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Comment by witchesindublin | Hacker News Reader

You touch on a major reason where a lot of American digital nomads fail, and that is that it takes A LOT to integrate into a foreign culture. Europeans tend to have a lot more contact with diverse cultures and are more likely to understand that they will suffer from not being about the integrate fully into a foreign culture, but I think that Americans assume that they will be fine wherever they go. Asia in particular is a place where lots of Americans go and end up failing, but it can also apply to Europe and Latin America to an extent.

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You're painting with very broad strokes.

I would say perhaps Europeans as a whole have much more experience living in a foreign country than Americans do. But as an American with significant travel experience globally, I have yet to visit a country that is as culturally diverse as America.

This never makes any sense to me. Have you been to any country in Southern Europe? Parts of those are akin to the Mexican border with nationalities from all over the world - for example Portugal has a half-Indian prime minister and most of its immigrants are from Latin America, Middle East and Africa, with a number from China via Macau.

What do you consider southern europe, as a red-blooded American, I suck at Geography.

But, I have been to Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey.

And it was all full off Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, and Turks, respectively.

Colonialism does mean many european countries do count among their ranks people who aren't "native" to europe, but America is a land of immigrants. Full stop.

Southern Europe has much more visible minorities than most of the US, especially the smaller and medium sized towns. Not sure where you have been. Most Indians I have met usually have negative views about racism and diversity in the US.

> Southern Europe has much more visible minorities than most of the US, especially the smaller and medium sized towns.

Sources?

I've lived and worked in the US and Germany. I've travelled all over Europe at this point (except Italy, notably).

Most of Europe is not very diverse. It took me a while to overcome the culture shock of what is essentially a European monoculture. The most diverse country I encountered in Europe was probably Spain.

What do you mean by "mexican border"? I think you are talking about preconceptions based on the news cycle.

At work in Europe, you will get weird comments if you are not a white person. I never encountered anything like that in the US.

Northern Europe is much less diverse and Southern Europe, but there are also parts of the US which are similarly less diverse (especially once you have taken out Hispanics from the equation who are often white or slightly non-white). American culture is also a monoculture - people forget that the "immigrants" in the US are actually highly assimilated into American culture, often moreso that the immigrants in Europe - black people are a good example; it says a lot that I, a Brit, get into far more arguments with Indian Americans than actual India Indians.

Most ethnic minorities in Europe tend to be more thinly spread out as compared to the US, and there is much more interaction between Whites and racial minorities. This is one of the biggest complaints that I get from Indians about the racial culture in the US, but it's also traditionally famous among Blacks as well. It's based on the traditional mixing of ethnic groups that has been going on for thousands of years - remember even during the Roman Empire and Ancient Greece, there were immigrants from Africa, Middle East and South Asia.

EDIT: This chart on the Non-Hispanic White distribution similarly has Northern America as being more white than Southern America: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Non-Hisp...

> black people are a good example

Black people aren't immigrants. They were taken from their land, had their culture stripped away from them, and sold as property.

And if you're talking about the recent wave of immigrants from Africa, they have maintained their own identity and culture in addition to adopting american customs.

British Blacks.

And also just to point out that racial minorities have been mixing in Europe, Africa and Asia for thousands of years. Look at immigration in the Roman era for example.

Just to add another point. You forget that the minorities in the US have assimilated into American culture. If you put a British Black person and Black American into a same room, or Indian American and British Indian, they would have a lot of cultural differences based on their nationality and not their race. Assimilating into America is no different to assimilating into Germany or Mexico.

You're right. 'America' as people talk about it often means coastal US metros... definitely nothing to do with 'flyover' areas smaller than Chicago.

I'm surprised by pockets of the city I grew up in when I walk a few blocks off the roads I've driven 100s of times. Latin/Somali/Vietnamese/you-name-it neighborhoods I had no idea existed. Sqaure-mile or two neighborhoods within a 1-200sqmi metro, not too surprising.

But you have these types of places everywhere, all over Europe and much of Asia. You forget that much of Southern Europe and Asia has had immigration for millennia and ethnic groups from all over the world have been living beside each other for thousands of years.

