The Luck Laboratory

Has the internet and technology killed expat life?

Part of the lag between my recent posts has been my recent move back to the U.S. after a year and a half in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I wanted to be a flaneur in a cheap, hip city that would let me enact my Gertrude Stein dreams while was still young, childless, and relatively untethered to life in the U.S. I was lured by the number of times that I’d read that Buenos Aires was “to the ’00s what Paris was to the ’20s,” envisioning a vibrant cultural scene and the next Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the make. But having just left that so-called expat paradise after a year and a half, I wouldn’t say that the famed “Paris in the ’20s” feeling isn’t in Buenos Aires; in fact, it’s not likely to ever exist again.

For starters, the so-called Lost Generation depended on physical locations to bring expat writers together, such as English-language bookstores, cafés, and periodicals: The Paris Review got its start during Paris’s second wave of expatriates in the 1950s; Shakespeare and Co. was founded in Paris a few decades prior, and published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. There are a few English language bookstores in Buenos Aires, and thanks to tourism boom since the economic crash, many regular bookstores now have English language sections. But compared to the ’20s, current writers and artists have no inherent need to find any such physical community to have their work validated or published. Maya Frost, a U.S. expatriate living in Buenos Aires, has a book forthcoming from Crown on May 19th of this year. While in Buenos Aires, she got her agent because of her blog, and arranged the entire deal—from proposal development to manuscript proofreading—via e-mail. Any writer or artist today only needs the internet to work or network. Literary magazines there have a much smaller potential audience than a literary magazine in the states; as a result, the best work is emailed overseas. At last year’s Buenos Aires Book Fair, one of the few panels featuring expat writers was a writing group that expounded on tips on how to use the internet to further your writing career. There wasn’t a need for a 21st century Shakespeare & Co. before the crash–and there’s no need for one now.

Many expats earn their living by telecommuting; who can afford the good lifestyle if you’re making pesos? While Hemingway earned his living in a similar fashion, by reporting for newspapers, budgets for freelance writers or foreign reporters aren’t what they used to be. So here’s a key difference: lots of expats have computer-based jobs, posing as consultants based in Washington, D.C.; it’s a Thomas Friedman article come alive, but with protagonists who spend more time on Facebook. Because they’re competing with others in Bangalore and NYC, their intensive work cut down on face-time. A recent MIT study showed that the internet is more isolating than TV.

Even if your friends have no need for jobs and enjoy hanging out face-to-face, transportation isn’t what it used to be. In the 1920s, a 4-5 day transoceanic liner was the only way to make the trek from the U.S. to Paris. The subsequent expansion of air travel has turned this process into one that’s comparatively cheap and painless. This relative lack of an initial investment in living in Buenos Aires also makes for an extraordinarily transient population: many rent apartments online—you can have a place lined up before you get there—stay for two months, and leave. Since it still seems like a great deal compared to Europe, study abroad programs are growing like weeds.

And yet, because it’s so easy for anyone to hop in and out, Buenos Aires is suffering from the same real estate problem of many large cities: the most affluent people in the world are buying lofts in Willamsburg, Paris, and Buenos Aires—spending a week in one before moving on—and helping to drive up rents for everyone else. Because of the opportunity for quick transportation and telecommuting, expat communities have sprung up all over; Shanghai, Beijing, Berlin, Jakarta. You can find a website for nearly every international city, each claiming to be an expat hub. But each filled with people who may:
-spend less time abroad, frequently going home for holidays
-can easily work and socialize with other foreigners

Why Living Abroad Makes You Creative

A great new study was recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about the relationship between living abroad and creativity. There’s now abundant evidence to add to what generations of expats have known all along: living in a foreign environment, or in a multicultural experience, mitigates creativity. Interestingly, this increased creativity doesn’t hold true for people who had spent time traveling abroad, just for those who had lived abroad. The level of cultural immersion, not the length of time spent abroad, emerged as a key factor determining creativity.

Living abroad, in my experience, is an exercise in 24-hour creative problem-solving. The daily activities of going to the bank or eating at a friend’s house, while time-consuming, become repeated to the point of automation. In contrast, living abroad–

-makes you break down each activity and rework unmanageable steps
-prompts you to navigate cultural or linguistic unknowns on a regular basis; try talking to the guy at the hardware store when you’ve completely forgotten the name of what you’re looking for
-relax your ideas of functional fixedness, wherein you are only able to conceptualize things according to one set of norms
-lets you pretty much second-guess everything you do the entire time, which in turn prompts different ideas about how to walk, eat, etc.

