The sweet synergy of being together and apart
On balancing independence and togetherness in America
America… the land of opportunity! A place where how far you go only depends on how hard you work. Or at least that is the official premise, even promise. There are of course, many stories from both natives and immigrants who attribute their success trajectories to this pulling-yourself-by-the-boot-straps concept.
And compared to the much of the rest of the world, the opportunities in the US still abound. Seizing their potential largely depends on an individual’s determination, persistence and hard work with a reasonable probability of it eventually leading to some degree of success.
(Although, let’s not confuse the individual’s taking charge of their destiny with an assumption that we all start from the same starting point. The ethnicity, socio economic background, race, education, physical and mental fitness, are some of the many factors determining how challenging and probable our path to success will be. But the myth of “equal opportunity” is a story for itself and for another time).
The path of relying exclusively on oneself as a sure way to accomplishing anything is an attractive concept in that one doesn’t have to be beholden to anyone but oneself. Our triumphs and failures are only ours. Individualism has many advantages but it is often misleadingly advertised as a path with seemingly no cost.
There is an under acknowledged yet significant price we pay for an independent pursuit of success. We lose the togetherness, the connection to each other, the community.
As I was listening to immigrants I interviewed describing what it was like when they first came to the States drunk on a dream of building a better life, it reminded me of what a de-conditioned person (aka me a few years back) feels like when they finally decide to get healthier by skipping the peskiness of the gradual stamina building and instead ambitiously fast forward to a bootcamp.
Immigrants are guided off the boat straight to the bootcamp of American individualism and pushed to independence and adjusting to the new rules, new language, new culture on the go. The pace intense, the demands beyond strenuous, the overall experience overwhelming, the only way to survive — play along:
It’s good here, there’s work. But I don’t want to stay in the US for the rest of my life. It’s expensive when you get old, when you need health care. It’s a good place to make money, but you have to bust your ass for it. It’s fine to bust your ass off until you are 40, and then there’s no upside after that. You need to keep busting your ass off until you die and I’m not excited about that idea. (Armenia)
Eventually, as the shock of it subsides, immigrants catch up with the natives in accepting the bootcamp as just the way things are, but also buying into it being the best way to achievement:
When you’re overseas, you think about America like it’s all in glass and sparkly. Once you arrive here you get the culture shock. You see that people here too struggle and go to work, it’s not like money grows on the trees. You have to work hard to make your living. You have to challenge yourself to adjust and adapt to be productive. Otherwise you will suffer. (Morocco)
Like the bootcamp eventually tones our muscles, persistence at work often brings results. Many an immigrant, and a native, has pride oozing stories of successes they’ve achieved with their bare hands. Impressive and admirable, indeed.
However, what has been sacrificed in the process — time away from family, distancing from the community and friends because of exhaustion and lack of time, physical and mental burden inherent in the self-reliance — somehow is quickly dismissed as merely an unfortunate yet unavoidable collateral damage on the way to the rewards: independence and freedom.
The autonomy of independence sure is dear to most of us, but is there a way to compliment it with some teamwork? Could it be that self-reliance is a much bigger burden than we are ready to admit? Its promise of independence and freedom from anything and anyone sure is seductive.
But something is missing. Of course some sacrifices are in order to ever accomplish anything, but what and how much is a matter of the cost-benefit analysis.
The no pain, no gain philosophy of individualism disguised under the allure of sweet independence, quickly becomes demoralizing and unsustainable in the long run if we don’t take into account other dimensions of life.
This country has a different style of life, a different pattern. It’s rush, rush, rush! You wake up, go to work, come back, do homework, do this, do that. It’s very robotic. There is no moment to sit and have a cup of tea with your parents. We don’t go to check on our neighbors or visit if someone is sick. People don’t know about each other. I don’t know my neighbors and they don’t know me. Everybody is busy! (Morocco)
Can’t we retain some sense of community and work together without losing the benefits of independence? Are they really mutually exclusive? A fellow immigrant from Croatia once only half joked that America is best to live in from 9–5 and Croatia from 5–9. If we could only teleport!
All my interviewees agree that there is no perfect country. America’s strongest suit is making money and professional advancement. And while globalization has done it’s job of making the rest of the world emulate the American rat-race tendencies, it seems that socializing and fun times are still valued more elsewhere than here.
We cherish professional success, efficiency and financial well being, but if there is no time left to enjoy any of its spoils, what’s the point?
I like the efficiency here. I get what I want faster. I felt very appreciated as an employee, I moved up based on my performance. That’s difficult in Peru because there is corruption at every level. However, people then demand you to be even more efficient and sometimes they forget to pay attention to other important things like vacation.
