The essence of a **hitchhiker** is not just a person by the roadside with a thumb extended, but a spirit—a way of being. It’s an attitude, a disposition towards life characterised by curiosity, vulnerability, and openness.
Hitchhiking is about more than getting from place to place. It’s a journey shaped not by control, but by trust — a willingness to be guided, to let someone else show you the way. That demands a very specific type of humility. A true hitchhiker listens deeply, engages in dialogue, and reflects the courage to encounter the other — someone whose life, background, and worldview might be entirely different from one's own. And in that lived encounter, one doesn’t just learn intellectually; they feel, sense, and absorb an unfamiliar way of being.
In many ways, this type of journey is becoming more relevant with each passing year. We're witnessing an unprecedented rise in global mobility. People are on the move for countless reasons: migration, climate change, war, family, economy, simple curiosity. In the past, most people lived and died within a day’s walk of where they were born. Today, a huge and growing proportion of the planet’s population lives on the move—modern-day hitchhikers in a literal and metaphorical sense.
And it's not just physical travel. There’s a form of mental and digital hitchhiking happening every day. As we swim through oceans of information online, we surf across ideas, stories, and images from every corner of the world. We can sit at home and explore the experiences of a Brazilian artist, an Inuit teacher, or a Kenyan engineer. We hitchhike through virtual landscapes in a way our ancestors could never have imagined.
This spirit of hitchhiking has also become essential in fields like science and innovation. The most groundbreaking discoveries often arise from the fusion of disciplines, cultures, and perspectives. Increasingly, the ability to operate across domains—to think across boundaries—isn’t just valuable, it's vital. Creative collaboration, interdisciplinary work, and agile thinking are now the cornerstones of scientific and technological progress. And arguably, they should be the foundations for new forms of governance and social practice too.
But here lies a tension: traditional institutions—whether in academia, business, or government—were built to preserve structure and order. They favour classification, hierarchy, stability. And so, they often struggle to accommodate natural hitchhikers: those who traverse departments, languages, countries, or cultures. Historically, such individuals have been seen as outsiders. Misfits. They’ve had to make their way alone, without institutional support, often without financial means.
Yet today, more of us are becoming hitchhikers, either by circumstance or choice. And rather than viewing this as a challenge, we should see it as a profound opportunity. At a time when knowledge is cheap and ubiquitous—especially with the rise of artificial intelligence—what matters most is not access, but synthesis. The genuine creative skill lies in bringing together knowledge from disparate places, and steering it with care in ways that respect and reflect the rich diversity of our societies.
To do that, we need institutions that understand and support the hitchhiker’s spirit. Institutions that encourage border-crossing, nurture curiosity, and provide space and resources for those forging new paths through unfamiliar terrain.
That is our ambition—to help build these new kinds of institutions, fit for this emerging world of movement, of dialogue, of encountering the unfamiliar not as threat, but as possibility. We are all hitchhikers now.
--- This is a first draft, and my personal take. The final document will be a polyphony, or chorus of voices that we write together.