The Global Hermit

Find your authentic self by constantly adapting new cultural perspectives.

A global hermit is not a man of solitude.

A global hermit is not someone who lives in a cage.

A global hermit is not someone who wanders around aimlessly in the world.

But still, a global hermit understands why people would want to live in seclusion, withdrawing themselves from the influences of the world.

Being too strongly influenced by a single culture stops us from developing, growing and finding our authentic self.

Living exclusively in a single cultural environment means that we become stuck in the cultural conditioning of our ancestors and the people around us. It means that we only ever learn to look at the world from a single perspective. It means that we fail to develop the mental flexibility of thinking in ways outside of the conventional box that our mind is forced to be stuck in.

Even worse than that, it also makes us susceptible to negative influences on ourselves that we do not even see happening.

Things like the media who are trying to shape our opinion. The behavior of the people around us, which is getting us to act foolishly by wasting our time on things like Instagram, wasting our money on things like expensive cars, or thinking that we need money to buy ourselves happiness. Our companies which are dictating to us how we ought to live our lives… and in doing so making us forget our own values.

We can break free from this circle by learning to look at the world from various different perspectives

Global hermits strive for independence of thought. They understand how the environment they live in influences them. They develop the self-awareness to understand when it is necessary to break free from the influences of any given subculture.

When you are stuck for too long in a single subculture, you get sucked in too deeply into it’s void.

If you notice that you start expecting certain patterns of behavior, and at the same time judge behavior outside of that range as unusual, then you know that you are stuck too deeply in a culture’s void.

Karin Dames has written a beautiful example of this in her article how to make diversity work for you.

“In most of the western world, it is considered good manners when a man holds the door and allows the woman to enter first. In Africa, however, it is considered to be cowardly as it is the role of the man to protect the woman. By walking into a door first, they can make sure that the room is safe of wild animals or ‘tsotsi’s’ before allowing the woman enter”, she writes.

You can never fight against the void’s gravity as long as you are in its orbit. It will always pull you back into old patterns of thought. All you can do is to take a leap with all your power and jump into a different universe.

In the new universe, you will be the stranger.

You will be the weird one who doesn’t know what’s appropriate to do and what isn’t. You will be the one that violates other people’s expectations about what’s normal. You will be the one that will be judged all the time by the people around you.

Still, you will bring your own culture’s way of thinking with you.

Even from far away, your culture’s orbit has you firmly in its grip. It’s as if it has injected some sort of sensor in your heart that always keeps pulling you back.

That sensor is made out of a mixture of your history, your memories, your beliefs, your values, and your sense of who you are.

You can never erase that sensor from your existence completely. Doing so would slowly kill the human in you. At first, it would throw you into a phase of deep depression and identity crisis. In the end, it would turn you into an emotionless robot without any consciousness or sense of self.

All you can do is to gradually weaken the effect of the sensor on you.

As you enter another cultural universe, you slowly start observing the behavior of the people around you. You slowly start understanding the beliefs underlying their behaviors. You slowly start imitating them in order to fit in. You slowly start questioning the belief system of your original culture. You slowly start adapting to new beliefs and new behavioral patterns.

Being stuck in your cultural orbit means to be stuck in one single perspective of looking at the world.

It is a perspective that has been ingrained into your mind through the environment that you grew up in; a perspective that you share with the people of your culture of origin. It has its own advantages and disadvantages. Its own biases. Its own flaws of thinking. Its own reason for existence.

As you slowly start understanding another culture’s perspective, you start realizing how narrow your own perspective of the world really was.

Every culture develops out of the conditions of the environment in which it is placed.

In the book Cultural DNA, Gurnek Bains explores how the belief systems of different cultures have developed based on the environmental conditions they found themselves in.

One interesting example of this is how the environmental conditions on the Chinese plateau forced farmers to cultivate their plants in close proximity to one another, thereby creating a need for maintaining harmony among the farming communities. Until today, harmony within a group of people is one of the primary values of the Chinese, and they have an elaborate system of behaviors that exist for the sake of maintaining that goal.

If every culture develops out of environmental necessities for survival, then every culture also has its own limitations.

As you start adapting to another belief system, you will start seeing your culture of origin in a completely different light. You will start seeing its flaws. Its strengths. It’s beauty.

You will start understanding more about why the people in any given subculture behave the way they do. You will get hungry for exposure to new perspectives that can widen your lens of looking at the world. You will learn to be able to look at any given issue from multiple perspectives.

In doing so, you gradually weaken the effect that the sensor of your cultural orbit has on you. Values and beliefs that were imposed on you by the environment you grew up in slowly start to break apart.

