The dualist world view of an immigrant. Here are 3 things I love, and simultaneously hate about the UK
I swore my allegiance to the Queen today. It was a coronation of a year-long and quite painful process of getting British citizenship. Formality as it may be, a citizenship ceremony prompts you to stop and re-examine how the … did you end up where you’re at. Because, trust me, it has never been my dream to be British.
So how come the UK is the country where things simply worked out?
Leaving home, building life
As soon as I arrived here 8 years ago, I wanted to leave. When I got a job and made some friends, I still wanted to leave. When I started my Masters, it was with an assumption that I’d come back home afterwards. There was a period when I dated a Brit and considered staying here, but as soon as we split I started looking at flats in Berlin, at jobs in Melbourne, at taxes in Copenhagen.
One day it just hit me. The moment is vivid in my memory, even though nothing happened at all. I was walking back from Tesco in Ealing Broadway, carrying my shopping through a patch of green and saving on a bus ticket. Something about the soft misty light reminded me of evenings at my grandparents farm, and I saw very clearly that they were gone forever. Summers, farm, Poland. Home.
Like when you listen to someone and eventually start reading between the lines, I listened to the tone of my own thoughts and finally asked myself: you’re not coming back, are you. No, I wasn’t.
Years later, when my partner gets a job in a different country, there’s not even a conversation about whether I’d come with him. I have a life here, as they say. And when you’ve built yourself a life in a different place, rather than stepping into the life laid out for you in your own country, you see the building blocks more clearly.
It’s not simply a path dependency that keeps you in the new country. You’re very aware that if you have built a life here, you could build it somewhere else, or come back where you’re from. You gauge and evaluate, and you live with a feeling that non-immigrants can’t relate to: that you could be, and could have always been, somewhere else. And by gauging and evaluating the building blocks of your immigrant life, you learn to appreciate the delicate balance through which it’s been made possible.
Dualism in philosophy, dualism in immigration
As an immigrant I stick with other immigrants. Many of them are still hoping to find a perfect place to live. When we meet, we end up discussing the same rankings: which one is better, Dubai or Singapore, Paris or Barcelona, and which one is the ultimate best? Those are my neoplatonic friends.
If you ever met an immigrant or are one yourself, you know we complain a lot. When we’re in our country of residence, we miss our country of origin, and vice versa. Weather, food, jobs, money, insulation, handymen, shoe sizes… you name it. We take those building blocks of life and we dwell upon them over and over. Each one has its good version in your home country, and a bad version in the new country — or the opposite. This way, regardless of where you are, you always lack something.
In that, immigrants are dualist philosophers. Ever since Plato, dualism has been present in European thought. The platonic version of the world doesn’t only divide it into two, it also labels one part good and the other bad. Christian religion adopted dualism through Neoplatonism and with that, it inherited the hierarchical element. Soul — body, spirit — matter, intellect — emotion, light — darkness — so far as the former governs the latter, the world is doing fine. And then there’s the ultimate dualism of God and his creation, according to which all the phenomenal world will eventually end its lesser existence, and unify with God as an eternal and supreme being.
Such are my neoplatonic immigrant friends. They look at things they appreciate in a country and at those that annoy them, make a hierarchical list of what constitutes their Quality of Life, and cherish a hope that in Portugal, Switzerland, Japan or California, they will find high salaries AND affordable houses, soft water AND tasty tomatoes. They look for a perfect unity of the bright sides.
Yin & Yang, a united kingdom
As for me, I’m a taoist. My Britain is a universe where yin and yang act in harmony. If I stayed here, it’s simply because things worked out. And behind a simple notion of things working out hides a whole cosmic struggle of opposing powers.
Think of a close person in your life, a person with whom things are working out. Bring to memory this person’s best qualities. Bring also the worst ones. Now, aren’t they two sides of the same coin?
My partner is creative but messy. My mum is carrying, but worries too much. My best friend is easy going, but he’s also so careless he’s lost 3 phones and a passport in one year.
That’s the Chinese philosophical concept of yin & yang. It explains that the forces we see as opposite don’t in fact oppose each other, but give rise to each other in an interconnected and interdependent way.
Our world seen like this is not divided into two. Everything, be it phenomenal or spiritual, has both yin & yang aspects, and which one we experience depends on what our focus is. Think of landscape, for example. A mountain range is also a valley range, and there is no separating one from the other, no setting them against each other. They are different but the same, opposite but agreeing.
My experience in the United Kingdom has been that very paradox of unity in duality.
