It seems the gulf between myself and a lot of people around me is growing and I am struggling to maintain satisfying relationships in face of wildly different worldviews and hardened egos. My loved ones also worry that I can cut people off seemingly suddenly. Ok, with age some of it happens, like the art meme below states elegantly:
But the family reaction got me thinking — I may be on a more extreme end of this. Surely, this is not some clinical mental decline and certifiable cranky old men syndrome (I don’t feel it is yet), and surely more than the loss of civility Western societies experience in general and especially since Covid. I reckon in my case, it has to do with my journey, starting with a fairly extreme culture I grew up in, then just as I was to open my wings, moving to a incompatible culture that refused to validate my contributions and built up frustrations in me, and the short trigger I developed is being extra-tested in an stupid era when the ill-informed never been this loud (and I no longer have to hold my tongue as much). This journey is unpacked in the next three chapters, the questions remaining in the fourth and last.
Growing up
My birthplace (an odd corner in an already odd container-state in central Europe) just refused to fit any neat generalisations. It was neither East, nor West, not capitalist, nor communist. Surrounded with ethnically homogeneous countries, it contained a full kaleidoscope of nationalities. Part of a powerful and advanced empire in the past, poor but peaceful and improving when my generation was born into it, then self-exploding through a civil war that came out of nowhere. Our generation were as undefinable as the place that raised us: in some areas, we were ahead of almost all countries, but civilisation was breathtakingly thin in others. Advanced and backward, friendly and savage. Our little corner of the container-federation were uniformly and very firmly socialised, into a strange, old-fashioned Viennese / Prussian tradition — so much so that our girls later told us that people from that region feel like aliens to them.
Knowledge, work, and order were valued much higher than most other societies. I remember the grandparents repeating “do one thing, do it right”, “what you learn, no-one can take away from you”, “the more languages you speak, it is as if there is more of you”, “cleanliness is godliness”, “knowledge is power” (Foucault, eat you heart out, we were already onto that one). School was serious business, reading was strongly encouraged, teacher’s word was law. If someone proved themselves academically, they were to be respected and listened to in matters related to learning, of course they were. Listening to someone better at something wasn’t a humiliation, but the exact opposite — we felt lucky to have a chance to learn something. I remember a teacher who sometimes stayed around after school on his own time in a small park in front of the school building, with a bunch of 7th and 8th graders hanging around, listening to the teacher’s thoughtful, illuminating stories full of facts and ideas, interjecting with questions and trying to answer his occasional questions. “What is the most valuable thing in the world?”, the teacher would ask… giving us 20 long seconds to think, then answering himself: “information”.
If daylight is a good disinfectant, matters of our intellectual life were very hygienic indeed. There was nowhere to hide for the under-performing student. We would have six to eight classes daily, about 10–15 subjects in a school year. Typically, subjects had 4 large (90 min) tests per year, 4–8 smaller (45min) written tests plus maybe 4 oral examinations in front of the class — that’s 12–16 examinations per year. Everyone’s results were announced in front of the class as the marked tests came back. The grades (ranging from 1 to 5) had to average above 2 for every individual subject every year, or the student would repeat the year — I remember many of us knowing all our grades from all subjects (probably numbering over 200 by the end of the year) and their running averages per subject and the overall average, at any time for many years. Grades were important, they were public and they were performance-based, not the meaningless statistically-adjusted grades and uni-entrance rankings of the West (why would we foster competition among students instead of co-operation? Is the aim to improve ourselves, or do we just want to win?). We all knew who the low-, middle- and high-academic achievers are, but with competition taken out of it, this carried no great cost to the ego. A teacher, during oral questioning, surprised at a wrong answer, may say in front of the whole class: “how come you don’t know this? Even [insert X, name of a lower-achieving student three seats away] would know the answer to that!”, and X wouldn’t take it as an insult, maybe just think “yay, I got a mention”. To the westerner, used to the positive-reinforcing, ego-booster approach, this would be a terrible thing to witness (as it was for my daughters when joined a school in the old country for a few weeks), but we wouldn’t even notice. No-one would have thought to pass themselves off as smarter, it would have been ridiculous — and no-one looked down on the lower-performing ones, it would have been unbecoming. Anti-intellectualism would have been absolutely stupid, unimaginable even — I only encountered that later in democracies.
