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A comment on Reverse Culture Shock. Parent comment

Re:Reverse Culture Shock by nebabyte on Thursday March 16, 2017 @12:58AM (#13882646)
Though it's a lonely frame of mind you describe, it's likely not rare, given modern globalization by the numbers. Even if most reform into cliques derivative of both parent cultures, some small percentage of singletons is still a fair number of people.

I can from experience say it's one that some children of immigrant parents (or parents that moved a lot, and/or both) identify as, when they don't identify with their own culture nor have complete familiarity with their surrounding one (nor have a 'derivative clique' of similar parents-of-immigrants to identify with - though even if they did, they'd likely have a common 'outsider' mindset w.r.t. 'everyone else').

It's funny, iirc the whole "thankful for the outsider's perspective" thing was essay/application fodder for me at one point, and something which I considered might be useful for a particular career path.

All this to say - thinking of yourself as "alone in a crowd" is likely a risky supposition if what you're after is the true state of things. https://xkcd.com/610/

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Re:Reverse Culture Shock by nickbauman on Thursday March 16, 2017 @04:57PM (#13889107)
Narcissism aside, the feeling is more akin to the part of Herman Hesse's novel Siddhartha where he finds himself walking alone through a pass in the Himalayas at night. Realizing for the first time he's completely alone, a tiny, tiny fleck in the maelstrom of the cosmos, his ego is obliterated. But he's also completely free.
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