Three things I love, and simultaneously hate about the UK
1. Weather
Let’s start from the obvious one. Nobody moves to Britain for the love of weather. I hate that it’s always cloudy. I hate that the temperature oscillates between 7 and 22 degrees for the whole year, and when it goes up, it just reminds everyone of climate change, and when it goes down, people and institutions don’t know how to function. I hate that I have to take vitamin D all year, a supplement I hadn’t known that existed before I came here. I hate with every fibre of my being how on the day of my birthday it gets bright at 9am and dark at 3pm (except it never actually gets bright because — it’s always cloudy).
And yet.
I wear sneakers all year. I wear jeans all year. I cycle to work all year. In winter in Poland, I wore boots and tights under my trousers and I could still feel the piercing cold. In summer in Spain, my thighs stick to each other in shorts because I’m so sweaty. Good luck cycling on ice in Poland, or in full sun in Spain. Oh, and in the UK it’s never too cold or too hot to breathe, which is something I’ve experienced in the past and didn't appreciate. All in all, this mild weather makes my life very pleasant.
And there’s one more thing. When it’s a clear day in the UK, everyone is out. Whatever plans you had, they are unimportant because the nation is having a picnic in a park, cooking up a barbecue, or storming the Lake District. It’s like we’re one big tribe again and all worshipping the sun, and I love it.
2. Small talk and indirectness
Another classic, arousing as many emotions as it is trying to hide. Surprisingly to myself, I became a fan of smalltalk and not the worst at it, too (relative to my origin of course). When I first came to the UK, I was desperate to make social connections, and smalltalk helped me get to know people. In countries with a more direct culture, like Germany and everything east of it, you have to have a reason to talk to someone, or else you’ll be considered weird (Germany) or may even get in trouble (everything east of it).
I love the indirectness in British expressions, I love how the syntax protects your feelings, hides your agency and allows you to avoid confrontation. English language finds the bomb in a problematic sentence and skillfully defuses it:
- Did you have a chance to…(and if you didn’t, it’s the chance’s fault for not presenting itself, not yours)
- Would you mind if I… (it’s not that I want to do something, I am primarily concerned with things that you may mind)
- We should be mindful about…(I’m just contributing by pointing out some things that are important, and if they are the opposite of the things you proposed, that’s a coincidence).
On the other hand, it is very, very hard to tell what someone truly thinks about you. You miss genuine connections. You can be chatting to someone for years, and never be sure if they secretly don’t despise you, unless they start calling you the worst names and openly mocking you. That’s when you know they love you.
3. Working culture
A friend of mine who is a consultant told me why he preferred working on British, rather than German projects. In Germany, he said, you give your client 5 options of how to solve their problem. You research all 5 extensively, present them all to the client, and propose two. They refuse your proposal, tell you to research more on the three options you left out, and come for another presentation. In the UK, you present the client one option. You tell them there is also option two and three, but your choice is the best. The client trusts you and doesn’t want to see your research. Everyone is happy and you go home on time.
That’s more or less it — just a straightforward working culture. You can be very committed to your job or say it “pays bills”, that doesn’t matter as long as you do it decently. You go for the most efficient solution, you’re not too hardworking, you don’t slack off too much.You treat your subordinates like people though don’t expect to be their best friends. There’s little toxicity, servitude and bitchery.
However, as British people treat work as a normal part of their life, they don’t have ways of differentiating the work environment from your life environment.
For example: time of work versus a time of break. This distinction does not exist. Brits chat at work all the time. All the time! They don’t do coffee breaks or water cooler talks. If one of them goes to the kitchen, they ask each other “do you need anything”” and reply “oh yes could you grab me a tea please” — because they don’t want to move from their desk to take an actual break — because they haven’t actually worked that much — because they’ve been chatting all the time!
And what are they chatting about? Their personal stuff. Everything you don’t want to and don’t need to know, but end up knowing as their coworker. There’s massive oversharing, and if you don’t involve yourself in it, you are seen as a stone-cold workaholic. You better choose wisely between getting your stuff done and complimenting on your colleague’s dinner menu or recent socks purchase.
You’d think they’d save it for a lunch break? They don’t have a lunch break! They eat their sandwich and crisps (that’s a meal) at their desk while “working”. Yes, they don’t work too hard or slack off too hard, and instead the whole day is a one blurry work-break situation. But… you do go home on time.
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Back in Ealing Broadway, as I was carrying my Tesco bag through a patch of grass, I couldn’t tell why I’d realised that I would stay. Few years later and wiser, I know. Something about the soft misty light reminded me of evenings at my grandparents farm, where everything was just as it should be. I saw the same balance of things, I saw things simply working out. Behind that — a cosmic unity of yin and yang.