The classes were challenging and curriculum was relentless, but we reveled in it. By the end of year 10, which was the end of the compulsory general schooling, we have completed in-depth studies and passed multi-year studies in subjects like geography, history, biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, technological studies and two-three languages. At that stage, I remember being able to creatively solve math problems using complex geometry, trigonometry, systems of equations, logic, set theory, logarithms, derivation of functions, non-linear equations, imaginary numbers. Physics studies also gave us good grounding in all its classical aspects: kinetics, mechanics, dynamics, waves, electronics, thermodynamics. While in the West students are asked fun multiple-choice questions like “Kerosene as fuel a) corrodes b) combusts?”, we had to calculate resistances and inductance of complex electric circuits. Those planning continuing towards uni studies continued took another two years of academic studies into ever more esoteric and fantastic scientific realms. I (to my teacher’s surprise) took the academically easier path of an engineering school and became a toolmaker.
At the eve of the civil wars that were to destroy all our recent material advances and carefully crafted values and mores, our small town of 100,000 had undergrad university studies in engineering, architecture and business/economics. Towns and cities of similar size in 50–100km radius had all the other areas of study one might want covered. Once graduated, we had large, efficient, internationally competitive companies ready to employ the highly-trained workforce. Just our town alone had large-scale, advanced, internationally competitive manufacturing companies with headcounts between 500 and 6,000 building and producing: electric motors and components, bicycles, fertiliser, train carriages, modular high-rise buildings, plastic products, printing, beverages, spices, dairy products, sweets, bakery goods, leather goods, knit ware, clothing, shoes, electronic systems, even IT mainframe services. Five rail-lines and an international road converged in our town to support the efficient manufacturing and farming, the results of long Austro-Hungarian planning and tradition in trades and industry. Having observed the examples of professionals in various technical fields, I was certain of the “station in life” that would be about right for my abilities and ambition: after my Uni studies, I’d work for (hopefully the most advanced) manufacturing company as an engineer, probably finish up as lead engineer with some inventions and maybe do some teaching at the end. Yeah, that felt about right, until that imaginary world, just as I was to enter it as an adult, was blown to smithereens.
Civil war was coming. Somehow my parent got an early wind of the destruction heading our way, started to seek a way out, and soon landing in Auckland, New Zealand on a very shaky (like three month-visitor’s-visa-shaky) status. While they were struggling with the immigration laws in New Zealand, I managed to pass the entrance exams at one of the world’s premium engineering unis in a neighbouring Hungary, and by doing that, able to dodge military service. Until eventually reuniting with the rest of the family in New Zealand there I was, supporting myself financially by smuggling alcohol and selling it on the market between lectures, partying hard through the nights, and in the time left, sitting at the lecture halls with the elite and self-important students of the academic powerhouse, still with the metaphoric machine grease under my fingers from the tool making workshop. Apart the elitism and xenophobia which I hated, things were in Budapest as before: brilliant teachers, talented students from all over the place, hard but exciting curriculum, under all kinds of pressure but loving every minute of it. Still the same Viennese school, still the same cosmopolitan setting.
1990–1998: The New World part 1 — New Zealand
When arriving to New Zealand as a twenty one year old, I was somewhat shaken by the close escape from the war and general turmoil, but very motivated about the new chapter in our lives. I was excited about the new surroundings, and very grateful for the country taking us in. Keen to fit in, I was learning English at a great clip: arriving with about 50 words, all but fluent in everyday conversations nine months later. I also remember being full of confidence about my abilities, as being gifted at studies and sport conditions one to be.