While it’s certainly true that the study may have been an examination of correlation and not causation–the kind of person who would live abroad may have already been more open to new experiences–but even priming the experience of living abroad raised the participants’ creativity level. My theory that living abroad is cognitive calisthenics still stands.

Where have I been?

I know you’re wondering, so I’ll just say it: I’ve been captivated by Christopher Walken’s Twitter account.

Why online dating fails: people are experience goods

Online dating doesn’t work. But this has implications even if you’re not on eharmony.com. The sexily-titled “People Are Experience Goods: Improving Online Dating With Virtual Dates,” published late last year in the Journal of Interactive Marketing, provides some clues. We can’t just match people with each other the way we’d match people with static products, the way Amazon.com’s recommendation service does. (I wrote a feature a while back on recommendation technology.)

What can be searched for in profiles–eye color, income, weight–aren’t at all related to the actual experience of dating someone. On paper or online, Brad Pitt is perfect. But there’s a sizable gap “between the kinds of information people both want and need to determine whether someone is a good romantic match and the kind of information available on online dating profiles.” Sites like eHarmony.com that test and match people on “29 dimensions of compatibility” can’t reliably transfer over to real life. On-the-fly interactions are crucial for interpreting personality and sense of humor; things like loyalty can only be gauged over time. As study co-author Zoe Chance told me, “Dating is much more complicated because our personalities change depending on whom we’re with.”

Another study (”‘Shopping’ for a Mate: Expected versus Experienced Preferences in Online Mate Choice,” available here) examines the effect of choice overload and its consequences on dating behaviors. Yes, there is such a thing as having too many options–especially since, as stated above, even though you may want a partner with blue eyes, whether he or she has blue eyes has no bearing on your actual interactions together. And then there’s the whole value inherent in stepping outside of your comfort zone. As I’m reminded in the excellent book The Black Swan, one of the problems with prediction is that we don’t know what we don’t know. We’re notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy, despite a tendency to cling to certain ideas about what kind of profession, brand of jeans, or tattoos our ideal partner would have.

So for people who mistakenly think that they’re saving time by going online to find things like dating partners or new careers, just remember that there’s no shortcut to going out on an actual date.

Germany’s remake of The Office gets Germanier

On my trip Bogotá last month, I brought some heavy duty reading material with me demonstrating my general lack of ambition regarding the Spanish language:  Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. “Are you going to review that?” I was asked, jokingly, as though anyone in the Spanish-speaking world had to be told about Harry Potter.
“Have you read it in English?” someone asked me.
“No.”
“You could read that, and the English version, and then compare the two.”
Blank stares.
“No, I’m just kidding, that would be dumb. Unless there’s a plot difference.”
“Yeah,” I joked. “In the Latin American version, Harry gets a mullet and then dies at the end.”

Oh, but there are cultural differences when some pieces of pop culture get translated. Who knew? Originally appearing in Great Britain, the TV show The Office now has a host of international spin-offs in the U.S., France, Germany, Quebec, and Chile. Yes, I knew that, but the cross-cultural comparisons seem starker than previously pointed out, possibly because the stories have since been given time to develop.

Looking at a Google translation of the German version’s Wikipedia page–admittedly not the best source, but it’ll do until someone wants to pay me to find out–reveals one of the major characters missing from the U.S. version:

Erika Burstedt is due to its corpulent exterior is a popular target of jokes Strombergs. She is competent and a good soul, like on the occasional jokes against Berthold laughs. For many years, with an unfaithful husband, married, is to a flirtation with employees not averse. Erika is a member of the SPD and the trade union and calls to their superiors Stromberg, of which it often was dismissed, again and again of their rights as a worker one. At the end of the third season Erika died from the effects of a heart attack in hospital.

Yes, a woman conscious of workers’ rights with an unfaithful husband dying of a heart attack. Much more like it.

Short blog posts = good. For some.

