortable question hit me. If my values changed because my environment changed, then how much of what I believed before had ever really been mine? How much of my identity had simply been inherited — from society, from teachers, from mentors, from my parents — and never examined because I had never been in a place that challenged it?

Once you start pulling at that thread, it unravels quickly. And it’s disorienting. There’s a real sense of loss in it — loss of certainty, loss of belonging, the feeling that the ground has shifted beneath you and you’re no longer sure where you stand.

I don’t want to speak too much for my old friends, but my sense is that they never really had to go through that process. Their values stayed mostly the same, and they remained in environments that reinforced them. There’s a comfort in that. No crisis of identity, no existential questioning, no feeling like a stranger among people who used to feel like home. They followed a fairly continuous path — American university, corporate career, high achievement — and their world never gave them a reason to doubt the framework they grew up with.

The ironic part is that these were not people who lacked worldly experience. They had traveled extensively throughout their lives. But exposure to different cultures doesn’t necessarily change you. You can move through the world and still carry the same framework wherever you go. The international American school bubble travels with you.

I see the same thing in my parents. They’ve lived in countries on opposite ends of the globe, but their values and way of life haven’t really been shaped by any of those places. They find a small community wherever they go — people who share their culture and outlook — and settle into that. The world around them changes, but the bubble stays the same.

And that’s what I find most fascinating about all of this. It’s not really about moving or staying put. It’s about whether your environment ever forces you to confront the things you’ve always taken for granted. You can cross oceans and never leave your bubble. You can stay in one place your whole life and become an entirely different person.

The question is whether something — a move, a relationship, a crisis, whatever it may be — ever puts you in a position where the things you assumed about yourself can no longer go unquestioned.

For me, that something was moving to Europe. I didn’t choose to change. I just ended up somewhere that didn’t let me stay the same.