Five Things I’ve Learned Living Outside the U.S.
Aside from a few trips back to the U.S., I’ve been in Playa del Carmen, Mexico for seven months now. The experience of living outside of the U.S. has been pretty surreal. I’ve had multiple people agree with me that living in Playa can at times feel like a dream. The opening line of Bohemian Rhapsody sums it up pretty well – “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”
The lifestyle of living in Playa is drastically different from what I had grown accustomed to in 27 years in the U.S. No one is really in a hurry here. And there’s a really palpable sense that you’re in a developing economy, not a developed one. There’s a certain eagerness and hunger in the air that is intoxicating. Everyone is down to their last few pesos, but no one is panicked because there’s an understanding that everything is going to work out. It’s raw. It’s revitalizing.
Going back to the U.S. is a bit of a culture shock now. I’ll always be an American to the core, but it definitely takes a few hours to re-calibrate my head after clearing U.S. customs. It’s like entering into a different universe. That’s what’s so awesome about traveling. Why do people fantasize about interstellar travel when we can visit alien civilizations on our own planet?
Here’s five things spending some time living outside of the U.S. has taught me:
1. Americans don’t know how good they have it. I never fully appreciated what it means to be from the U.S. until after I left. The American economy is one of the greatest marvels of human history. It’s easy to take it for granted when you’re born and raised there which is a shame because there are so many people who would (and do!) risk their lives for a chance to get to the U.S. and work. Being here makes me feel way more appreciative at the freedom to work in the U.S. It’s a privilege really. Think about this: there are people all over the world who would kill to be in your shoes working the job that you have, making the money that you make, and having access to the opportunities that you do.
2. Mexican culture is lovely. I feel nothing but sorry for Americans who harbor anti-Mexican sentiments. I have never once experienced anything other than complete courtesy and kindness from them. They are polite, considerate and family-oriented people. Yes, there a drug crime problem in Mexico, but let’s not blame people born into a set of laws that created a market for an underground drug trade. Be mad at the laws, not the people. There are drug crime issues all over the U.S. too. It’s unfortunate that the only thing Americans ever hear about Mexico is the violence reported on the evening news. That’s just 1% of the story. You don’t hear a word about the 99% of great things south of the border.
3. Most people don’t really give a crap if you’re American. It’s a stereotype on the international scene that Americans are pretty egotistical. Sadly, I have to say I’ve found this to be pretty true. When I came here, I was the worst of this stereotype. I thought the fact that I was an American would impress people. The reality is that most people don’t really give a crap if you’re from the U.S.
4. The world is getting a lot smaller. The Internet is really leveling out the global playing field. The next few years should be a pretty wild time for humanity. Check out this chart of global population and Internet users:
Technology is getting faster and cheaper. Owning a Mac is not as big of a deal as it used to be. Gradually, the whole world is getting online. I exist (these days, barely) in a whole sub-culture of people who make make playing poker online. All over the world people can do just about anything on the Internet ranging from learning about any subject under the sun, playing video poker at an online casino, or diagnosing their own medical problems. Chileans update their Facebook statuses, Aussies play casino games, Indians write crappy articles that pop up in Google search results. The whole world is growing closer together thanks to the power of the Internet. I get asked by Mexicans here if I’m on Facebook. I can remember getting on Facebook in 2004. It makes me feel like an Internet dinosaur.
5. The world is not that scary of a place. Living here has made me a little more relaxed about being in unknown areas. We hear about a lot of the bad things in the world and it creates a false reality in our minds of what the world is like. I think people are a lot more spooked than they need to be with regards to going to certain areas. I met a guy here who rode his bike all the way from Tennessee(!!!). I asked him if he ever felt like he was in danger during the trip. He said the most scared he felt on the whole ride was when he was going through Louisiana.
Links from a Ginger #1
I’m going to try a new series for this blog I’ve titled Links from a Ginger. It’ll be a collection of interesting links I’ve stumbled upon from around the Internet. Will probably be able to post one of these every week or two thanks to the litany of awesome stuff that gets sent my way. This is just my way of passing it forward.
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Killing the Buddha by Sam Harris
Great article by Sam Harris (the “great” is nearly redundant there) about how Buddhism as a religion gets in the way of spreading its wisdom.
to turn the Buddha into a religious fetish is to miss the essence of what he taught.
The wisdom of the Buddha is currently trapped within the religion of Buddhism.
It does not seem much of an exaggeration to say that if you are reading this article, you are in a better position to influence the course of history than almost any person in history. Given the degree to which religion still inspires human conflict, and impedes genuine inquiry, I believe that merely being a self-described “Buddhist” is to be complicit in the world’s violence and ignorance to an unacceptable degree.
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The most mind-bending physics lecture I have ever seen. A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.
I’d recommend watching this completely sober. It’s enough of a trip by itself. I won’t even try to summarize as that would suggest I understood the lecture well, except to say that I think Krauss, who has figured out more in his ~40 years on this earth than you or I would if we lived to be 100,000, succeeds in making the point that the universe is literally made out of nothing. This one I’ll need to watch again sometime.