I was cleaning out my Bloglines account of unread articles–I’m convinced that having 22 unread emails, 117 articles pegged for immediate reading and 3,209 unread posts cannot be good for you or your anxiety levels–and came across one on the pros of having shorter blog posts.

I get that the blog post is short. I get that people who read blog posts are probably doing it the way I’m doing it, just skimming a bunch of things in the off-chance that something catches your eye. My problem is that nearly every comment is somewhere between “I lost interest after 500 words” and “…. what?” Seriously, people, are we that inept? The “gosh, that was long” comment seems especially common in articles that seem to attract the type of person you’d associate, albeit in a stereotypical manner, with having a short attention span. Such as those who like to read about video games.

To those who leave lots of ‘I can’t focus’-type comments, I say this: I find it hard to believe that there isn’t one single topic in the world that would hold your attention for longer than 350 words or a minute, especially since you’re taking the time to leave comments. That has to take what, like a minute? At least? Didn’t anyone ever warn you about what happens to people with short attention spans?

Happy old, new year

Colombian donkey watching a fútbol game.

“The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack,” wrote playwright George Ade. He was obviously speaking of non-European trips, as well.

I will return soon…

Why I love to travel: part two

“One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.” -Sir Richard Burton

After spending several consecutive months in Buenos Aires and then about a week in Bogotá, I had a craving for silence and repeated the perennial traveler’s slogan–I just wanted to get away from it all. And so, a hostel owner in Medellín recommended that I go to Santa Cruz de Mompox, also commonly known as Mompos, a colonial town of 20,000 that’s liminal in every sense of the word. Getting there from Medellín required getting a bus to Magangué, a ferry, a taxi, a canoe, and yet another car. The bridge had fallen out a month prior (”Just sunk slowly, like a movie in slow motion,” said a few locals), adding a few extra legs to the journey, each involving someone grabbing my backpack and throwing it into the next form of transportation before asking me for money.

“I could have done that.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“I’ve already got it—”

It’s better to just pretend like you don’t know Spanish and grab your own bag before you duck through the crowd to find a taxi headed towards Mompox. Of course, once I got there, the atmosphere was what you might call “zen.”

This is a place that’s known for–wait for it–its artisan rocking chairs. It’s as if Mark Twain, Gabriel García Márquez, and Italo Calvino had invented the picture perfect sleepy town that’s both right in the middle of Latin America and fully disconnected from this world. Mompox figured prominently in The General in His Labyrinth, the historical novel by García Márquez about Simón Bolívar. Remnants of Bolívar, who assembled an army of 400 men from Mompox to defeat the Spanish in Venezuela, are all over town: “If to Caracas I owe my life, then to Mompox I owe my glory.”

I spent five days wandering around Mompox, getting lost, sleeping in the hammock at the Casa Amarilla, and straining to imagine a time when the people there moved quickly enough to engage in a war. Like anywhere in the world, it’s far from perfect: the mosquitoes at night were particularly determined to wage war with my skin. Then there was the humidity. And the heat. I’d been reduced to a sort of sashaying saunter by the end of my stay.

Being able to enjoy whatever it is about a place that makes it unique, whether we’re in Mompox for the architecture and a getaway or in Paris for a conference: that’s why we travel. But no place on earth is perfect, and the second the honeymoon begins to fade and our shins have been transformed to puffy, blood-scratched mosquito motels, we get to leave. That, too, is why we travel. We get the good parts, and we get to leave before any of the bad parts sink in. Having hosted my fair share of friends in Buenos Aires since moving there, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the naive joy of being a tourist completely removed from their home. Everything seems wonderful (”Yes, I’m dehydrated, unsafe on this a roof…. I don’t know who any of you are, and I may have gotten my passport stolen, but I’m in the South Pacific!!!“) because you’re in the honeymoon stage. Always.

You think: stuff is cheap! My dollars buy many of this other type of currency! And even though the Lonely Planet may have mentioned something about a ‘country in conflict’ in its section on history, well, what country isn’t in conflict? No one is going out of their way to hear a grim economic ramble about the real cost of living there. You see a couple walking slowly, in colorful clothes, and think that they know about the good life. These are a people who can slow down and enjoy each minute. You don’t think to go up to them, where you may discover that his foot is infected, her shoes are too tight and they’ve forgotten where they’re going.

