I don’t know if worldiness is a real word, but it’s the one that comes to mind. For me, it was a slow-burn transformation. The widening of an aperture. A shift from seeing the world through a tight, insular neighborhood lens to thinking in terms of global business and culture… from communities to continents.
As I wrote in earlier chapters, I grew up in a blue-collar Irish Catholic family in New Jersey. A big family, with aunts, uncles, and cousins all around us. There was zero pretense. Nobody had gone to college. Nobody worked for global companies. International travel was rare… mostly cruises, honeymoons, or my older aunts visiting relatives in Ireland. Our entire universe stretched maybe a hundred miles in any direction, with the occasional outlier like my aunt retiring to Arizona, or Irish cousins coming to visit New York City. But even then, they came to us. We never went there.
I’d later learn that my father resented my grandmother for never taking him to Ireland growing up in the ‘60s - ‘70s to meet his cousins. It was like she had no interest in mixing her new life in America with her old life back home. Maybe she just needed a break… time with her sisters and friends without the burden of travel logistics and kids (especially disabled kids who had suffered the blight of polio). Whatever the reason, the result was that I grew up with no real sense of global identity. Despite being just one generation removed from Ireland — and only three from Germany on my paternal side — I had no cultural bridge. My mother’s family, by contrast, was deeply American, tracing back to the Mayflower and Concord. But even this fascinating fact was little known to me until my mid-20s.
But something began to shift in college. I started meeting people from other states. Other countries. I took classes in international business, finance, marketing, media, and culture — some out of curiosity, some required to graduate. I began following global news. I picked up magazines — Bloomberg, and later Monocle. The content, the imagery, the stories… they pulled at something inside me. That aspirational thread you feel when you remember your parents worked themselves ragged to put you through college — not just so you could “do better,” but so you might escape into a new world they could never access themselves. For as much as we rag on Boomers for this well-intentioned yet often oversimplified orientation, it’s grounded in true aspiration.
Then I met my future wife during my junior year. She came from an entirely different orbit — still East Coast, but more formally educated, more refined. Her father, grandfather, and both uncles were doctors and medical researchers. She and her family had been traveling to Europe since she was a child. That alone blew my mind. The first time I’d been on an airplane was for a Disney World trip in 1997, when I was 10. The next time was… another Disney trip in high school when I was 17. Otherwise our biggest family vacation growing up was a road trip to Yellowstone — classic Americana.
When she graduated in 2010, her parents invited me on a celebratory trip to Paris. I’d never been abroad. Of course I said yes — and I was incredibly grateful. At the time, I had already graduated, was living at home with my parents, paying off student loans, and trying to figure things out.
Paris changed everything. The architecture. The plazas. The food. The people. The language. The simple act of walking down a street that had existed for centuries plus. There was one moment that stands out. I was standing at an entrance to Les Invalides — the Military Museum and Tomb of Napoleon — reading a small sign that said EU citizens received discounted entry. For some reason, it pissed me off. Not because I couldn’t afford it. But because of what it symbolized. It was telling me about a club I wasn’t part of. Not even the angry waiter from the first restaurant we visited made me feel like a foreigner for not speaking French. It was that little fucking sign. It was a wall I didn’t know existed — until I ran right into it.
That benign declaration ended up being one of the most influential, determinative objects of my life. It planted a seed — and I quietly entered a planning mode that would subtly influence most of my later life and career decisions.
I started researching whether it was even possible to obtain EU citizenship. But more than that, I had to actually educate myself on the very concept of citizenship. How arbitrary it really is. How shaped it is by politics, history, and ideological anxiety. And then, in a twist — the blue-collar state-school Jersey boy who had never set foot in Europe, not the polished daughter of seasoned Europhile pathologist — had a legal right to Irish — and thus EU — citizenship through descent, thanks to my grandmother who ironically — whether innocently or intentionally — had kept the Old World at bay for so long.
Within two years, I had a beautiful Irish passport in hand to add to my American one.
I still hadn’t actually set foot in Ireland.
But I had cracked the world wide open.
Some personal photos for paid subscribers…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Junteau to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.