You often see people like fish out of water when they are out of their comfort zone or, let's say, their homelands, but what happens when you slowly adapt to another environment and then somehow evolve into something else, let's say you got a complete new set of focus, interests, or attitude toward life.
Then one day you look back and feel so disconnected from the other fish that you once knew, so should you keep becoming yourself or try to become familiar with the old fish again?
I can relate to this. I’ve been away from my family and where I grew up for about 15 years. Over time, you adapt to a different environment, culture, and way of life, and eventually you realize you’ve become quite different from the person you once were.
Even after returning, that old attachment isn’t quite the same. Most of the people I knew have grown up and are busy with their own lives.
Thank God I could retire early and reconnect with my family. I’m also happy I could marry and now have a sweet child. These days, my world is centred around what matters most: family and Bitcoin. 😄
Maybe that’s what makes humans so unique, we adapt, evolve, and find new reasons to call somewhere home.
Yet the people back home didn't even realize how much I've changed over the years, and still use their standards to judge.
My mum asked me the other day, "When will you have kids?" and said some of my old classmates are already sending kids to school, like she doesn't care how much I've learned or grown as a person, only care am i doing the things that most people are doing back home: marry - kids - send them to school, or whatever.
People are same everywhere - even moms are.
I used to listen the same from my mom a lot while I wasn’t married.
I think it all comes down to the personal preferences of yours when/what to follow and what not to. But if I had to choose between my home and away - I would choose home without a doubt but I would do it for the love for my family - for my dad and mom and my siblings - and ignore what others think about me and my ways. I had to be away for making money and I remember that I was like 17 working very hard and in the evening cooking for myself . However these are common here in India that many people waste their youth earning money away from home, I’d lovingly marry early and have children if I had the money when I was younger.
I haven’t been back to my homeland in over a decade. I expect to feel right at home when I go back, but we’ll see. I don’t think I’ve fully acclimated to where I moved to.
Or you might feel reverse culture shock. 👀
Maybe. I think we’re going to go back sometime in the next couple of years, because we want to show our daughter around and introduce her to our friends.
You just reminded me of another potential problem: if I feel disconnected from the old water, it would def affect the next generation, I see so many second-generation immigrants who already don't even speak their grandma's language. 🫠
Fortunate for us that the Anglosphere is so enormous. We’re far from home but still speaking the same language.
I know a few parents who are trying to raise their kids bilingual. It definitely looks like an uphill battle.
When I lived in Egypt in an expat zone, my neighbors were a Dutch/Italian couple. Their kids spoke 4 languages (Arabic (local), English (what parents speak), Dutch (mom), Italian (dad)) and according to those for those that could judge their language that I couldn't, they were fluent in all 4.
Not all kids can do that though.
I was trilingual by the age of 10.
My brother (at around 7), on the other hand, struggled a lot with it and would mix words from each language into a sentence without realizing it.
At some point, his teacher asked my parents to agree on using one language at home and reserve the use of others (and then only those exclusively) to specific events or locations.
They never managed to uphold the discipline required for that, so we stuck to one language from there on out.
I still do that today. I'll just be talking casually and be like... wait, what did I just say? haha.
Love to see kids like this! it would be really interesting to see how they feel about themselves, like, do they feel more Arab or more Dutch/Italian.
Remembering how it went there back then, they will probably always feel a bit outsider. There's a big religious barrier and from what I hear it only got broader. However, I traveled a lot in my teens due to parents' work myself and I most often just don't feel the tribal roots thing that much; I expect that to be similar for them and I expect them to travel. They're coming of age now, so it'd be interesting to find out what's what.
I know it’s possible, if the parents are really committed to the effort and/or there’s a lot of exposure to the languages being spoken natively.
It’s something that has to be whole-assed though.
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This is real and can take on unexpected forms.
When I returned to my birth country after growing up about 3/4 of the formative parts of my years in another country, I felt immediately right at home.
Yet still, my body showed very strong symptoms of culture shock. I hadn't connected the issues to that until I had to finally see a doctor about the problems. He then connected it to return culture shock amplifying an issue I had from an older injury (sustained and supposedly cured while still in the foreign country.)
This is really interesting! I guess it's because each country has its own unique energy, soil, and water, which then affects the food we eat and slowly changes our bodies?
Nah, the injury was a very mundane, mechanical one. A knee injury sustained playing soccer.
The damaged ligaments had healed (have been for 2 years), but my nervous system hadn't fully understood that yet.
Add the subconscious stress from return/reverse culture shock to that, and my lower back got so stiff and painful, I was unable to get up from bed after sleeping. (And that as a mid-20's, active guy.)
It got so bad, I had to roll over on my stomach and push myself up like a plank to get out of bed. An hour or so later, the issues were mostly gone and only minor pain in my lower back remained.
Bizarre combination of issues there but, ultimately, the stress made the benign nerve signal path issues show up in that stiffness and pain. It was fixed in under two weeks.
I like the in-between.
Very definitely Nordic (and, speaking to Americans, Europoorean!), but neither Swedish nor Icelandic. It's nice to be in both, selectively revealing yourself to the world style.
👀 food for thought, how about when you towards the Nordic people?
aaaah yes, just over here routinely quoting Hughes 1:4. Beautiful
me looking at who/what's Hughes, and still no idea.🤔
Early cypherpunk, important privacy guy fr the 1990s
Eric Hughes?
Yes!
sorry, I'm not following? When I what towards the Nordic peeps...?
so you are saying you are like Nordic when speaking to Americans, Europoorean, but how about the other ways around?
do I feel American when I speak to Nordics?
well, sort of: I understand/appreciate America in a way most Nordics don't. Also: they've usually never been, and they get their impression of what America is like from state TV/propaganda news so their knowledge is, uh, warped.
