Our actions, the way we think and the way we perceive reality are all strongly influenced by cultural conditioning. Perhaps this seems obvious, but spending just a month outside London in Europe really brought this home for me.
As regular readers will be aware, I’ve been outside of the UK for the last few weeks. Now to be fair, I’ve hardly been on a retreat to rural Tibet, or meditating on a mountain in India. I spent most of my time in Berlin (itself a major city) with a few days in Ibiza (a party island) and at a music festival in Estonia. So I’m not writing this from the perspective of someone who has really disengaged from Western culture.
Nevertheless, Berlin remains a very different proposition to London.
You see London is a global metropolitan hub. I’ve visited New York many times and it seems to me that, while NYC has taller buildings, the lifestyle in both places is very similar. That is, you work a crushing corporate job, try to live somewhere close to the ‘action’ (probably in Shoreditch or Brooklyn) buy fashionable clothes, adopt a snarky, superior attitude, read snarky, superior websites, go to trendy bars and restaurants to gripe about colleagues and friends, and indulge as much as possible in hookup culture.
There are other common features too but I hope you’re getting the point.
Berlin is a little different. Yes, it has expensive, fashionable shops, bars and restaurants. Yes, it is the capital of Germany, now—post-Brexit—the most powerful country in the EU. Yes, many regard it as one of the coolest cities in the world (a Colombian girl I was talking to there told me that for her the most important cities are “Berlin, New York . . . and maybe London”) and yes, the effects of gentrification are undeniably visible.
But the overall feeling is very different to London. It is inculcated in the culture. The graffiti all over every wall tells its own story. That would never be allowed in London. In Berlin people are proud of it—it reflects their tolerance. Everything is shabby, whereas increasingly in London everything is polished, even in previously shitty areas like King’s Cross. Because of the low cost of living a lot of people don’t work, or seldom work, or are creatives—writers, musicians, artists. That used to be true in London and Manhattan too. Not anymore—no-one can afford to be a starving artist in those places now.
I felt shifts in myself the longer I spent in Berlin. I was noticeably less concerned about my appearance, and about the things I was wearing. In London people are very status-obsessed and so the way that you look matters. People judge you on the kind of sunglasses you have. In Berlin no one gives a damn.
Dating Culture
The dating culture seems different in Berlin too. Basically, girls are a lot more friendly. As I’ve previously observed, it’s not a great city for game, but even so, I was getting a lot more IOIs and good responses from (non-German) girls that I do in London. I contrast the way in which the hot Belarusian girl in Berlin opened up to me immediately, with the way an attractive but inferior English girl effectively shut me down when I spoke to her the other night here. Admittedly I probably have some exotic value as a foreigner in Berlin, but I do believe that the more relaxed atmosphere there just encourages people to be nicer to one another.
Most importantly, I was able to consider the direction of my life more calmly in Berlin and to understand what was more important to me—freedom and the time to write rather than money and status. I had always wanted to live in a major city since i was a child (I was brought up in the suburbs) and there are huge advantages to doing so. But there are also downsides. What became very clear to me as I travelled back into London last week was the fact that there are a lot of ‘sheep’ here who are unthinkingly following the conventional pattern of job-consumerism-marriage-mortgage-kids and not having a particularly fun time doing so.
For me, I want something different from life and my time away from the UK helped to crystallize that in my mind. I only hope that, as I return temporarily to the corporate world tomorrow I don’t get sucked into the machine once more and lose sight of that.
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