I visited Frankfurt and Helsinki last week. There is always a stirring sense of anxiety when you go to a new place, especially one where you don't speak the language and are unfamiliar with how everything works. It's a weird combination of excitement about experiencing something new and the instinctive fear of the same. Underlying all that is a soft static of irritation that not everything works the same way it does back home. I mean, why in the world do other countries use rounded electric outlets at 220 volts? At least, there are Burger King and McDonald's restaurants aplenty.

Which was what really struck me on this trip. Everything was already familiar. In Germany and Finland, the drive from the airport to the hotel was as familiar as the drive from Ronald Reagan National Airport to my house in northern Virginia or from JFK Airport to my parents in Jersey. There is the highway, filled with modern cars, dotted by familiar malls, signs, and buildings. Strip malls, tall office buildings, gigantic sporting venues, chain restaurants, and even indoor skydiving franchises along the side of the highway beckoned to the familiar in me. The signs were in English, most of the time.

But even if the signs were in Klingon, everything would have felt obnoxiously familiar. The hotel was a Marriott, with a familiar lounge that displayed fruits in the same basket and configuration that I saw in another Marriott in the U.S. just last week. The coffee machine in the room was the identical model with familiar looking capsules, bath amenities smelled exactly the same, and even the paper sleeve for the room keys was identical. Then you step outside into the downtown streets and realize that it could be downtown in any large city in the industrialized world. A sleek forest of modern metal and glass buildings, dotted with occasional glimpses of the old, mostly churches or town halls from bygone eras. Frankfurt could have been Dallas, and Helsinki could have been Boston. Frankly, the Germans and Finns that I met on this trip probably spoke English better than your typical American.

Am I complaining? Absolutely not. Sameness is super convenient and comforting. I already know what to expect wherever I go, as long as I stay within a certain parameter of gentrified existence. The familiarity caters to me. I don't have to waste cognitive energy to understand my new environment and figure things out. The familiarity empowers me to be super-efficient in my dealings, which is probably the point. I am there to do work. To produce. Like an assembly line in a factory, mass production can only happen when the parts are identical. I am also a cog in this machine. When fatigued or defective, I will be replaced by the next part in the bin. It's nothing personal. It's just that our industrialized existence has been made so efficient that we are forced to live with the constant awareness that we are always replaceable.

As I said, I am not complaining. But, somewhere deep within me, I suspect that there is a certain intangible price that I am paying for this molasses-like cloyingness of modern, soulless familiarity. I feel myself yearning to witness something truly new, feel something unexpected, and be dumbstruck by something that's overwhelming fresh. I want my travel to transport me to a different existence. I want to feel what Max Weber or Stanley Livingstone must have felt encountering unknown civilizations and primordial nature for the first time.

Of course, I am lying. Thou dost protest too much, indeed. Here I am complaining that the global electrical sockets have not been standardized to the American norm, and I want to go toe-to-toe with hostile indigenous tribes? As if.

Frankfurt is not Dallas, and Helsinki is not Boston. I know myself enough to realize that the unbearable sameness that I experience is one of my own making. I am the one that's static. I am the one that's not changing. I am the one who created this comfortable mental cage and is complaining that I can't get out. Since I am not changing, I see everything else as the same. The gentrification is actually happening within me. I am boring and predictable, actively seeking out the same and then complaining that everything is the same. I have become insufferable.

I have lost the true privilege of the young and inexperienced: the ability to see something as new. The young are constantly surrounded by the newness every day because they choose to embrace it. They delight in finding that little-known Turkish food kiosk in Frankfurt. They marvel at the weather that constantly shifts throughout the day. They are delighted to walk along the old cobblestone streets of Helsinki. They marvel at the late April snow that covers Helsinki with a soft sheen of white. The world is raw and ready to be devoured while fresh. Bon Appétit. May it last a long time.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect The Korea Times' editorial stance.