Is there anything of which one can say,
Ecclesiastes 1:10
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
I have been in Kazakhstan for a few days now and by far the most profound impression I have had is that life is the same here as it is everywhere. Children go to school. Adults go to work. People shop at supermarkets and cook at home, or sometimes they eat out at an assortment of restaurants. There are doctors, veterinarians, and eyewear stores. People sit on street corners selling fruit and other small goods. People drive cars and struggle to find parking.
Perhaps you may think me a fool for having expected anything else. So you may say, what else did you expect Adam? And I really do not know. But clearly I had some subconscious belief that life here would be different in some way or another. And yet what I have found is that everything is largely the same, albeit everything is in Russian and nobody can understand me.
A central motivation for traveling to Kazakhstan was that this country would supposedly ‘broaden my perspective.’ I thought that coming here would be something new, something different, something I had not yet experienced before. But what has actually occurred is that this country has felt exactly the same as everywhere else I have been, albeit with a different color scheme.
All cities are the same
Perhaps what underpins this disappointment is that I am only experiencing a Kazakh city; perhaps if I traveled to small remote villages I would find that life is substantially different.
It has been my experience that every city in the world is exactly the same. I felt this in Tunis and Quito, and especially in Barcelona. So I thought perhaps this was a function of being in the western world. But Karaganda, Kazakhstan, is refuting that hypothesis. If anything, the opposite seems to be clearly true: all cities in the world are entirely the same. And that may seem like a hasty conclusion to jump to with my limited traveling experience, but I have supplemented my own experience by talking to other people. My father told me he felt the exact same sentiment in Tokyo. If cities from countries as presumably distinct as Kazakhstan and Japan feel exactly the same as western cities, where in the world could possibly feel different?
And I do not mean to assert that all cities in the world are identical, but rather I am pointing towards something more abstract. For instance in Barcelona people tend to stay up much later than in other parts of the world. But what I am trying to get at is that such differences are merely superficial. They do not represent broader, existential differences. And there are plenty of other differences I would regard as largely superficial, such as wealth, cuisine, and weather. None of these factors change the human experience of living in their respective cities, and this is what I am really trying to get at. It seems the human experience of living in any city anywhere is exactly the same. The minute structure of existence is the same around the world from city to city. You wake up, you work, you come home and eat, maybe you take care of your family, maybe you have a hobby, maybe you go drink. But this is the formula for life in any city anywhere.
You may think this is obnoxiously obvious. You may say to me, Adam, you think you are so clever and wise for discovering what is the most obvious thing in the world, namely that life is life is life. Perhaps I am a fool then for thinking that life might be different in Central Asia than it is in the western world. And perhaps I am wrong to be mildly disappointed that life feels exactly the same.
But maybe not all is the same?
It may be the case that life in one city is the same as life in any other city, but perhaps we are searching for existential differences in the wrong places.
One candidate for a real, substantial difference could be the difference between city life and rural life. Such a difference would be manifest between life in Karaganda and life in some tiny remote village on the Kazakh steppe. But, equally profound, such a difference would also be manifest between living in Boston and living in rural Maine. It may be the case that the structure of rural life is substantially different from the structure of city life in a way that would satisfy my craving for something new.
So what could possibly be different about rural life? Examining the structure of rural life it again appears to be functionally the same. You wake up, go to work, tend to your family afterwards, go to bed, and repeat everyday for practically all of your life. But if this is the case how can we understand the sentiment that city life is not the same as rural life? Because clearly they are different in some capacity.
I think the main difference would have to do with the values associated with rural life. Rural life tends to be, for instance, slower and more community-oriented. In New York City you may barely know any of your neighbors, but if you live in a small village in rural Kenya you probably know everybody. And this does seem like a substantial difference insofar as it represents a broad change in someone’s minute-to-minute existence. In rural life your own existence revolves more around the community than it does in the city. Everything you do therefore takes a different aim from living in the city. You are not, so to say, looking the same way as people in the city. You have a different perspective on things.
Difference is in cultural values
If city and rural life than have some existential differences due to differences in their respective values, then I would expect cultures with different values to manifest existential differences as well. And this is really the problem I am running into: I cannot ascertain these existential differences from merely being a tourist. To really understand the values of another place you must marinate in them for a long time. But let me give a few examples.
The United States has a value of independence that is not present in the majority of the world. Thus the broad existence of your average American is different from the majority of the world because the American will be encouraged to go out into the world and create their own success for themself. Compare this to the culture in South Korea, which is oriented around the family unit. Young adults may be expected to find success, but only insofar as they can share it with the family. This difference is manifest in the reactions of my family to my yearlong volunteering trip around the world. They were all for it! Where if my good Korean friend were to tell his parents he was going to do the same, they would chide him and tell him not to go.
So perhaps the reason I cannot see that Kazakh life is different is because I am not Kazakh. If I peer closely, I can actually see the subtle outlines of a significantly different reality. I can see this in the institution of marriage: I have learned Kazakh people traditionally marry much younger than the average American. I think this would qualify as a broad existential difference.
Thus, to conclude, here is why I have errantly believed that everywhere in the world is the same: because I am fish and they are a bird. When a fish meets a bird, he cannot understand birdhood. He can only understand what it means to be a fish, and therefore he looks at the bird through the lens of being a fish. And he thinks, well, it appears that everything in the world is a fish. So I hope that on this trip I can learn what it means to be a bird.