The power of global hermits lies in their ability to make active choices

As you start seeing which beliefs have been ingrained into you by the environment that you grew up in, you start to gain the ability to be able to make conscious decisions around who you are. You start to be able to make an active choice around which values and beliefs are truly yours as opposed to having been ingrained into your mind by the people around you.

You start playing a conscious role in the creation of your own belief system.

When I lived in Indonesia, German managers kept telling me how the German way of doing things was simply significantly more effective and efficient than the Indonesian way.

One example for that was how meetings were done in Indonesia. The German managers were flabbergasted by how much time the Indonesians spent on small-talk, how unstructured the meetings were, and by how much they were talking about seemingly unrelated topics.

Well, they were right. Indeed, meetings in Indonesia tend to be less efficient than German meetings.

But what they do not recognize here is that efficiency is not the goal in Indonesian meetings. In a country where maintaining relationships is more important than anything else, a significant part of any meeting is to socialize, have fun together, laugh together and enjoy time.

The goal is simply not to be efficient, but to make sure that the relationships are maintained and all parties involved are happy. The assumption here is that when the relationships are built in a positive manner, then the work will also get done eventually.

When you are not only aware of these two different systems of thought, but also have internalized both of them completely, you are now able to choose which of these two different behavioral patterns suits you more. Or, you are even able to use your own creativity and construct your own way of action by integrating different elements of these two cultural systems into one single whole.

In other words, you are an active creator instead of a passive receiver of cultural knowledge. And, you now have the ability to actively choose who you want to be rather than being passively shaped by the culture in which you grew up.

Global hermits recognize at what point a cultural environment starts limiting their growth

“Society in its full sense… is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can even arrive at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates” — Ruth Benedict

I think this quote by Ruth Benedict is an incredible important point to reflect on. We need to remain conscious of the fact that everything we learn is cultural. Everything we learn is something that has been created by the people around us, whether it is through a speech given by a professor, a book, a video, a song, or any other way of transmitting knowledge.

Participating in a culture to reach your full potential basically means that you need to have constant contact with people in your field of knowledge if you want to achieve your full potential. You need to exchange ideas with them, learn from them, reflect on criticism by them, be inspired by them and so on and so forth.

But this thought also has one major limitation. When Benedict says that “no individual can even arrive at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates”, she is essentially forgetting the limitations that one single culture can have on your way of thinking.

Yesterday I had a conversation with my wonderful partner who is a student of architecture. She was very impressed by a friend of hers who moved back to her own small town, where she basically took on the responsibility for the town’s best architecture firm right after her graduation from uni. Something that is quite unthinkable in Tehran, where there is an overload of talented architects.

She was saying that her friend’s life was not only all settled now — she was also in the process of getting married — but that it was also a perfect opportunity for growth as her friend has much more responsibility than anybody else of her fellow graduates.

And yes, I certainly agree with that standpoint on the short term. But what it neglects is what happens a few years later.

As her friend is more and more getting settled in her new way of life — being the small town’s most respected architect and being married with a partner who definitively wants to stay in his hometown — she will also slowly stop growing. Comfort will set in. As the town’s most respected architect, she simply won’t need to significantly improve her skills on a daily basis.

Plus, her environment simply won’t change very much. Perhaps every now and then, somebody will graduate from architecture from one of the country’s top universities and move back to their hometown, but other than that, the key players will remain the same.

Remaining in one particular culture for a long time limits our growth to the standards of that environment. Once you feel that your learning and your growth are significantly slowing down, it’s time to move.

This is true on the level of a subculture, as I have described in the example about my partner’s architect friend. But it is also true on the level of national culture, which also limits our growth, albeit in a different way.

You have been in a writer’s group that has significantly helped you to improve your writing, but now you are starting to become much more successful than your peers?

Move.

Move to another city where a lot of authors live that are more successful than you. Find peers on an international level. Do whatever is necessary to keep growing.

You have had amazing experiences in a new culture and you have learned a great deal about their way of looking at the world, but now you start understanding the culture to the point that your learning process starts slowing down significantly?

Move.

Move to another country that is significantly different from any culture that you are familiar with. Find a culture that fascinates you completely, and start reading about it. Start learning as much as you can about it. And move.

Of course, I don’t want to reduce personal growth to saying that aimlessly moving to anther cultural environment is the answer to every problem. It clearly isn’t.

Many times moving to another cultural environment isn’t the answer at all. My argument is simply that at the time that our learning curve significantly slows down in any cultural environment and we start to become more rigid in our way of thinking, we should reflect upon the question whether moving might be the best possible option we have.

