All posts tagged: connection

Two Years of Seasonal Migration

Published by ericaeyoung

The headline on my LinkedIn bio proudly displays the Barabasi quote: “Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success.” To anyone who will listen, I’m always saying things like “it’s not only what you know, it’s who you know” and that the quality of our relationships is the strongest indicator of happiness and health long-term. Unfortunately it feels like modern life is often at odds with this worldview. What better way to embody these beliefs than to reorient my life around my relationships?It was this seed that grew into the Seasonal Migration experiment. My family is extremely small, so I don’t have a strong gravitational pull to a specific place. Having moved internationally from the Americas to Asia and then Asia to Europe, my ‘chosen family’ are more geographically dispersed than most. Since I left the US in 2008, all but my closest relationships there have withered. Many people might describe this lifestyle as nomadic, but I feel there’s an important difference: nomadic movement is generally unpredictable and acyclic, while migratory …

Seasonal Migration Chapter 4: Hong Kong

Published by ericaeyoung

It still surprises me how quickly you can switch from one reality to the next. On Friday I was eating award winning Chinese food with my family overlooking the HK skyline. Saturday I was jogging along the beachfront in Santa Monica. Monday I was stumbling through a conversation in Spanish over lunch with my host family in Cusco. As I walked up to my host family’s door on Monday morning, a hummingbird was feasting on nectar from the flowering bushes outside. I’m taking that as a sign that I’m in the best reality for me right now :]. Below are reflections from the fourth chapter of my seasonal migration experiment. ReflectionsIt was even easier to slipstream into Hong Kong life this time ’round. Healthy habits around exercise, eating, and work formed quickly and were fairly easy to maintain even after my mom arrived. I had much less life admin because I had sorted most of it last fall (e.g. mobile phone number, China visa, apartment). My friends and I quickly found our rhythm, so we got to …

Seasonal Migration Chapter 3: London

Published by ericaeyoung

There were about 12 days in the middle of August that honestly felt like pure bliss. It’s funny, because if you had caught me at the moment I was thigh-deep in mud pushing my kayak downstream, you might think otherwise. Or the moment I raced home to meet someone who was buying a piece of furniture and then didn’t show. Or the moment I was awake at 3am worrying that I had upset a friend. My baseline was so positively buoyant that those types of moments couldn’t detract from my overall mood. It felt like I had finally unlocked how to live well in the UK. I guess absence does really make the heart grow fonder :p.Below are reflections from the third chapter of my seasonal migration experiment and my first time returning to a place in the seasonal migration rotation.ReflectionsThis summer I really fell in love with the UK. I can’t say that it was ‘again’, as my relationship with the UK didn’t begin with love at first sight like Hong Kong. It also didn’t get serious …

Seasonal Migration chapter 2: Mexico City

Published by ericaeyoung

My ‘Hasta Entonces’ party was almost a slow motion train wreck. At 5:30pm it started to pour, which brought everything in CDMX to a standstill. It also caused a power outage at the bar, so we had no electricity for lights, music, or air conditioning. We gathered as many candles as we could find and set up a fully-charged laptop to play music. Then the electricity pole outside the bar caught on fire, dropping burning ash onto the sidewalk. When the fire department came to put out the fire, it provided entertainment to the handful of guests who braved the rain. Eventually the skies cleared, the electricity came back on, the bar filled with guests, and we found the bottom of a bottle of bacanora ;p. For the last act, an adorable ringtail appeared in a tree outside the bar and then darted across the street in front of a passing car. Thankfully it reached the far side unscathed. Let’s just say it’s a party I won’t soon forget! Below are reflections from the second chapter of my seasonal migration experiment. Decided that I need …

Seasonal Migration Chapter 1: Hong Kong

Published by ericaeyoung

Was hoping to finish writing this before I arrived in Mexico City, but the jellyfish that stung me had other plans :p. Mercifully, it happened after my last morning of kayaking in the Sea of Cortés and as of now the burning and itching sensations have mostly subsided. Below are some reflections about this first chapter of my seasonal migration experiment. ReflectionsOverall, I feel like my time in Hong Kong was a huge success! Since moving to London in 2015, I have travelled back to HK 5 times, usually for a week or two at a time. As a result, the city remained very familiar even though there have been plenty of changes, both good and bad. Unsurprisingly, a number of my close friends have left over the years. Thankfully, a handful still remain and many of them have started to raise families in HK. In general, it was easy to reintegrate with most of my old friends and start to build relationships with their children. It was harder to reconnect with previous weak ties where I …

