Capitalism and Mediterraneanism
Recently I had a short holiday in Lisbon, and it was a really powerful experience. When I arrived a strong feeling emerged from my guts…”nostalgia”. But it was the first time I was there!
I come from a small town near Rome (in Italy) and so I grew up being used to certain type of architecture (and lifestyle). When I arrived in Baixa Chiado in Lisbon…I wanted to cry! Portici, big squares, old buildings with pitched roofs, bricks…small and twisted roads, trams, “cafes” all over the place, and small square stones as paving.
But then walking around, there was something different! They were talking an interesting language (portuguese), food was a little different…what was going on?
I started exploring the city, and the feeling never left. And during one of the many walks in the beautiful Lisbon, I started reflecting on what was so different from where I live now (New York). And an adjective came into my mind: “mediterraneanism”. Here are some points of difference between a capitalistic and a mediterranean lifestyle/city from my point of view.
Time is Money — Time is Time
First big difference. Especially in New York, Time is Money. Really. You feel like you have always to do something, the branch, the drink, being a FOMO person and you get lost. Months pass by and you don’t even know! Because if you don’t do something…you can work! I was quite surprised to learn the term workaholic. I never heard something like that! Don’t get me wrong — in other countries, contrary to many misbeliefs, you can work like in USA. But in mediterranean cultures you still put an accent on having time to enjoy your time, take a coffee break, or go outside. On the opposite spectrum you create society that are highly inefficient and full of problems (Italy first) but as always a good middle ground is needed.
Having 10 or 15 days of holidays is not enough. Having one month of paternity/maternity leave is NOTHING. There are some exceptional countries that are trying to improve this by experimenting with working hours that are less than 40 with good success — happy people is more productive!
Time is money…but how many money do you really need ? This is a wide topic, but a possible source of discussion is to link this to health and education. If you had that covered, how many money would you need ? Where is your happiness in this “equation” ? Do you really need a fancy car or clothing ? Food for thoughts!
Fast food — slow food
I have something to confess: I never had a take-away cappuccino/coffee until I moved away from my home country. I was always eating 3 courses meals, separated, with a final espresso. And I was still working 40 hours a week!
On the opposite site of the slow food, fast food, can be really useful when you don’t have time to eat and you need to rush (meetings, airport, …). But many times eating should be almost a ritual. What is eating ? Is the process of putting resources into your body. It can be also an exercise in presence (read here and here), and it could be considered a “ritual”. In mediterranean cultures, eating is a long process and is a way of sharing stories and time with family. You rarely see someone eating and not seating, and many times it is an integral part of creating a group of people (being it a family, colleagues or friends).
Mindful eating can be a good exercise to practice slow food, and even more to understand what your body really wants and needs. Eating with the automatic pilot will lead, most of the time, to being really full and not even paying attention to the taste of what you are eating. “Do you really like what you eat ? Do you really know what you like to eat?”.
Cooking can be a good skill to learn, leading towards a more balanced eating and a healthier digestion system — hence body and mind.
Functioning architecture — unique but non-functioning architecture
Older cities have an incredible charm, being for the history they carry, being for the incredible architectures and styles the have. Architecture has almost always been functional, but with changing in civilizations (the need of the Roman Empire were quite different than the ones from the modern times) they started to suffer the uniqueness. Before google maps, if you were living in Rome or London…well good luck. You had to learn each part of the city step by step and then link them. Was really easy to get lost!
If not properly handled, old buildings can be horrible for pipes/heaters/spaces, while new ones can be amazingly organized and functional.
Lisbon is mainly made of old buildings, but more and more are being reworked and improved. It is a longer process, and the efficiency of spaces is not the best. Thus you can’t normally build as you wish, so the old building remains the same, and maybe old green areas are sadly converted to houses or offices.
On the other side, New York is very easy to navigate and go around, but architecturally…it has some nice places, but still around you see many home-boxes with hundreds of apartments. Functional maybe, but not a pleasure for the eye. You don’t really go for a coffee in Madison Avenue! You go to squares and parks, where people and energies merge and flow, when you can feel connections.