When we travel, we get the raw, direct experience without any of the hang-ups that accompany knowing something well. No one I cared about deeply in Mompox betrayed me. I never got in a fight with a friend or had my ego crushed in front of people I had to live with forever. I never had to see anyone I loved there go through a difficult time, or hear from the widows of the men who followed Bolívar into Venezuela. I just heard the part of the town’s history worth repeating.

Why I love to travel: part one

“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” Dagobert D. Runes

In Cartagena, this guy seems interesting. His shtick is unique. But I’d avoid him like the plague at home.

I get to see others. I get to meet other people. I learn about new ways of life, new guidebooks, new backpacks, new ways that people who treat the Lonely Planet like a menu and not a list of options criticize how “touristy” everything has become.  The people I meet while traveling are not unlike new barbecue sauces; one wants to use words like “fresh,” “bold,” and “exciting.”

Traveling is a way of perpetually being on first dates with everything you see: you’re only in a place long enough to notice its shimmering coast and smile, but not so long that you start to doubt why it’s still economically depressed. You’re not there long enough to feel tired of its excuses, to get severely bored or frustrated with any sort of repetition. The people I’ve met have severe cases of wanderlust: they’re vintage guitar dealers from Seattle named Brian, financial workers from the outskirts of London named Tom, recently-graduated Australians named Sarah and Craig, adorable, 50-something Swedish couples whose names I couldn’t pronounce then and can’t remember now, Irish guys who saved tens of thousands of Euros by working as a cell phone customer service representative for a few years.

Of course, I never get to hear the other side of the story: had they left behind a string of broken hearts of promises? A baby? Defaulted on loans? Were they illegally collecting unemployment benefits while crashing in their parents’ basement, smoking marijuana for two years? Your paths cross for an hour in the lobby of a hostel in Cartagena, or maybe a few days on the coast near Santa Marta. But how hard is it, really, to be nice to someone when you’re both in great spirits, not working, and far removed from the financial obligations and stressors of everyday life?

It’s not just that. My people are those who value travel and discovering new cultures enough to actually prioritize it (instead of making excuses why they can’t travel). As explored by Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich in studies including “To Do or to Have? That Is the Question,” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003, Vol. 85, No. 6, 1193–1202), experiences give people more happiness than things. The memories we take of these times ripen like a fine wine; when we spend our resources on things, the quality of our memories deteriorates over time. The memories are sweet because they are short. We remember the end of our car’s days, when it wouldn’t start in the snow or had to spend thousands on a new transmission. But in traveling, we are only given a highlight reel.

Leaving the forest with a story to tell: Memoirs of former FARC hostages

After spending years in the Colombian forest looking down the barrel of a gun–and then being released—there’s another war that many FARC hostages face upon leaving captivity: a bidding war to secure the rights to publish their memoir.

“I don’t know where we’re going with this,” said Herrera, “because in Colombia there are between 3,000 and 4,000 hostages. Each one will tell their story, each one will write a book. But I don’t know if that will be very sensible.”

Last week, former senator Jorge Eduardo Gechem Turbay, who regained his freedom this February after six years in captivity, presented “Viacrucis De Mi Secuestro,” (Crusade of My Kidnapping). Admittedly, the book was written with the help of other writers and researchers, Ricardo Mosquera Mesa and Jorge Guebelly, and being marketed as a work
with more “academic intentions.”

Why all the sudden interest? “I think that Colombians have always thought this to be important,” says Juan Pablo Cardozo, spokesman for the Colombian publishing house Norma. “The difference is that this year, Colombia has been making a lot of concrete advances to end the war… there are a lot more opportunities to tell the story.”

Ingrid Betancourt’s forthcoming memoirs reportedly fetched millions of Euros. Colombian publishers are also getting ready to publish a work by Martin Sombra, a former FARC member who was in charge of keeping the hostages.

Next year, the memoir of Ingrid Betancourt’s vice-presidential candidate Clara Rojas–who gave birth during her six years in captivity—will be published simultaneously in over 15 languages.

“The country wants to know what is going on. These stories mark the history of the country,” added Norma’s Cardozo, who suspects that people will only tire of them “when there are final resolutions to not just the part political, but the economic and social aspects of the war, as well.”