Future Shock

An extreme manifestation of this urge to move is found among the female hitch-hikers who are begi

Teen-age girls in particular – perhaps eager to escape restrictive home environments – are passionately keen travelers. A survey of girls who read Seventeen, for example, showed that 40.2 percent took one or more "major" trips during the summer before the survey. Sixtynine percent of these trips carried the girl outside her home state, and nine percent took her abroad. But the itch to travel begins long before the teen years. Thus when Beth, the daughter of a New York psychiatrist, learned that a friend of her's had visited Europe, her tearful response was: "I'm nine years old already and I've never been to Europe!"

This positive attitude toward movement is reflected in survey findings that Americans tend to admire travelers. Thus researchers at the University of Michigan have found that respondents frequently term travelers "lucky" or "happy." To travel is to gain status, which explains why so many American travelers keep ragged airline tags on their luggage or attaché cases long after their return from a trip. One wag has suggested that someone set up a business washing and ironing old airline tags for status-conscious travelers.

Moving one's household, on the other hand, is a cause for commiseration rather than congratulations. Everyone makes ritual comments about the hardships of moving. Yet the fact is that those who have moved once are much more likely to move again than those who have never moved. The French sociologist Alain Touraine explains that "having already made one change and being less attached to the community, they are the readier to move again ..." And a British trade-union official, R. Clark, not long ago told an international manpower conference that mobility might well be a habit formed in student days. He pointed out that those who spent their college years away from home move in less restricted circles than uneducated and more home-bound manual workers. Not only do these college people move more in later life, but he suggested, they pass on to their children attitudes that facilitate mobility. While for many worker families relocation is a dreaded necessity, a consequence of unemployment or other hardships, for the middle and upper classes moving is most often associated with the extension of the good life. For them, traveling is a joy, and moving out usually means moving up.

In short, throughout the nations in transition to super-industrialism, among the people of the future, movement is a way of life, a liberation from the constrictions of the past, a step into the still more affluent future.

Dramatically different attitudes, however, are evinced by the "immobiles." It is not only the agricultural villager in India or Iran who remains fixed in one place for most or all of his life. The same is true of millions of blue-collar workers, particularly those in backward industries. As technological change roars through the advanced economies, outmoding whole industries and creating new ones almost overnight, millions of unskilled and semiskilled workers find themselves compelled to relocate. The economy demands mobility, and most Western governments – notably Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the United States – spend large sums to encourage workers to retrain for new jobs and leave their homes in pursuit of them. For coalminers in Appalachia or textile workers in the French provinces, however, this proves to be excruciatingly painful. Even for big-city workers uprooted by urban renewal and relocated quite near to their former homes, the disruption is often agonizing.

"It is quite precise to speak of their reactions," says Dr. Marc Fried of the Center for Community Studies, Massachusetts General Hospital, "as expressions of grief. These are manifest in the feelings of painful loss, the continued longing, the general depressive tone, frequent symptoms of psychological or social or somatic distress ... the sense of helplessness, the occasional expressions of both direct and displaced anger, and tendencies to idealize the lost place." The responses, he declares, are "strikingly similar to mourning for a lost person."

Sociologist Monique Viot, of the French Ministry of Social Affairs, says: "The French are very attached to their geographical backgrounds. For jobs even thirty or forty kilometers away they are reluctant – extremely reluctant – to move. The unions call such moves 'deportations.'"

Even some educated and affluent movers show signs of distress when they are called upon to relocate. The author Clifton Fadiman, telling of his move from a restful Co

In a famous study of a Canadian suburb they call Crestwood Heights, sociologists J. R. Seeley, R. A. Sim, and E. W. Loosley, state: "The rapidity with which the transition has to be accomplished, and the depth to which change must penetrate the personality are such as to call for the greatest flexibility of behavior and stability of personality. Ideology, speech sometimes, food habits, and preferences in decor must be made over with relative sudde

The steps by which people make such adjustments have been mapped out by psychiatrist James S. Tyhurst of the University of British Columbia. "In field studies of individuals following immigration," he says, "a fairly consistent pattern can ... be defined. Initially, the person is concerned with the immediate present, with an attempt to find work, make money, and find shelter. These features are often accompanied by restlessness and increased psychomotor activity ..."

As the person's sense of strangeness or incongruity in the new surroundings grows, a second phase, "psychological arrival," takes place. "Characteristic of this are increasing anxiety and depression; increasing self-preoccupation, often with somatic preoccupations and somatic symptoms; general withdrawal from the society in contrast to previous activity; and some degree of hostility and suspicion. The sense of difference and helplessness becomes increasingly intense and the period is characterized by marked discomfort and turmoil. This period of more or less disturbance may last for ... one to several months."

Only then does the third phase begin. This takes the form of relative adjustment to the new surroundings, a settling in, or else, in extreme cases, "the development of more severe disturbances manifested by more intense disorders of mood, the development of abnormal mental content and breaks with reality." Some people, in short, never do adjust adequately.