Free time is not as appreciated here. People think about work even when they have free time. It can be difficult to separate work and play here or to give them equal importance. You have less time to travel to get to know other places, to do other other things, to rest.
Individualism brings personal freedom but also deprives us of connection with others — a basic human need we like to pretend we can demote or replace with stuff:
In Cameroon we lived in a community. Here, we live in a house. I have a neighbor here. Every day we see each other and say Hi, how you doing! We talk over the lawnmower running on the side. It’s very surface level. Every person does their own thing.
One thing I miss a lot from home is that love, that community tie, doing things together. We didn’t have any money to buy anything, but still people just drop by your house and sit and drink water. If something happened to this person I would want to know, and if something happened to me he’ll ask me. It’s the community living together! Here I’m just by myself in my house.
Now, before we get too carried away with romanticizing the community based societies, immigrants who have lived that reality are well aware of its dark sides.
As much as the community is a fail safe it can also be a crutch, an impediment to self-reliance, progress and freedom of choice:
Our sense of humor in Mexico is big. We have this thing we call Albur. It has double meaning. You would laugh at everything. Meaning that no matter how much you’re suffering you always find a way to feel better by talking with your friends or family.
Because you’re hanging out with people that are in a similar situation, you don’t really think that you’re poor. Maybe you have a problem or don’t have money, but then you go home to Albur and life doesn’t feel as bad, as heavy.
But Albur is also one of the reasons why I feel like Mexico is like it is. We take everything lightly. We joke about everything instead of taking some things seriously.
American lifestyle may remove the safety blanket of community and to make do without it is not easy but in many ways it is liberating:
I am more responsible now, because in Brazil I had the support of family and friends. I have friends here but it’s different, I feel more on my own.
In the beginning it was a bad feeling but now it’s a good feeling because if I made it to this point having a lot of challenges and troubles and I’ve made it, I think I could do anything on my own like start a business or a family. I feel more confident now.
Another aspect of life that suffers in the collective cultures is privacy and personal choices:
What I like here is that you have your privacy and peace. It’s a double edged sword though because that means that my social life here is not as rich as it would have been in Bosnia & Herzegovina. But I got used to that and I like it that way now. More time for myself, my family, I’m not pulled in too many directions.
The tribal life comes with the territory back home. Like, this guy is getting married so it’s expected that the entire town shows up. And it’s like that every weekend, there’s a wedding or baptism or someone is partying and everyone has to be there.
If you start avoiding it, there are social repercussions. Why didn’t he come? Does he think he’s better than us? Here everyone is minding their own business.
The lack of privacy, living like a herd together not by choice but you need to roll with it, I don’t miss that at all. Here I feel that I am in charge of my own destiny, walking through life independently. I don’t need to explain myself to anyone about anything.
As it is evident, immigrants are not mourning the herd mentality they’d left behind. However, there is plenty of space and good use we could find for integrating a sense of support of a strongly knit community.
A society thrives when the relationship between the individual and the community is symbiotic.
When we ignore the role of community we risk misunderstanding and living in fear of each other. Not relying entirely on oneself and asking for help is not a sign of laziness or weakness but a part of our human disposition to raise each other up in support:
I appreciate the personal space I have here, but I don’t want it to go to the extreme and be isolated and not have social life. But I don’t want people barge in my private space either. I’m still working on creating that balance.
I told my husband that I’ll go to our neighbor and introduce myself. And he said, no, no, we don’t do things like that here. But we walked together around our street saying Hey, we are the new neighbors, we just moved here. And we were received in a very positive way and now I have a very close relationship with two of my neighbors. They know me, I know them.
Once I told them I’d be in Sudan for a month and when I didn’t come back in that time, one of them emailed me to ask what’s wrong. It made me feel looked after. I don’t want to live in a place with no connection to the community that I live in.
I didn’t wait for others to welcome me but I took initiative. And once I did it, it didn’t seem weird. It broke the ice between us and now I can let them know more about who I am, where I come from or what’s happening in Sudan. It had brought us closer to come as one community.
The value of being closer is feeling secure, welcome and my neighbors will feel comfortable seeing me around. The stories in the media about where I come from can create fear and questioning. That’s why I thought it important to reach out so they could see me as a person.
None of us can avoid the bootcamp of life but that doesn’t mean we have to go it alone. As anyone who’s ever read a job description can attest, most any proverbial list of required qualifications would not forget to mention that a prospective employee must have an ability to work well alone AND with others. Why do we think then that our lives outside of work only require one of those dimensions?
A synergy between individualism and the best imports from the collective cultures is an opportunity to thoughtfully curate a strong and harmonious social infrastructure. All we need is the will to give it a go.