But New Zealand was confusing. At first, I was awestruck by the material differences. The economy looking like a a mix of basic services and small cottage-industries (I remember saying I was a toolmaker and being asked: “so you make hammers and files?”) the place didn’t seem productive or advanced. But pay checks were impressive, about five times the size I was used to seeing. Looking at the easy material advantages, I remembered thinking: surely the natives know some high-end things I need to learn and imitate? Especially as they were all so confident! I lacked any of that, and instead assumed that wide-eyed, quick-to-ask-questions posture which, together with the very basic English and the unfamiliarity with basic local cultural tenets, must have made me look like a very nice and simple man indeed (that propensity to ask questions instead of asserting myself when I should only evaporated around 20 years later. A long time, I know).
Then the disappointments started. I was often asked where I came from… which I didn’t mind, it often came from a place of harmless curiosity… but then the follow-up questions were not what I expected. “Oh, really? Have you heard of the Beatles?”, someone asked. I mean, I came from Europe, not the Amazons! I remember the anger welling up, wanting to say something “do you mean the early lineup with Pete Best or later with Ringo?”, but… bloody limited English. Another asked if my ex-country bordered with Canada. Couldn’t that person maximised his chances by picking a country that borders more than one other? My brother attended high school, and our jaws dropped seeing how basic the school curriculum was. TV news was extraordinarily shallow. How can this prosperous country be running with what seemed to us such limited minds, I wondered? (judged by the reactions of the locals, I’m sure we seemed like limited minds to many of them also). I felt anytime I had an original thought, I was “put into my place”, most often by that snappy “that’s not the New Zealand way”. Asimov thought anti-intellectualism is justified in a democracy, because “one’s ignorance is just as good as another’s knowledge”, and I certainly started to see his point. I realised that in the old country we needed to be smart to get ahead from the low station we were born into, but in this developed, well-oiled machine they didn’t need thinkers — just doers.
My world was rocked when applying to continue the engineering studies at the University of Auckland. I was seen by a liaison officer (powerful title, I remember thinking, “officer” and another word I haven’t even heard of), who after an amiable chat (things are looking good) is asking for my study records… thumbing through them, asks “Budapest University, where is that?”
- “Well… in Budapest… you know, Hungary”, I answer, feeling weirdly embarrassed
- “But that’s… that’s a communist country!”, the officer says incredulously
- “Well… yes, it was…”
The officer looks at me with pity for a few seconds…how can he break it to me kindly…
- “…but we have very high standards here in New Zealand”, he gently tells me.
Later, the prejudice in “learned” circles became obvious among the immigrants from my background when dozens, maybe hundreds of doctors were taking their very expensive professional exams, only for 100% of them to be failing for years. But when this happened to me, I remember being rendered immediately and utterly speechless — witnessing, in the place of the country’s highest learning, an idiot (well-meaning as he is) deciding about lives in seconds based on his well-ingested ideology and ignorance. A student can come from a place that produces the highest number of inventors and Nobel prize winners per capita in the world, but if a Communist party happens to be in power there, the credentials are worthless. Maybe at that stage a few well-constructed sentences would have made a world of difference, but… bloody limited English and that misguided deferential mindset.
Doomed in this sliding-door moment by my inability to defend myself on the spot, instead of engineering I was accepted into an open course only (“open” meant “with no restrictions” , i.e. no limit on the intake, probably since leading to no careers except teaching, hardly anyone wanting to do it). I tried to make the best of it by studying the most objective, least culture- and language-dependent studies (pure mathematics and physics), but my heart wasn’t in it. I still though of myself as an engineer at heart. The years started to blend into each other, I started doing odd jobs to make some money, eking out basic existence near the bottom of the society, and neglecting the dead-end, mostly low quality and uninspiring studies I was allowed to do.
Finer cultural incompatibilities started to multiply, and my feelings of homesickness skyrocketed. Nightlife was barely existent. At the tame social gatherings, everyone was into polite small-talk, but my small-talk game sucked big-time. Like before, I often wanted to talk about world-view forming topics and ideas of consequence, but the reactions to that was as if I announced I had leprosy. If I offered an honest, constructive criticism, instead of appreciating the thought, everyone thought I was rude. Those heavy lessons of my youth that my teachers thought will prepare me for life made me lonely and ineffective instead. Feeling completely out of position in that society, my attitude slowly started to harden, and felt how bitterness and insecurities are creeping into the engine room of my psyche.
