Globalization's Hangover

A reflection on how the systems that once promised integration, now produce dislocation, identity crises, and geopolitical tension.

Ever since I can remember (I was born in 1996 and don’t even remember what the Deutsche Mark looks like,) the world felt like one big open-plan office: chaotic, exciting, connected. You could drive from the southernest point in Spain to the most northern point in Germany without being stopped at any borders, eat sushi in Berlin, stream a series from Seoul, and feel like borders were a cute historical concept. We were the generation raised on cheap flights, Wi-Fi, and the illusion that global interdependence meant progress.

But now, the music has stopped. More like a record scratch in the middle of a beautiful song, when you realize someone pulled the plug on the global party. And it’s dawning on us that globalization, much like a wild night out, comes with a hangover.

The symptoms are everywhere - inflation, nationalism, supply chain headaches, tech and AI wars, trade wars, real wars… The idea that “the world is flat,” feels quaint now. The same forces that once promised connection now seem to be pulling us apart. Here, I don’t just see politics. I see the hangover of a collective illusion: that progress was linear, our openness was sustainable, and that global meant good.

The systems that once promised integration - trade, technology, travel, are now producting dislocation, identity crises, and geopolitical tension. Globalization was supposed to dissolve borders. But instead, it dissolved certainty.

In the 1990s, the world imagined a flat, borderless economy: capital would flow, ideas circulate, and conflict would become obsolete. But today, supply chains are weapons, information is ammunition, and digital bridges are digital battlefields.

These same technoligies that connect us, also make us transparent. The global markets that promised freedom also caused dependencies so deep, that even a single ship stuck in the Suez Canal could hold the world hostage. We call this an “interconnected” world, but what it really is, is an interdependent one. When the U.S. sneezes, the world catches a cold. When China recalibrates, markets everywhere tremble. The illusion was that connection would make us equals, but the reality is that it only revealed hierarchy.

My generation, the so-called “children of globalization,” are now living its dillusionment. Yes, we’ve studied abroad, worked across time zones, and built our careers on “connectivity.” But we’re also the ones sitting in airports at 2AM, realizing that belonging everywhere can also mean belonging nowhere. We used to define our identity on proximity, by where we were from. Now, it’s by the things we consume, the algorithms that shape us, and the languages we half-speak (guilty as charged.)

For many of us who grew up “global,” belonging became not so much about community, more about navigation. We learned very well how to move through worlds, but staying in one? We have issues with that (again, guilty.)

Politically, this dislocation has its consequences. Nationalism, polarization, and nostalgia for the “simpler times” aren’t glitches in the system. They’re symptoms of a generation that’s tired of floating. When people lose a sense of rootedness, we grab onto identity like a life raft.

The geopolitical hangover is imposisble to ignore. The wars we’re watching now - Ukraine, Gaza, the South China Sea simmering in the background, aren’t seperate crises. They’re symptoms of the same thing: a global order that lost its balance. The West is tired of holding it up, the East is tired of being held down, and everyone else seems caught in between.

I don’t think globalization failed, it just grew up, the same way we are. The optimism of the 1990s has become the realism of the 2020s - that connection without coherence is chaos.

I don’t think the cure to the hangover is to turn inward or close the border. The world doesn’t need less connection, it needs better connection. Every generation inherits a different kind of chaos. Ours began with fragmentation, but it’s slowly circling back to something darker. We were raised to believe the age of war and famine was over, that the world had learned its lesson. But here we go again, watching borders harden, alliances fracture, and scarcity return in new disguises.

My favorite high-school teacher in Switzerland, Mr. Shuler, taught us about the Strauss-Howe theory, that history moves in eighty-year cycles. Peace, complacency, crisis, renewal. Maybe we’re at the end of one of those cycles now, standing in the hangover between what was promised, and what remains.

But this could also be our chance to rebuild meaning in a world that mistook access for connection. To grow up, as globalization itself must, and decide what’s truly worth preserving before the music stops for good.