I agree about functionality of architecture, but still I like to be happy with the eye. It is like eating: pleasure with eyes increase the pleasure for food!
A possible question could be…what you like about the city you live in? What not? Which part? If you were totally free to move…where would you move and why?
Paid healthcare/education — free healthcare/education
Interesting and broad topic. Having good education is an amazing power for your country — educated persons made the difference. Being ignorant is useful to be controlled (it is a very old technique, in middle age the church were hiding many technical books that were often written in greek, thus hard to understand by persons that could barely…read). Having a good education that is obtainable only by paying a lot of money widen the gap between rich and poors. In mediterranean countries good education can be almost free (I paid 3000$ for all my degree in software engineer, and now I work in USA as a software engineer…) and then you can choose what to do. On the other side, everyone that is lazy enough can use university as an excuse to delay work, so a paid solution can be an incentive to be serious about work.
Something is missing in both is an education about ourselves. “Know thyself”, as part of the framework of “taking care of ourselves” (also known as “technology of self”) should be something to teach as basic skills.
Meditation, mindfullness, be open to be with our feelings, being in touch with ourselves…could be the real game changer for me. I know it sounds cliché, but seeing how many are going to “repetitions” about this subject now is good and bad at the same time.
Healthcare…another universe. Always hard to find a balance, but a simple thought: where does health finish and business start ?
Drink inside, to be open — drink everywhere, for the taste
In Lisboa as other mediterranean countries, it is common to drink outside and be relaxed. When I lived in UK (near Birmingham) I remember having a cultural shock about how much guys were drinking! No offense or judgement, but I was just noticing the difference.
I saw the control problem: the more you put control the more people wants to break the rules and you need more rules. An extreme example is drug dealing in Lisbon. You will meet a lot of people selling drugs on the street. Selling is not a crime. If they get using drugs, they send you to the psychologist! You are treated as a person with problems! Side effect of this ? Drug persons are considered sick and not cool. Plus all this constant flow o persons selling drugs makes you want to…never touch drugs again! And last you lose all the “forbidden attraction” and transgression of using drugs.
Results in portugal: much less drug usage, jail emptied by drug dealers, small traffic of drug compared to before, happier people.
To be honest I never saw persons wasted on the street for either alcool or drugs.
“Sorry” — “Obrigado”
I was noting how many times in Lisbon I was using and I was hearing the word “Obrigado” (thank you). Another thought struck my mind: since I started living in english-speaking countries, the most used word is “Sorry”. Of course we want to be polite, but how much you prefer to feel sorry than grateful ?
I truly believe in the power of words — vocabulary can really make the difference — and this was another point.
As a personal example about the power of words, if I hear “I love you” or I hear “Ti amo” it makes an incredible difference to me: years of emotions linked to my native language cannot be easily deleted, and still words in my language give me much stronger emotions. This also is an incredible side-effect of being an expat, but I will talk about that in another post.
So nurturing a gratitude feeling was the main point of being in Lisbon. Even though, as I just wrote, talking in another language is different…the feeling sorry, and the body language associated (moving the head down, eyes down, to become smaller) is opposite of looking in the eye of someone else, smiling and say “thank you”!
What is really interesting is that Lisboan people, as far as I saw, tend to be very humble, joyful and sometimes with very low self-esteem.
This is something that I like to do, and in New York is perceived as weird in my experience, but looking in the eyes someone and say “thank you”, or say “goodbye” when leaving a restaurant/cafe, it really can make a small difference. It is like something that I still can’t understand: in office it is really rare to say hi to someone when arriving. And if you say hi…nobody replies to you. I am probably not the first to notice that!
So…what can we use from this difference ?
Bringing some more “thank you” looking into the eyes, some “hello” and remembering that there are persons behind the roles (there is someone with maybe an awful day behind a waiter/bartender/cashier) is paramount.
This can be applied to everyone, included our families.