On a basic level, New Zealand was excellent. It gave us shelter in our life-and-death moment, and for that alone we will be eternally grateful. The local primary school took my brother in in an age-appropriate, mainstream class even though he had no papers and couldn’t speak two words of English. When he broke his arm, the emergency department fixed him up free of charge. We had access to a decent social security net, and the country was an excellent place to give birth to and raise our very young children. But man lives not by bread alone, and the culture shock stayed. Even nine years after our arrival we felt firmly stuck in the rejection phase (see illustration above).
If this sounds whinging, complaining about injustice when one doesn’t know injustice, I understand. We got plenty of comments that inferred “grow a pair”, “most immigrants have it worse”, “if you don’t like it, go back”. But while to the receiving population these cultural differences may seem insignificant, the end-effects are real. Tiring from sailing into the wind and refusing to go into the regression phase, in our late 20s we decided to try one more time and on-migrate to Australia instead. Apart from the two fabulous kids in tow, we had no money, no finished qualifications, no professional work experience and low self-esteem — outcomes the kind liaison officer and others like him in positions of power over us had an important contribution to.
In fairness to New Zealand and by all accounts, later migrants found a better prepared ground, a society more used to us all-sorts. With the economy emerging out of prolonged doldrums, later arrivals also often managed to prosper easier in New Zealand. We were simply super-early arrivals, and had a lot of early-mover disadvantage. More pliable personalities also did better, I think, but that wasn’t us — we were the proud square pegs in the land of proud round holes. We would have loved to contribute to New Zealand more, but were not allowed to — a crying shame for all.
1998 — Today: The New World part 2 — Australia
After nine years in New Zealand, we were unsure if we’ll find anything different by moving, or if the problems are with us and will follow. Turns out, we need not have feared, as the move to Australia was a revelation in the most positive sense for us. The country already had a long history of large-scale immigration and successful integration. Everyone was from somewhere, so our messy background and messier English accents mattered very little , sometimes a net positive even— oh, that feeling of normalcy again! I applied for a much better job than what I could have dreamt about in New Zealand (an actual professional position!), and despite not having completed qualifications, got in via passing aptitude tests — yay! Arriving with mental wounds, the healing and recovery phase began with a sharp upturn. Maybe a bit too sharp — after the many failures, the quick successes got to my head slightly, but the resulting ego dissipated in a few years. Looking back, what hasn’t dissipated from our minds at the same speed were some low-frequency, more enduring emotions: the insidious soft put-downs, the vague sense of exclusion and the diffuse lack of self-esteem and low-connectedness we acquired in New Zealand.
This major difference in our experiences may seem strange for someone looking in from the outside. Australia is definitely not night-and-day better than New Zealand as a whole. But because prejudices don’t limit mobility, we got a chance to do work and live around people we share interests with, and because of that, it was night-and-day better FOR US.
Cumulatively, the built-up setbacks have not been eradicated, but were being reduced instead compounding. Starting to build my career only at 28 meant that while I eventually reached a respectable technical position that somewhat made a use of some of my talents, the length, trajectory and height of my career was a lot shorter and lower than what it could have been. Economist call this “scarring”. Because of the relative lack of achievements, people still don’t believe (many can’t even fathom) the things I could do, and (lacking my own platform) many of my ideas and potential contributions will go unrealised. I still get under-estimated, I still miss out on opportunities — but the gap is shrinking, not growing.
Have I finally gotten over these unfair setbacks? Well, depends on what “getting over” means. In material sense definitely not, because the negative gap between potential and actual outcomes is undeniable and still real — catching up a lost decade in this lifetime will be impossible for me. The reality is that, having fallen behind my peers on the greasy corporate pole, in my mid-50s, I have down-sized my professional life early, and am seeing out my productive years driving a bus instead of producing in the knowledge economy at the height of my professional powers. In another sense, I definitely did overcome. I have regained the courage of my convictions (sure, suitable tempered by all facts, thank you!). I am very confident now of myself and the respect I demand, and need to say less each day as our life-achievements speak increasingly for themselves. Not only we need to say less, we also can say what we want more freely — as our independence grows, the power of others over us is diminished. We are financially secure, healthy, surrounded with loved ones in respectful, warm relations, spending quality days full of varied interests and hobbies. If I died tomorrow, I’d die a happy man.
