Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

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The thing with culture is that it's invisible when you're in it. You literally don't know how houses could be built any other way, or human relationships be formed any other way. You might as well be questioning whether gravity should always pull and not sometimes push.

Articles like these are great for giving you a taste of what things are like in other countries, and making you see that your way isn't the only way things can be. Travel does that too, and in a much more hands-on manner.

One of the things that made an impression on me on a work trip to the US was that I was talking to a colleague and she said something about her not being well in her mental health the previous year, and then immediately apologized to me for "burdening me with her problems".

I was speechless at (and still don't fully understand) the cultural factors that lead people to apologize for mentioning a detail of their personal life to a coworker, but it seems to me that life must be much more lonely like that.

For example, as an American what struck me most about the article was this line: "I’m just saying that if you are found to have signs of a meningioma and go in for an MRI scan, you might expect eight to ten friends and relatives to take time off work to show up with you and weep in anticipation in the waiting room. You will not find that here, and you’ll feel a sharp crash and withdrawal."

Is the author exaggerating, or is this actually a thing in other countries? I'd expect my immediate family and close friends to know I was going in for a scan and to care about the outcome, maybe even wait by the phone for results if they have the time. But to take off work and physically show up in the waiting room just for moral support? What planet is that? I mean sure even Americans can do that for major surgeries/births/etc, at least for those there's some amount of physical care required during the recovery that people can help with. But moral support for an MRI?

I actually would feel bad being the center of that much attention. I guess Americans moralize "being useful" more than other countries, or just have a different conception of what "useful" means. Just because I might have cancer doesn't mean anyone else's time is less valuable than it was yesterday, or that I'm some charity case (Is being a "charity case" an Americanism I'm unaware of?). Immediate family and very close friends have some obligation of moral support, but beyond that it's like how a cat grooming another cat is the dominant cat. It's generally seen as less genuine, and even if it is genuine it's seen as putting unnecessary burdens on people who don't have a pre-existing social obligation to said burdens.

No idea about Armenia, but that wouldn't be that strange in latin america. Of course not everyone would take the day off but many would offer to go to the hospital with you.

I'm pretty sure it's actually a thing. About 2 months ago I was in Yerevan and went to a doctors office to re-up a prescription (I'm one of those medicating Americans) and basically everyone there was with several family members, and this wasn't even a surgery facility, just a large doctors office

I think a lot of it stems from American culture simply being centered around money. It's all about how much you make and what you can afford. We all live in our houses 20 miles away from family if not farther and don't value community at all.

It's like the US was devised in a way completely contrary to the way in which we evolved.

Well that and you don't get health care unless you are employed, independently wealthy or someone else's dependent that does work.

Thats a different issue altogether. I'm saying we don't have a community. I'm not saying those small farming villages were great and all like fiddler on the roof kinds, but much like the amish, it has a standard set of community. People work for eachother, give of themselves, and acknowledge life is a challenge.

In the US, if you don't figure it out on your own and get rich, people just view you as scum and don't care whatsoever. This is why we have psychopaths shooting up concerts, a receding youthful male population, increased suicide rates in general, and people just tuning out of society. There is no defined purpose. You just have to make it. Which is incredibly hard in an economy devised full of choices, every which way preys upon your financial naivety.

The US is a system of the lucky being raised right.

I'd expect my friends and family to accompany me in India.

Infact, even in USA, my Indian friends showed up to the hospital when I dislocated my pinky finger.

In America, compared to other places I've lived, people's sense of responsibility to their jobs often seems to override responsibility to their friends and families. Especially people in lower-earning jobs seem to have very rigid expectations of attendance and can even be punished for talking on the phone during work hours. Although they care about other people, they need to be careful to protect their jobs. In some poorer European countries, low-paid employment seems like a much more casual relationship.

None of this is true in the highly-paid and highly-privileged world of elite tech workers in America, where the better employers emphasise flexibility, well-being, and taking care of your loved ones.

In terms of the “eight to ten” people, it was a bit hyperbolic, but it wasn’t so far from the truth as to be implausible, and the essential aspect is definitely real. I’ve directly experienced this many times during my time in Yerevan, where I have extended family.

In the US, social and institutional priorities are such that nobody can time off for that kind of thing anyway, and everybody’s too spread out to be much within the blast radius or overall locus of an event like that. It’s just different in an intangible way that’s hard to describe—I tried my best in the article.

Yeah, I second that opinion that culture is invisible when you're in it. I'm an American but have been an expat living in Berlin, Tallinn, and then a few months in Armenia actually and have been gone for ~3yrs. I'm not sure I would have really understood this article as well as I do now unless I'd been gone for a while

Intriguing overlap! I spent ~2 years total living in Armenia and bounced in and out of Berlin as well, and once lived in the latter for about 3 months.

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