Seasonal Migration Experiment

Published by ericaeyoung

(first written in Sep 2023, updated Sep 2025)Recently I’ve mentioned to many of you that staying in one place all year round doesn’t spark joy. So, I’ve decided to experiment with a new rhythm. For the next year, I’m going to split most of my time between three cities. If it works, going forward I will spend the fall in Hong Kong, travel for a month over the holidays, spend the spring in Mexico City, travel for another month around Easter, and then enjoy summer in London before hitting the road again. Notice how I don’t even mention winter ;]? For now, I expect the three main cities will remain the same from year to year and where I travel in between will vary. What’s the experiment? Here are some of the things I’ll be testing out over the next year:Why Mexico City? Both Hong Kong and London make sense because I already have a network in each of those cities. Here are a few of the reasons I’ve chosen to give Mexico City a try:Seasonal …

Introducing The Reliants Project

Published by ericaeyoung

Recently, I’ve been building up my understanding of social network analysis (SNA) so I can help myself and others build and maintain more resilient personal networks. I’ve learned how to graph my social network and the impact that quality relationships have on your life. Now I’m hoping to incorporate these skills and interests into my work more directly.I wanted to say thank you for your willingness to respond to my repeated requests over the last several months; filling out surveys, testing newsletters and sharing content with your network. Every little bit helps and I wanted to share some of the valuable outcomes you have helped make possible so far.People who made direct introductions have helped me: Connect with 20+ potential collaborators Find 7 podcast guests Identify 3+ advisory opportunities with companies that are trying to solve important problems using networks People who shared The Reliants Project content on social media have helped me: Secure a guest blog post on The Relationships Project, which will help build awareness around the importance of networks with people that are working on social problems Get …

Primary relationships impact personal network structures

Published by ericaeyoung

In my post “Change over time“, I hypothesised that coupling up and separating with someone would have a significant impact on the structure of an individual’s personal network. After my divorce many years ago, my network structure shifted from one that was compartmentalised to that of a ‘sampler’. Little did I know that I would soon have the opportunity to actually test this theory.Between 2015 and 2016, I tracked how my London social network grew from a small group of pre-existing connections to a reasonably strong support system. In the resulting graph, I emphasised the role that non-local contacts had in helping me expand my community. Now I’ve taken 2016 data and compared it to the present in a new visual:The most dramatic differences between the 2016 and 2017 visualisations are the new node sitting at the centre of the graph and the cluster of new nodes on the far right. That central node is my new partner and the cluster to the right is the portion of his London network that he has introduced to me. His …

Celebrating friendships

Published by ericaeyoung

After all the effort of building a dataset for The Reliants Project, it’s been great the reap the rewards with countless ways to explore and visualise the data. I’ve decided to focus first on the reliants, my closest relationships.To give readers a sense of the breadth of the group categorised as reliants, here are some reference points. They include family members I’ve known since birth, others I’ve built relationships with spanning 25+ years, as well as people I’ve gotten to know within the last year. I met an equal number through direct introductions and public events and there are even two that I met serendipitously. They are overwhelmingly male, but very diverse in terms of nationality and ethnicity. Their ages span from mid-twenties to retired, though the majority are 25-45. Almost all of them have moved internationally and have lived in the same city as me at some point, though there are a couple of exceptions. Roughly half of them are married and/or have children, however few had reached this life stage when I met them. Beyond family (2 people), two pairs have relationships …

Change over time

Published by ericaeyoung

If you’ve met me, you’ve probably heard me say “change is the only constant” more than a few times. It’s been incredible to reflect on how much my personal network has evolved since university. After 12 months of The Reliants Project focused on my new London network, I decided to shift focus to 3 areas inspired by that exploratory research: Building a more complex visual of my entire personal network in the hopes that it will give me a more accurate representation of change in my network over time Visualising how new connections transition between the categories of stranger, acquaintance, friend and reliant (and even loosing touch) over time Identifying how significant life events (e.g. moving, marriage, parenthood, divorce, career shifts) impact connections’ positions within the network While I gathered data over the last 15 years, it was hard to reach back beyond 2004 (introduction of Gmail) with much accuracy. Nonetheless, this data captures 2 international moves (Massachusetts to Hong Kong in 2008, Hong Kong to London in 2015), my divorce (2010), and 4 career shifts. The first time series visual I created based on that data is below (click to enlarge).  If …