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Awesome mash-up of anti-consumerist propoganda. Multiple Bill Hicks clips so you know it’s good.
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Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Beatles Songs. There’s an interesting, insightful article to go with each song. I was thoroughly entertained for a few hours listening to the track while reading the corresponding article. Learned a ton of interesting things about the group. For instance, did you know that Eric Clapton was thisclose to replacing George Harrison at one point during a feud between he and John Lennon? Maybe you did. Maybe you’re a better Beatles fan than I was before reading these Stones pages.
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It’s referred to as the 20 minutes that changed music: Queen’s performance at the Live Aid concert in 1985. It’s considered by many the greatest rock performance of all-time.
Step 1: Make popcorn.
Step 2: Dim lights.
Step 3: Press play, full screen.
Steve Jobs Documentary
My Spanish tutor alerted me to a worthwhile one-hour documentary created by PBS on the life of Steve Jobs. I found it pretty interesting on a few levels and shared some notes below.
Watch Steve Jobs: One Last Thing on PBS. See more from Steve Jobs – One Last Thing.
- So Steve Jobs was kind of a prick. I find this somewhat unsurprising. You probably can’t draw the type of innovation out of people that led to Apple’s raging success without using them and abusing them to get there.
- As a younger man, he was pretty deep into the counter-culture hippie movement of the 70s. He even traveled to India for a time to study Buddhism and incorporated a lot of his affinity for a simplistic, zen lifestyle into Apple’s products. The film only briefly hints at it once, but Jobs credited acid for a lot of his success saying, “Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”
- The film really portrays Bill Gates as a slack-jawed square who idolized Jobs which is pretty funny.
- I love the hysterical girl who is filled with joy after waiting on line for 8 hours to buy an iPad. Like dear god, just buy it a month later with no wait. It’s not like whatever you’re going to do with it in that month (just send out lots of emails to make people jealous of the ‘Sent from my iPad’ sig-line, probably) should be valued higher than having those 8 hours to do something more interesting than idly waiting. That’s why Apple is so fascinating (and also why I also think their stock is way overvalued): it drives people to a completely irrational furor over some pricey device they don’t need that will be a relic in 18 months. See: boy in China selling a kidney to buy an iPhone and iPad.
- I have to give credit to my poker friend in Playa, ‘Kevlar’, for pointing this out to me originally, but it’s fascinating how much public outcry there was over his death. Kevlar said it best (paraphrasing), “it seems like everyone was sad and talking about what an amazing person and innovator he was, but I don’t really remember anyone caring that much about him when he was alive.” I have to agree. The people crying and holding up video of a candlelight on their iPad at vigils seems a little silly. Maybe I’m just not hip enough to get why Apple is so amazing.
Interesting film, I’m glad I watched it.
Dennis Rodman Was Really Good at Basketball
I stumbled upon an awesome sports data analysis site yesterday called Skeptical Sports. Stuff like this is what I love about the Internet. Basically, some guy(s) took the time to compile a bunch of data showing why Dennis Rodman was the bomb.
If you grew up rooting for the Bulls in the 90s, you undoubtedly remember Rodman as the brash-tempered party animal with an absurd tenacity for rebounding. Despite being just 6′6″ tall, a relatively average height for an NBA player, Rodman was the best rebounder the league has ever seen.
Skeptical Sports dedicated a comprehensive, four-part series to using data to show just how good Rodman was. The purpose behind the series was to show why Rodman should undoubtedly be voted into the NBA Hall of Fame one year after he failed to be inducted in his first year of eligibility. They used stats that make those listed on the back of basketball cards seem like a fuzzy old black-and-white TV compared to a modern 3-D 59″ plasma.
So just how good was he? By looking at the performance of teams he was on when he was out of the lineup as compared to when he played in the game, they are able to acquire a stat known as win differential percentage. Basically, this stat expresses how valuable a player is to his team by showing how many more games that team wins with him in the lineup. Rodman’s win differential percentage was 18.1%, highest of a group of 470 players whose style is compared with Rodman’s as well as HOFers and future HOFers. Put another way, the teams he was on could expect to win 18.1% more of their games with him in the lineup than without him. That’s one player single-handedly accounting for nearly 15 wins in an 82-game schedule!
As Skeptical Sports points out, Rodman’s absurdly high win differential percentage is even more startling when you consider the high caliber of teams he played on. In other words, not only was it harder for him to contribute on these uber-talented teams, but he also had a ceiling to how much of an impact he could have on their win percentage since they won so many games without him anyway.
The man was a total statistical anomaly. The numbers he put up in his career are so rare that you could expect a player of his caliber to come along once every 400 years.
The Rodman data on Skeptical Sports is too immense to fully absorb in any reasonable amount of time provided you’re not a savant, but give it a look anyway because it’s really fascinating stuff. Dennis Rodman’s career was the little dot on the line graph that seems so out of place you’re left to conclude it must be an error of data entry. But it wasn’t. The guy was really that good!