What remains of the problem?
The nagging doubt is that, perhaps because of past injustices, I may be cutting friends, acquaintances and colleagues off too soon, or behave harshly, even inappropriately so that they would remove themselves (I arrogantly imagine that latter scenario as the “rubbish taking itself out”). We like people, so it is important for us to know: Do I respond to today’s irritations in a sub-optimal way? Is there something that lays beneath that anger that makes eruptions bigger than need to be, do I still have a leftover “baggage” about it?
I think the answer is mixed. In as much as baggage being something one can choose to put down, stopping the past negatively affecting the future, my response has been pretty good: I had completely forgiven the kind idiot at Auckland Uni, as I have every prejudiced, ignorant person that temporarily dismantled some of my self-worth or held me back unnecessarily in some way. The words of the great moral teacher “forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” has been applied diligently. Good scorecard up to that point then. But maybe as a result of frustrations in my past I have developed, and haven’t been able to shake just yet the zero-tolerance approach to people who, while clearly at a lot lower level in some topic form (or have) the right of governing me, or even just arguing with me in that topic. I still love to learn from the more knowledgeable, but feels like the years spent listening to arrogant fools used up the politeness and tolerance I arrived with to the new world as a wide-eyed 20-year-old. I know that the basis of civilised society is plurality of viewpoints, but now, despite my commitment to civilised society, when I hear drivel arrogantly delivered, I snap. My form is really not pleasant: unless a close loved one, if someone rides on me a couple of times, I quickly will up the ante, and that person will either backtrack or strongly feel the need to fuck off in a quick minute. I literally don’t care. There could still remain a lot of anger and hurt from past episodes of belittling (the “baggage”) that would help if I could manage to put down. Maybe it is normal that patience that dissipates with age? Was my understanding and patience all used up by drainers and idiots I wasn’t smart enough to filter out of my life up until now? In our naiveté, we have even allowed some prime sociopaths into our inner circle — it may be even desirable to keep out some of these drainers in these stupid, greedy times with double-quick, explosive methods. I’m thinking about this.
Conclusion (kind of)
I have never bragged because growing up, I was secure in my status, and I’m not going to start now; it would feel yuck. But I’m expecting people to notice, without us making any allusions, that my wife and I, and increasingly our kids and their tentative family units are formidable people and that we have proven ourselves well beyond what was imaginable by those around us who were so quick to mark us down. This team, capable-but-bumbling I and my overly humble but really rock-star wife, starting from way behind, have quietly created a lifestyle that the motor-mouth smart-alecs can’t even begin to comprehend. I will not be shy of those achievement, a result of a long, disciplined effort that still continue to build. In our current stage of life it feels again that those early, hard lessons are a help, not a hindrance, and while the days of intense, organised study are probably behind us, the yearning for learning is still there. We still widely and extensively read, watch, travel, discuss and create. We have places and people to talk about our interests: world events, world history, technology, science, music, politics, economics, art, food, travel, various hobbies and some sport at a high level. We still like people: please come into our lives if interested, take what you want, contribute if can, change our minds with your incredible insights (even mid-50s, we are very happy to change if shown something new). We think kindness is the most important thing — if someone we can help, we will try, and we will always argue for a fairer society. But kindness is no longer niceness. If someone comes leading with ego, proudly advertising their ignorance, regurgitating some propaganda, a cockeyed worldview or stupid conspiracy theory, or God forbid, crap all over in this peaceful sanctum or our carefully constructed inner- and inter-personal balance, then that person will likely find his or her good self on the metaphorical arse with our metaphorical or real front door slammed behind, super quick.
Hmm. Even just writing this, it doesn’t make me feel good. But until I find ways of replenishing patience or improve my diplomatic skills, not sure what else I can do. Any constructive ideas are welcome!
