How Culture Affects Your Thinking

What's Wrong for Me is Simply How it Works for You

Me in my hometown, 2024

It Isn’t Just About The Money

I recently started thinking about how much our cultural context influences our thinking. What’s totally acceptable behavior in one country is sometimes totally unacceptable in another. It’s a status game first and foremost.

For Americans, economic success is the highest status achievement. It doesn’t matter how good your life is outside of work, if you’re not working the most hours and flexing with the biggest house and nicest car, you’re a loser.

As someone who grew up in that culture, I found it a bit silly and a complete waste of time to focus on money alone. While money is important, if you have poor physical and mental health, it doesn’t matter.

In the same way, cultures that value martyrdom, for example, are not concerned with these things. It doesn’t matter how educated you are, how hard your work or how much charity you give. As long as you died for your country/god/people, you and your family are high status, even if only posthumously.

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Russians Are Cool With Faking Documents

Exhibit A:

Russians are much more comfortable faking documents than Americans are. I had a Russian friend growing up whose father wanted to get out of a cell phone contract. He would have had to pay the carrier hundreds of dollars to do so. There was, however, one loophole — you could get out of the contract for free if you moved outside of the United States permanently.

Instead of waiting it out or coming to a legal solution, his son created fake documents to demonstrate this permanent “move.” The typical American would NEVER come up with a scheme like this.

Exhibit B:

A friend of mine, a Russian guy who moved away from Georgia, had a package that needed to be picked up at the post office. The only way to get this package was by showing his original passport, which, of course, wasn’t in Georgia.

After making some phone calls, it was clear that there was no way around this. The next day, he casually asks me if I’m comfortable going to the post office with a fake passport. I refused.

Exhibit C:

I heard about a friend of a friend who successfully received a residence permit in a large EU country on the basis of fake bank statements.

I have overheard many such conversations between people, almost always from a former-Soviet country, discussing how they can bend the rules with fake documents.

The only faking of documents that’s widespread in America (amongst non-criminals) is driver’s licenses so that adults 18-20 can drink alcohol in public (the same people who can be held criminally responsible for their actions, buy guns and pay taxes).

Unrelated:

When I was 18, there was a referendum in my county about whether or not to allow alcohol sales on Sundays. Despite being below the drinking age of 21, I was allowed to vote in this referendum, and I did. It passed.

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I’m a Cultural Hybrid

As I’ve written in a previous article, I am first and foremost American. I felt foreign growing up in the US, but having lived abroad for some time now, I realize that I am very American in my thinking, and that’s okay. It’s what differentiates me from the Georgians and Russians that surround me, whose goals in life are often very different from mine due to their respective cultural upbringings and status games.

It took me a long time to understand this difference, and it has brought me stability knowing that I can continue to play my American status games without wondering why people around me don’t value the same things.

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My next article is going to tackle status games in more detail and how they shape our social environments.