I like your approach, need to think more about it.
I spent 11th grade abroad. I was expecting things to be different on going abroad and the culture shock was quite manageable. I didn’t expect the reverse culture shock when I returned after missing a year of high school, especially the year that people turned 17.
Now that I’ve been living abroad for over nine years, some things also surprise me when I visit. You don’t really explicitly know the things you got used to abroad that just aren’t so back home.
Actually, I'm quite surprised to see how many usual stackers have similar life experiences ( moving to other foreign lands ) I'm not sure if that somehow leads us to BTC?
Trying to send money internationally has definitely been a key experience for me.
ugh, same! the slowness, fees, and number of docs needed to submit with traditional banking are a nightmare.
I haven't lived in my "homeland" in 30+ years. I even feel more at home in some places where I lived for shorter times. I still go, I still have fun when I do, I still meet people from long ago and have a good time. In the end we're all human beings, culture is a thing, tribe is a thing, but it doesn't have to define everything. I think that keeping an open mind helps in these matters.
Oh, and I never talk politics with anyone. Which helps a lot.
Same! so you suggest finding common ground with different people and staying open-minded, I'm also thinking maybe I could even turn my perspective into an advantage?
Yes, re: common ground. There's a lot of that to be had as long as there's mutual respect. If you start from respect, then it often stays there, in my experience. Which can also mean you let someone ignore you because they cannot deal with whatever image you represent in their head.
As for turning perspective into advantage... I don't know. I generally don't think in "advantage" but in terms of solutions to problems.
"Advantage" might be a bad English word, it's more like fresh eyes seeing both world.
It will help you, sure.
Even though the US is family monolithic when it comes to culture, there are differences from region to region.
The Pacific NW (where I am from) is pretty different from Texas (where I currently am). I haven't been in Texas long enough for the disconnection you speak about to really set in, but I get glimpses of it: the climate and geography are starkly different and it used to always be the case that if I drew a tree, it was a Douglas fir. But recently, one of my children asked me to draw a tree and what came out looked like a live oak.
I wish that I could have the opportunities and advantages of Texas in the NW, because I do feel like it's slipping away from me and that my children are becoming Texan more than anything else. I can only imagine how strong this feeling is when you leave one country and language for another.
Different languages, cultures, foods, ways of living, and attitudes toward life and death.
One of the best examples I could share is why death is like a taboo topic to even talk about, and scary? But death is so openly talk about here and see as uniting with god, completely different perspective like this really makes you think.
yes.
parents lost home in 2008 (gfc).
i'd already moved out in 2000, but when the city sold the land, demolished the homes, and built a casino atop. like cutting the last thread to the rope.
ever a wanderer.
Family home got demolished that's something different, I feel sorry for your family.
Would you be a wanderer forever, not making a home somewhere?
maybe...
after all these years, i've learned that home is where you are.
some places that i lived at for 3 months felt more depth than places i been at for years. and viceversa. teaching my kids this too.
I don't feel this way yet, but as time goes on, my home feels like it isn't where I grew up, its where i currently live.
I am still in my homeland... but I for sure feel different then the other fish around me... my whole thinking about life, work, family etc mostly differs from my direct peers and family. My friends know this and just roll with it and respect my views. Sometimes makes them think about their choices (for example privacy related things), which they would otherwise have not.
I for sure changed my way of life compared to others and totally live differently then they do. No rat race, a lot of freedom, all due choices i made differently in the past
Just wanted to say it is totally fine being or thinking different then the rest. Anyone who does not accept that can bugger off... ;-) they dont deserve your energy.
Well, I'm a migrant, and I left my land looking for new opportunities for myself and my small family, really, for 4 years now, we've been disconnecting, little by little, in which we have completely adapted to Brazilian culture, but if the way we dress, talk, our relationships have changed little by little, a month ago It was our wedding anniversary and we began to see photos of when my wife and I were young and we were looking at how much we had changed, the metalness that we had before leaving Cuba and the mentality that we have now, migrating without doubts in our time, we grew up as people, as a marriage, many things that we learned to really feel a little bit of freedom.
Since we left Cuba we haven't returned yet, and we don't know what it will actually be like to return, I think it's going to be a little shocking
The things you (or the fish) remember, no longer exists except in your mind and how you captured it.
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man."
Like some sort of fossil captured in time, nothing wrong with that its just "the way the cookie crumbles" :-) or "panta rhei" (everything flows) it's natural.
It's good for ones soul to reminiscent and recall that feeling. I for one, try to look forward, not back. I would say, make new memories tomorrow, in 20 years from now you will remember this very moment.
I am 100% familiar with what you are describing here! I will use an extreme but similar example, it's just like how the covid plandemic split the world into two. Those that were pro-Fauci science and mandates; against those that were for real evidence based science and freedom. Some of the folks that I was close with for years fell in the former camp, and exposed themselves as fascists at heart who were willing to go along with lies because of the majority consensus, the extreme side of vires numeris.
They are strangers to me now, because when it mattered the most, they were willing to sacrifice our friendship, family bonds etc on the altar of Fauci science, which has turned out to be a big fraud. I think it's the same when you leave home, you discover new things about yourself that someone else who didn't take the journey you did will not understand until they do the same thing. Even worse when you discover that you want more out of life than they ever will and have new value systems.
Yes, I know that feeling.
I've moved to different places a few times...I need some time when someone ask me where am I from...
Sometimes I get the feeling of not belonging to a place.
How do you stay in touch with old friends back home? or do you?
Time changes people and places, where I live now is more like where I grew up than where I grew up is.
The future is a foreign land. The world we grew up in no longer exists.
https://m.stacker.news/153570