Thursday, 3 August 2006
loving and leaving america
Via Anil (who’s finally posting links again, hurrah!), I found this extraordinary essay on the experience of living abroad, and how it can change the way you see your own country. Beautifully written. Here’s a (small) excerpt:
Ten years ago, my sympathies were all with those healthy sunburnt types with the burgeoning dreadlocks and leghair bleached white by salt and sun, and there’s still a lot to be said for living cheap and getting naked without too much critical reflection or hesitation. Those people are having FUN, and they’re learning all sorts of important lessons about any number of things, and I don’t doubt that most of them will be better people because of the time they’ve spent in places like the Coban. Now that I’m older and grumpier, however, I find that I can only really hang with them until that inevitable first bit of geographical comparison, the jabbing aimlessly in midair with a joint or cig, eyes half closed and staring off at some impossible, unreal ocean sunset and declaring that this, and not America, is the good life, the life worth having. “America sucks, man. All that noise, all that dishonesty, all those people too busy to really talk to each other.”
I packed around that baggage for a long time, and sometimes I think the circumstances that landed me in international human rights law have long since receded from their original sincere highwater of post-adolescent big ideas to some sort of reflex globalism, some limbic system level preference for that easy living, nonintrospective rejection of skyscrapers and the need for clean clothes.
the freedom/responsibility curve
Lane and I are in my office this evening, and we just heard a staff member and a student having a discussion in the hallway. The staff member was (I think) talking about his small child, and he was bemoaning the fact the child seems not to appreciate how good his or her life is.
In an aggravated tone, the staff member said “I mean, you get the first five years of your life free, and maybe the last five years, and the rest of the time in between you’re working your ass off at school or at work. Why can’t kids appreciate how good they’ve got it during those first five years?”
Lane looked at me and said “It’s true, isn’t it?”
And I said “Not if you pick the right job.”
We talked about it a bit, and I ended up drawing this curve on my whiteboard:
Little kids, I told him, have few responsiblities, it’s true. No school, no work. But they have very little freedom to match that. Other people tell them what to do, and how and when to do it.
As you get older, your responsibilities increase, but along with it so does your freedom.
If your responsiblities get too overwhelming, your freedom starts to decrease again, to where you have no time to do anything than what’s required of you by others.
So, somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot…where you’ve got enough responsibility to be able to earn your freedom, but not so much that you’re trapped by it.
