The word for alienation in Turkish is yabancılaşma. It comes from yaban, meaning desert, barren land, a place where nothing grows. A yabancı is someone from that barren place. An outsider. Someone who does not belong.
I think about this etymology often.
At school I run a company. At the company I attend school. Neither sentence is entirely accurate, but both capture the dissonance. During a chemistry lesson I am thinking about a deployment pipeline. During a deployment I am thinking about a chemistry exam. The overlap is zero. The context switch is total.
This is not a complaint. I chose this. But choosing something does not make you comfortable in it.
There is a German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who described the human condition as being "thrown into the world." Not placed, not invited, not eased in. Thrown. You arrive without choosing the time, the place, the circumstances, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to make sense of the landing.
I was thrown into two worlds.
The first world is a school in Istanbul. Uniforms, timetables, bell schedules, classmates who talk about football and university entrance exams. I sit in this world for eight hours a day. I know its rhythms. I speak its language. But I am not fully in it, because my phone is face-down on the desk and the notifications are from a team in London waiting on a decision only I can make.
The second world is a company with four operating divisions, staff across multiple countries, and clients who do not know or care that their chairman has a trigonometry exam next Tuesday. In this world I make decisions about infrastructure, hiring, product direction. I chair meetings. I sign off on invoices. And then the meeting ends and I open a textbook.
Neither world fully recognises the other. My classmates know I "do something with computers." My colleagues know I am young. Both groups have constructed a version of me that fits their frame, and neither version is complete.
The Turkish sociologist Cemil Meriç wrote that alienation is not about being far from home. It is about being unable to feel at home, anywhere. The distance is internal.
I have felt this. Not dramatically, not with any great suffering, but as a quiet persistent hum. A sense that I am always slightly out of place. Too young for the boardroom, too busy for the classroom. Too Turkish for London, too English for Istanbul. Too serious for my age, too young for my seriousness.
The instinct, when you feel this, is to pick a side. Commit fully to one identity and let the other atrophy. But I have watched people do this and it does not work. The abandoned identity does not disappear. It lingers, reminding you of what you chose to cut away.
There is a simpler reading of alienation, one that does not require philosophy. It is the feeling you get when you open your phone in any quiet moment: in the car, on the sofa, waiting for a class to start. We fill silence compulsively because silence forces us to sit with ourselves, and sitting with ourselves means confronting whatever we have been avoiding.
I do this too. I fill every gap with work, with code, with planning. The gap between school and the office is not rest. It is another kind of work. And the question I keep circling is whether this is discipline or avoidance.
I do not have a resolution. Alienation, the real kind, does not resolve. You do not wake up one morning feeling perfectly at home in every room you enter. You learn, instead, to carry the gap. To stop expecting it to close.
The barren land does not become fertile just because you name it. But you can learn to walk through it without pretending it is something else.