Living abroad has really improved my perspective in life, mostly because the limits of culture are plain to see. Culture shock was not new to me, even before traveling abroad, because I had experienced culture shock as a teenager within the US. I spent most of my childhood living in a very diverse part of the US, where most of the people in my neighborhood were people of color. Then I moved from a neighborhood full of people of color into a neighborhood full of white people, which was a huge culture shock for me. I remember trying to make friends with my white neighbors, and most of them ended up bullying me (presumable due to being the only non-white person present). Luckily my high school was somewhat diverse, so I found nicer white people and other people of color to befriend later on.
Getting back to the point, my time traveling has really allowed me to see the limits of my own form of being and how dependent that is to the culture one belongs to. We are all mentally enslaved to the culture the people around us follow, and until we escape those social bubbles and have meaningfully interactions with people that have different cultures, we will remain blind to the evident truth that Culture is Socially Constructed. What you believe to be right and wrong depends on a system that was built by the ancestors of Your Culture. In the US, you don't have to be traveling to another country either, just go somewhere with a different demographics of people than what you are accustomed to, and really try to get to know the people.
These concepts seem so simple, but they are very complex so I will provide some personal examples from my own experiences: (Experience 1) My first trip abroad was to London. I started there because one of my best friends lives there and the English are like brothers to Americans, at least geopolitically speaking, so it felt like a natural first country to visit abroad. While in London, one of the first things I noticed was that the cops didn't carry guns, which coming from the US was something I'd never seen. In the US cops always carry guns, and the idea of people carrying guns, in general, is engraved into our laws and culture. It simply wasn't like this in the London, which I thought was fantastic. Sadly, I fear cops in the US much more than cops abroad, and this includes Mexican cops, which I have had encounters with. (Experience 2) Another example is when I went to Eastern Asia and visited many beautiful religious places. In one temple in Hong Kong, I remember seeing a man buy almost $300 of incents to simply burn for good luck, which baffled me but then it hit me that religion makes people believe superstitions that are not based on reality. In general, I also noticed that people are very religious all over the world, and that the religion you grew up believing, is part of fabric culture you come from. In other words, if my parents would have been Muslim, I may have been an ex-Muslim instead of an ex-Christian.
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