You know when it seems like half your friends are getting married? And not just that, but moving onto promising careers, advancing, settling, all that adult stuff. 

I gave it some thought, and it occurred to me that only my university friends were really doing that. 

The real judge is from my high school group, my graduating class then. In 2003 we had about 33 graduating students (including myself) from the British International School in Jakarta. Of those people… 2, maybe 3, are married. One, maybe two, are currently engaged. 

I don’t keep up with most of them, but to my knowledge some are still studying, some still don’t have full time committing jobs… but all of them are still mobile. 

My mother remarked, which brought me onto this train of thought, “Your friends seem to all have been late bloomers too.” Which is ironic because I was telling her about how one of them landed a full time job in her chosen field last year, but overall her point is accurate. 

One friend, whose parents worked with the UN, only got his life sorted out 1-2 years ago. It’s a slightly sad story. In his younger years his parents were posted in Tanzania, where he was picked on by the black kids for being the only white kid. Despite that he was bright, and his Indonesian was awesome, it took him a while to get on track. 

Another friend studied Finance in the UK, worked for a while in London and floated around in India… and his current location is Jakarta. I don’t know what he’s doing there, actually. 

Another has moved from Australia to Canada to London to Singapore in the last few years, for work and study. 

One, whose father had something to do with the Colombian embassy, is, to my knowledge, a professional hippy in Australia. 

One friend did a stint as a missionary in China, then went to Japan to study martial arts. 

The friend I was telling my mother about tends to spend her holidays on long treks in remote places. I believe the next project was supposed to be Nepal. 

Most of them may not be following through with settling down or necessarily success-driven careers… but they’re definitely getting around the world.