Being an immigrant and having false nostalgia
I know I've been slowly becoming a "gringo" because, sometimes, I see videos from Brazil and my mind goes "yeah, that place seems nice and warm", and instantly I have to be like "wait, no, wtf am I thinking, that place was horrible, that's why I left".
Nostalgia does weird things to your mind, where it makes you remember the good things and forget the bad ones. No place is perfect, of course, but Brazilian society is extremely dysfunctional, it just has a nice coat of varnish over it, and foreigners will never experience life there as most Brazilians do. In the 8 years of living in another country, I was able to do more with my life than in 30 years of living there, and it's so hard to explain why to people who grew up in functional societies. Brazil kinda slowly saps away your will to do things because nothing ever works as it should, so you have to spend 10x more energy dealing with it, and after some time you just kinda… give up. Because why bother.
Most people would say Brazilians are politically apathetic, but I would say they are actually lethargic, and things seem to be getting worse.
Maybe people from other developing nations might go through the same process. That's probably why sometimes it's easier to connect with other immigrants in developed nations than with locals. The feeling of "they have it so good here and don't even know it" is a powerful one.
I mean, holy shit, being able to return a faulty device in only a few minutes instead of spending half of your day arguing with the store's manager and threatening to sue them for breaking the law [lol] frees up so much of your mind. It's such a minor thing, but it makes such a huge difference. Not having to wake up thinking "wth am I going to have to deal with today" is wonderful. And what makes everything so hard is that it's not anyone's fault, everyone is just trying to get by while doing the best they can.
I'm always telling people the time my internet went down after it rained the night before, and it took 2 months to have it back up. 2 months. And I only managed to have it fixed because after a month going back and forth with their call center, I thought "fuck it" and went on to sue the ISP in the small claims court. The judge there set up a date for the company to fix the issue, otherwise it would pay a daily fine, and guess what? They fixed it... on the last day possible before the fine started counting.
It's worth mentioning that, at the time, I was already working as a translator, from home, but it was before smartphones really blew up. I had to use my cellphone as a hotspot and buy 50mb packets to upload the jobs I finished. It was not a fun time (and not cheap either), and it was such a headache to deal with. And this is only one of the things that happened. I also had to threaten to sue my landlord so he would fix a leaky roof that flooded the second bedroom when it rained; I had to explain to federal employees how to emit a document that I needed in order to receive money from another country and avoid double taxation; had to debate for a while with my bank so they would allow me to be paid by foreign companies (this was before Wise and the likes were around); and so on and so on. Life was definitely tiring.
Meanwhile, European bureaucracy has been a breeze for me, and services in general have been pretty great. This frees up so much energy, people have no idea.
So yeah, sometimes I miss some things about Brazil, and Brazilians really are warm and friendly. I do love the country, but not enough to want to go back. This image from the Fire Emblem for GBA (which I saw here) summarizes my feelings well enough, I guess.
