It is currently eight in the morning and another bright sunny day in central Mexico on the second floor of my aunt’s apartment overlooking the town while I wait for my jet-lagged family to wake up. I am scribbling this on a quaint grade school notebook that cost eleven pesos at the corner bodega, as well as with a mechanical pencil I bought for 400 yen in Osaka the year before (peak globalism). All that said, here are a few takeaways from my trip so far.
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Building up your patience and lowering your threshold for stimulation before a trip like this as part of your lifestyle is a good idea. Part of the reason bugmen get so irritated during these trips to the sticks is because of the pervasive social emphasis on long periods of nothing and on leaving the day to chance. Fundamentally, people operate on the notion that there is always time to spare and therefore merely seek out ways here and there to fill it up; this is in contrast to the first-world industrial approach of feeling the opposite from the get go - that there is never enough time and sacrifices have to be made. People that don’t choose to drink the proverbial Kool-Aid would get restless pretty quickly and resort to reflexes such as flipping through their phone for the hundredth time.
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Your L2 ability is never up to par with what you imagine. A common problem, especially for intermediate learners, is thinking faster that you can speak and dropping phonemes in free variation in order to keep up with the general contour of the ideal sentence your mind lays down in real time - like railroad tracks in front of a moving train. This of course ends up being counterproductive as you have to repeat yourself and speak slower anyway to get your point across, which by that point, loses all relevance (especially any attempt to be witty or funny). All those years of popcorn reading aloud in American grade school helped bridge that gap in your English production but makes your lack of intimate time with your L2 far more apparent. Consider speech therapy or shadowing as methods to make these fine motor movements more automatic and one less thing you need to keep tabs on while functioning as a member of any foreign society. Writing prose in your L2 should also help with the other side - thinking in grammatically correct chunks automatically for when you need to use them. Of course, the biggest hurdle to overcome is building an adequate mental heuristic of the correct and the incorrect, but once you do that, native output becomes an inevitability - first in spurts and then in torrents.
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You are very much still a product of your home country in thought and behavior, despite how much you might have deluded yourself in the past that you were a fish out of water that just needed to find the right culture. There might still be many alienating or intimidating aspects of your culture, but all in all, if you’re facted with the choice of where to set down roots, you would have an easier time anywhere in your native country than than anywhere else in your current state. You might think the language barrier alone is to blame, but there’s no denying the tangible difference in how a second generation immigrant sets up his life versus how the first generation does. Native-born Japanese people spot fellow nikkei in large crowds just by the way they walk and the aura they give off without even saying a word, so what makes you think people will accept you any easier?
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Wherever you go, people fall into the same negative thought patterns. While relatively fewer, there are still a fair share of wanna-be-rich status-seeking consoomers and even gender-bending purple-hairs lurking the streets of your imagined utopia. Of course, there might very well still be pockets of what you’re looking for, but any insecurities you have about certain people are not going to magically go away by driving 2000 km in any direction. You still have the responsibility of weighing the pros and cons of each region’s NPC and seeing what a relationship between them and you with a few narrow but intense interests (if you’re reading this, this is most definitely you) would play out like. Odds are, staying put in the city isn’t looking too bad about now.
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Along a similar vein, going to a remote area with fewer chances of encounters would be courting suicide for anybody who still hasn’t worked through their mental inhibitions. If a man sees zero suitors in his home turf of a densely-packed metropolis, what makes him think that that number will be anything but zero especially without the advantages of similarity, shared experiences, and sheer number?
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A common pitfall for late bloomers - what merit is there to eschewing all chances to meet new women in order to make more money? How can one be so hellbent on having enough money to buy land and build a house, while all the while being aware of social stagnation against the many milestones that cousins and nephews are fulfilling left and right. This highlights one of the only benefits of bugmanism - having had the time and mental space to make friends and understand women better; that is the default social mode these days. The age-old adage emerges - if an older person could somehow merge their current conservative wisdom with the luxury of time they had before, that would be perfect. In the first place, just how much can someone rely on land ownership and a lack of rent to be what “saves” them from poverty and what secures them the free time to build community and feel confident enough to go out and talk to women?
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And on the topic on the absolute value of money, is it possible to escape the rat race of lifestyle creep (with a primarily social factor) only to enter the rat race of poverty (with a primarily economic factor)? For example, “Next up on the project list is to add a second floor to the log cabin that took ten years to finance. Time to live in your car for another ten years!” and the like.
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Is choosing to homeschool your children in the countryside, as opposed to the city, selfish by robbing them of expericences you probably had growing up? Sure, they’ll be less prone to vices (or so you think; alcoholism is rampant in the country) and consumerist tendencies, but they also won’t have as many organized music performances to take part in - performances that in hindsight probably serve as some form of self-propelling indoctrination (more on that later) but that also led to the most formative experiences of peoples’ lives. Maybe these worries are unfounded and there are better ways to prevent the corruption of a family?
As you may have garnered, this trip was primarily a giant daydream about the future. Ideally, you’d ask these questions right now to the person who has the other 50% stake in that future, but not everyone has that luxury and all the others can do is revel in the uncertainty and plan according to what someone like that might say. Be content with a few immediate goals filling the void, like moving into a house you own that you can truly call a place of your own. Everything else can come afterwards, but having a home base can be Stage 1 for learning the ropes of self-sustainability. That in itself carries a lot of smaller goals - like learning basic carpentry, welding, car maintenance, plumbing, strength training, self defense, etc. There is plenty to do. Even if that means you’re the only person working on this project for the next ten years, so be it.