Simply learning to see the world from another perspective isn’t enough

Learning to see the world from another cultural perspective is an important step in breaking free from our own cultural conditioning. In gaining the ability to take the leap out of the orbit of the culture we grew up in.

But it isn’t enough to become your own authentic self.

When we internalize two different cultural perspectives, well… then we are limited by looking at the world from these two cultural perspectives.

Of course, this has its own advantages as well. Firstly, we have the capability to approach different situations with two different patterns of behavior and patterns of thinking. Secondly, we can choose between these two different patterns with the thought of achieving the best results in those circumstances, in our minds. Thirdly, we develop a stronger awareness around how people’s belief systems affect their actions.

However, when we have simply internalized two different belief systems, we haven’t necessarily made an active choice yet about which beliefs of each culture we want to adapt for ourselves, and which one’s we want to rid ourselves of.

You need to assess the beliefs, thought patterns and behavioral patterns you are exposed to on two dimensions. Ask yourself whether they are…

• more or less congruent in terms of your own personal sense of self
• more or less helpful in achieving the outcomes you want to achieve

For example, I myself have been exposed to an indirect way of communication a lot during my time in Indonesia. For a German, this is a very strange concept considering that Germany is known to be one of the most direct countries in the world in terms of their communication patterns.

However, I found that this is a concept which is very much congruent with my own personality. For a German, I always tended to be more reserved in my use of language, and less direct in stating my opinions about something.

Consequently, I felt quite comfortable being in the Indonesian environment when it comes to this particular aspect of the culture. Of course, Indonesians are still significantly more indirect than I am, but it certainly helped me to understand myself better and find my own way of communication.

On the other hand, communicating indirectly in a German environment, for example, is likely to lead to less successful outcomes.

In other words, making an active decision around how to act in any given circumstances requires you to take into account how a belief, behavioral pattern or thought pattern affects you on the two dimensions of congruence with your own sense of self, as well as the outcomes you are trying to achieve.

You might say that these are not questions that you can ask yourself during a communication encounter. There simply is no time for that. And I agree with you. But these are questions that you should reflect upon regularly when you are in a new cultural environment in order to make sure that your own development is on the right track.

Five questions to ask yourself:

• are you currently in an environment that allows you to keep growing constantly, or are you in an environment that leads to stagnation?
• do you expose yourself regularly to new cultural perspectives? If yes, to what degree are you open towards embracing them as part of your own self?
• are you merely a product of your own culture, or are you making active choices about who you are and what you believe in?
• if you’re honest to yourself, to what degree have you adapted to the new cultural environment that you moved to?
• what are the biases that are inherent in your own culture’s way of looking at the world?

If you liked this article, please do 👏 and to share it with your friends. Remember, you can clap up to 50 times — it really makes a big difference for me.

I am considering to turn “The Global Hermit” into a short e-book with each chapter published here on Medium on a weekly basis and revised based on feedback by readers. I would be curious to hear from you in that regard:

• do you generally think that it is an interesting idea?
• which questions do you think it should address from your perspective?
• what are some of the main problems that you are facing as a person living in multiple cultures?
• what feedback do you have on the table of contents? What should I include/erase? How can I make the structure more interesting for you?

Table of Contents

Chapter one: Introduction

The Global Hermit: find your authentic self.

Chapter two: Tenets of global hermits.

#1: There is wisdom to be learned by every culture in the world.

#2: Being stuck in your own cultural conditioning means stagnation.

#3: Authenticity lies in being aware of how external influences affect you.

#4: Stagnation is a result of being limited by your cultural environment.

#5: Global hermits are cultural insiders- and outsiders at the same time.

Chapter three: Skills all global hermits need.

#6: Awareness of your tendency to judge too quickly.

#7: Taking on the perspective of people from other cultures.

#8: Controlling your emotions when exposed to strange behavior.

#9: Adaptability to different conditions and ways of thinking

#10: Processing feedback by people from other cultures.

#11 Awareness of how your cultural conditioning affects your worldview.

Chapter four: Paradoxes global hermits face.

#12: Conformity versus authenticity

#13: Uncertainty versus stability

#14: Freedom versus responsibility

#15: Growth versus comfort

#16: Roots versus progress

Chapter five: Lifestyle problems of global hermits.

#17: Value conflicts.

#18: Restlessness.

#19: Being a cultural outsider.

#20: Identity dilemmas.

#21: Sacrifices.

#22: Loneliness.

#23: Uncertainty.

#24: Home.

Conclusion: Who is it for?

#25: Is becoming a global hermit the right choice for you?

Note: for any comments, suggestions or questions, feel free to e-mail me at rettigtim@gmail.com