The "flyover" areas have a lot more diversity than they are given credit for, including many of the cities smaller than Chicago. I don't think there is a US city of any size without pockets of interesting diversity. (Certainly none in my experience though I will admit to generally limited exposure to the Plains states and some "Midwest" bias.) Plus there are all sorts of large "contiguous statistical area" regions in "flyover" land that correspond to multiple "small" cities but overall have the same diversity/pockets/feel-ish of coastal CSAs. Chicago seems an interestingly over-large cut-off point to me for "diverse city" and may show some bias of inexperience in "flyover" areas.

There's definitely a startling lack of diversity in many of the US' truly rural areas, which is why the current US culture war seems dominantly city versus rural. But there are also fewer truly rural areas than people expect. (The US love of suburban and exurban expansion touched a lot of the country.)

Just guessing but you have probably not traveled all over India where each state has a different cuisine and culture and language.

Well I am Indian, and during my time in India, I did not find it nearly as culturally diverse as the US.

I'm not speaking about regional differences, those exist in pretty much every country.

Indians are fairly culturally diverse if you only compare the major cities. You have much more ethnic differences in India than US as well. Immigration from the more "Middle Eastern" North-West India and the more "East Asian" North-East India is also widespread.

And it is also important to point out that regional differences are much more stark in India than in the US. Most Americans have only ever met ethnic minorities who have assimilated into being Americans. That would not be considered an ethnic difference in many racial philosophies.

> Most Americans have only ever met ethnic minorities who have assimilated into being Americans. That would not be considered an ethnic difference in many racial philosophies.

America deserves it's fair share of criticism, but to criticize America as having no/limited experience with diverse cultures shows pretty gross ignorance.

It obvious you have limited interaction with people from around the world since you seem to have no knowledge about how diverse many other parts of the world are, with much better results too.

I actually meet a lot of Indians who critise the US over places like Europe and South East Asia because of the lack of mixing between races/ethnicities in the US. I often get Americans in East Asia who don't understand that ethnic minorities from other parts of the world frequently make friends across ethnic boundaries. In America you are divided by race, whereas in the rest of the old world people mix like a port market - people in America seem to forget that inter-race and inter-ethnic immigration has happened across the old world for millennia, and they have been mixing for thousands of years.

> you seem to have no knowledge about how diverse many other parts of the world are, with much better results too.

It's hard to pin point your opinion because it keeps shifting--are you saying the US has racism? Are you saying people in the US don't mix with other races? Are you saying American's don't have experience with other cultures?

All of them.

I often attend a lot of events where you get diaspora from across the world, and one thing that all the Indians will agree on is that Indian American don't mix with natives as much as Indians in other parts of the world. This would be a type of racism in most European and Asian racism philosophies.

The other point is that most minorities in the US are highly assimilated into American culture and American norms. And most Americans have had very little experience of anything more drastic than Canada or possibly Hispanics (which is itself a very American concept). Americans drastically tend to underestimate just how different other cultures are and quickly jump to racism - I've been in a lot of situations in third countries where Indian Americans and other Americans call racism on "problems" they have that are considered normal in places like the UK or Australia.

You're saying every US immigrant population has assimilated except for Indians, and that's why America is not culturally diverse as Europe?

Every ethnic group that has immigrated to America (including Europeans) formed communities with others from their own country of origin.

That isn't an American thing. That exists in every country. As does the disdain for immigrants who forcibly avoid assimilating into local culture. In fact, every major European country I know has seen rise in nationalism fueled entirely by anti-immigrant sentiment.

Could you please stop crossing into personal attack? You've done it more than once and we have to ban that sort of account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> You touch on a major reason where a lot of American digital nomads fail, and that is that it takes A LOT to integrate into a foreign culture.

I find they are disappointed because the wealthy are often the first to travel and live multiple-house nomad lifestyle. Which is nothing like being a nobody who has only average income. An actor traveling all over the world with a personal assistant and businesses arranging everything is who they hear about most as the nomads of the world. As they are the big sports stars, film stars, book authors, musicians - doing their show.

But a lot of musicians and such will tell you that it is by no means easy to live on the road and to follow your own path.

Back in the 1980's, George Lucas and Joseph Campbell really tried to make this knowledge clear to people. Campbell: "They've moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you've got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can't. You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience -- that is the hero's deed."

Most people in 2023 wave around light sabers and have never bothered to study any of the things Lucas filmed about the mythology interpretation and human history of experiences.

“One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.” ― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

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