Career driven — happiness driven
One of the things I notice more when moving outside of my home country it was that most of the time the topics between people are related to work, and maybe the formula “what is your plan for the weekend”. When I am back home, or when I was talking with some Lisboan persons, we never talked about work! Mediterraneans tends to talk about life, emotions, problems. They tend to show their fragilities more, and many times are very open about themselves (maybe too much!). On the other side…work, work, work. Bigger house, truck, more shoes. If you are not an entrepreneur you are a nobody. And sadly, this is also a very important trait searched by partners.
Being career driven is good, amazing, go for it! But it is not all!
Think about that…with more and more automation coming in our life, we are losing many jobs. I can imagine that one day there will be many jobs done by machine…and this is good! When this will happen, we will have more time to concentrate on our inner world, on what we really want to be and we will be able to explore all we want.
Happiness should be our currency. All the hate, destruction and violence around the world happens because people are unhappy. It can sound too much of a simplification, but think about this: when you are really happy, can you think of going somewhere and punch someone in the face for the fun of it ? If the answer is yes, then probably it is time to talk to a psychotherapist. Joking aside, when we are happy and radiant we want to share, experience, sing, be with others, be in nature, create.
Happiness is the consequence of following your guts, after you remove all the masks from the external world. It is our true nature to be happy.
When we were kids, beside having really difficult childhoods, we were happy in a much easier way. Why ? We learnt to worry, to judge, to have the need to do something, to desire something else. We lose contact with the present. And as many of you know, present is a present. Present moment is linked to happiness (that is different than euphoria) and is the base for many interesting reads in our lucky times (Eckhart Tolle for example).
“The goal of your life is to be present. Everything else is secondary” — Eckhart Tolle
The energy you put when doing something is what makes the difference in the act. It is not a matter of the result! It is a matter of the action itself. Result is secondary, but the state in which you are doing something is paramount.
“There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understand the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment” — Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure
The present moment is a topic covered by most cultures I would say, as these to examples teach us. Marcus Aurelius too talked about the present moment in his meditations:
“Even were you to live three thousand years or thrice ten thousand, remember that no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing. Thus the longest and the shortest come to the same thing. For the present is equal for all, and what is passing is therefore equal: thus what is being lost is proved to be barely a moment. For a man could lose neither past nor future; how can one rob him of what he has not got? Always remember, then, these two things: one, that all things from everlasting are of the same kind, and are in rotation; and it matters nothing whether it be for a hundred years or for two hundred years or for an infinite time that a man shall behold the same spectacle; the other, that the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss; for it is the present alone of which either will be deprived, since (as we saw) this is all he has, and a man does not lose what he has not got.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations II:14
Happiness — presence — career. Interesting terms that leads to very different paths. What is good about being career driven is that you become a creator — you learn the skill to create, to manage, to finish. But living only by your career, or only by your goal…is an incredible error that will bring you to the mythical chase of the sun. I will write about that in another post!
Conclusions
There were quite different topics covered here.
I don’t like black/white definitions, I like to see shades and I truly believe that in every situation there is some good.
But what can we use from all these differences ?
I’ll leave it to you, with some experiments to bring some balance between capitalism and mediterraneanism!
- Try to say “hi”, “goodbye”, “thank you” looking into the eyes the person you are talking with.
- Try to see the person behind the role. Maybe the very bad waiter has just discovered he has a serious health problem ?
- Try to use the focus of being goal/career driven with the presence of not having a goal. This question could help: am I enjoying the process toward my goal ?
- Try to experiment with mindful eating. Try to eat without television, phones, books, but just use all your senses when you eat. Which part of your mouth are activated when you eat something ? What is the smell of the food ? What is the sound of it ? Be curious!
- Ask yourself what you like aesthetically in your city and why. See the beauty around you when you walk! Be curious about roads, architecture, buildings, roofs, doors.
- Try to drink for the taste of it. Be open about your feelings even if sober.
- Try not to talk about work!
- Consider the possibility for you or your kids of studying abroad. It can be an amazing experience to learn a new language, culture, open your mind and being debt free!
If you like this article, please comment it! Share your thoughts!
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Of course all those thoughts are personal opinions from my point of view, with my limited informations and resources.
Obrigado!
Gabriel
