A Subtle Art of Not Giving a F in Russian
Mark Manson about Russians
This text is taken from the wonderful book "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life" past American writer Mark Manson. This book is available on Amazon in unlike versions. #1 New York Times Bestseller, over 1M copies sold. The volume itself is very interesting, just I'd similar to quote a tiny role illustrating the main differentiator of the Russian mindset and communication culture.
"In 2011, I traveled to St. petersburg, Russia. The nutrient sucked. The atmospheric condition sucked. (Snow in May? Are yous fucking kidding me?) My apartment sucked. Nil worked. Everything was overpriced. The people were rude and smelled funny. Nobody smiled and anybody drank too much. Yet, I loved it. Information technology was i of my favorite trips.
There'south a bluntness to Russian civilisation that generally rubs Westerners the wrong manner. Gone are the fake niceties and verbal webs of politeness. You don't smiling at strangers or pretend to like anything you don't. In Russia, if something is stupid, you lot say it's stupid. If someone is existence an asshole, you tell him he's being an asshole. If y'all really like someone and are having a great fourth dimension, you tell her that you similar her and are having a keen time. Information technology doesn't matter if this person is your friend, a stranger, or someone yous met 5 minutes agone on the street.
The first week I found all of this really uncomfortable. I went on a java date with a Russian girl, and within three minutes of sitting downwards she looked at me funny and told me that what I'd just said was stupid. I nearly choked on my drink. In that location was zilch combative about the way she said it; it was spoken every bit if it were some mundane fact — similar the quality of the weather that day, or her shoe size — simply I was yet shocked. After all, in the West such outspokenness is seen as highly offensive, especially from someone you lot just met. Merely information technology went on like this with everyone. Everyone came across equally rude all the time, and as a result, my Western-coddled mind felt attacked on all sides. Nagging insecurities began to surface in situations where they hadn't existed in years.
But as the weeks wore on, I got used to the Russian frankness, much as I did the midnight sunsets and the vodka that went down like ice water. And and then I started appreciating it for what it actually was: unadulterated expression. Honesty in the truest sense of the word. Advice with no conditions, no strings fastened, no ulterior motive, no sales job, no desperate attempt to be liked.
Somehow, after years of travel, it was in perhaps the most un-American of places where I first experienced a item flavor of freedom: the power to say whatever I thought or felt, without fear of repercussion. It was a strange grade of liberation through accepting rejection. And as someone who had been starved of this kind of blunt expression most of his life — first past an emotionally repressed family unit life, so later by a meticulously synthetic false brandish of confidence — I got boozer on it similar, well, like information technology was the finest damn vodka I'd e'er had. The month I spent in St. petersburg went past in a mistiness, and past the end I didn't want to leave.
Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows y'all that another society can live with entirely different values and notwithstanding function and not hate themselves. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that peradventure it'south not necessarily the all-time way to live. In this case, Russia had me reexamining the bullshitty, imitation-nice advice that is so common in Anglo civilisation, and asking myself if this wasn't somehow making us more insecure around each other and worse at intimacy.
I remember discussing this dynamic with my Russian instructor one twenty-four hours, and he had an interesting theory. Having lived nether communism for so many generations, with little to no economic opportunity and caged by a culture of fearfulness, Russian club establish the most valuable currency to exist trust. And to build trust you have to exist honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly and without apology. People's displays of unpleasant honesty were rewarded for the simple fact that they were necessary for survival — yous had to know whom you could rely on and whom yous couldn't, and you needed to know apace.
But, in the "free" Due west, my Russian teacher continued, at that place existed an abundance of economical opportunity — so much economic opportunity that information technology became far more valuable to present yourself in a certain way, fifty-fifty if it was fake, than to actually be that style. Trust lost its value. Appearances and salesmanship became more advantageous forms of expression. Knowing a lot of people superficially was more than beneficial than knowing a few people closely.
This is why it became the norm in Western cultures to smiling and say polite things even when you don't feel like information technology, to tell niggling white lies and agree with someone whom you don't really concord with. This is why people acquire to pretend to exist friends with people they don't really like, to buy things they don't really want. The economic system promotes such charade."
I promise you enjoyed it. THIS IS A True STORY…
Source: https://medium.com/@mikeilyin/mark-manson-about-russians-47fa27512971
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