Superficial Engagement - On The Road With Another Bunch of Assholes

Expat Wanna-Bes: Cultural Locusts Feasting on Authenticity

I thought I was safe.

I was in a café in a small neighbourhood in the capital city of a country I thought few people ventured to and whose language I did not know.

I thought I would drink my coffee in silence because the incomprehensible words of that foreign language would be like white noise to me - there would be no sounds that formed into words that I hated used by people I hated, like home. I knew nothing about them and had nothing to hold against them. They were a clean slate.

The problem was that the café I chose turned out to be in a so-called hipster neighbourhood. (Full disclosure: the guidebook had indeed insinuated that it was a trendy neighbourhood, but I figured that for a city as dark, bleak and cold as this one, this hipster classification would harmlessly translate into just being less culturally frigid as I imagined the rest of the city would be…)

Sure enough, as I entered the neighborhood on foot, I saw a place still in the process of gentrification. It was the furthest from hipster that I could imagine; dilapidation, decay and seemingly one step from ruin. Yes, there were pockets of privilege in an otherwise vast plain of working class poverty riddled with dive bars and filth, but they seemed few and far enough between that I didn’t have to worry about the sort of people I would happen to come across.

In short, I felt safe from running into a hive of fakesters and inauthenticity.

I ordered my coffee and looked for a place to sit. The place was hopping and there were few free places left.

One free table to the right of me was next to two mothers, one breast-feeding at the table, the other casually ignoring the incessant caterwauling of its offspring right next to her. They were the locals.

The other free table to the left, well, I had no idea. It seemed safe enough. The couple were speaking their language, completely incomprehensible to me.

What I soon realised though is that these two pairs of locals were an anomalie in a café swarming with digital nomads and expats.

So, my first mistake was not in wearing fuckface-cancelling headphones to the café. Of course, I never imagined I’d need fuckface-cancelling headphones in a foreign country whose language I didn’t know. Their comments in a language I don’t speak, could have been the most inane ever uttered and I’d never know the difference.

But here, despite being in what seemed like an obscure place in an obscure foreign city, all the fuck I could hear were a bunch of arseholes speaking their insipid version of fuckwit English. The few people speaking the native language were completely drowned out by a hive of expat pretenders speaking a conglomeration of phony subculture phrases imitating the English language.

Don’t get me wrong - there are plenty of people who speak English who don’t feel compelled to let everyone within earshot know that they are unimaginative twats with an oversized sense of self-esteem.

Just not here.

Let’s set aside the fact that none of these people, all of whom were speaking English, had bothered to even learn how to order a fucking coffee in the language of the country they had chosen to move to. No need to learn to say a one-syllable word for thank you or please. Just stutter the fuck on in your native tongue as if the world were created as a canvas for you to verbally vomit your ignorance.

Suddenly, despite flying three hours to be in a place where I had never been, a place whose native language was not English, I was smack in the middle of the very fucking thing I hated - phony, ignorant people speaking English, pretending to be intelligent and cool.

What bigger sign of a sense of faux privilege than Yankee wanker poseurs sitting in a café, self-importantly tapping away on their laptops, stopping every three seconds to check their mobile cell phones for messages in the desperate hope that somebody gives a shit that they are alive?

I know, I know, why not live and let live, right? What do I care that these tossers are like bad actors in a shitty play? What does it matter if they pretend to come for a sense of adventure but desperately cling to everything that reminds them of home, whining in the dark for the magic teet of familiarity, crying themselves to sleep?

I’ve been an expat before. In fact, I’ve been an expat for so long in so many different countries that I don’t identify with a homeland any more. My homeland is inside of me where it belongs, not draped in flags or charaded in predictable clichés of nescience, desperately clinging to a cultural identity that I was pretending to trade in for a new experience.

None of these people want a new experience. What they want is a new stage, a new scenic design that they can hide themselves within and where their inadequacies as human beings are less culturally apparent. So they’ve adopted the title of ‘digital nomad’—a label that makes them feel unique, even though it simply signifies they’re not stuck in a factory job in some rural backwater that they can never escape from or subordinated in a dead end suburban office of paper pushers and corporate sycophants.

You see, the secret to modern expats is that most of them are losers trying to escape the place where they are from - where everyone already knows they are losers.

They figure that if they run far enough away nobody will recognise them, the way Nazis used to try to blend in to foreign countries after World War II, hoping never to get outed.

The problem is that the modern expats don’t try to assimilate into their new culture. They do not blend silently into the local crowd. They do not learn the local language and customs. Instead, they seek out public places where other modern expats like them gather, a place where they can all speak their common language of dewy stupidity together. They don’t want to learn new languages and adopt new cultures, they want to complain about the new languages and cultures they pretend to integrate into.

As a result, a poor, unsuspecting tourist like myself, instead of absorbing the uniqueness of a new country, gets assaulted by a hybrid cacophony of fatuousness.

Man-buns crawling on their hands in knees in a desperate search for the lone plug they can connect their phone or lap top to because their batteries are perpetually on the verge of dying.

A woman in her mid-20s who was thoughtful enough to wear a half-shirt so that everyone could see the rolls of her overfed belly spilling out over her sweatpants, presumably to distract from anyone noticing that she was wearing a pair of Ugg boots instead of showing up in her pink, fluffy bunny bathroom slippers.

Men and women parading their insincere aesthetics, the commercialization of their phony subcultures, measuring the degree of their overrated sense of self-importance, bleeding their impoverished consumerism out of every pore.

What right do I have to criticize them? The one that says that fake human beings, neatly packaged into a trendy, marketable aesthetic, devoid of any tangible use or purpose, should stay the fuck home, whatever place in America or the UK or Australia they came from. The one that says that if these people choose to invade a local café, spread their inadequacies and cultural privation like an industrial sludge over every standing wall and fill my ears with the jargon of their meniality, they are free game to critcism.

That doesn’t mean the flood of Brazilians, Spaniards or Romanians that seemingly every European capital absorbs because they, for example, are at least, even in using English if not the local lingo, learning something new.

This doesn’t mean Canadians, the Irish or Kiwis because these people do not exude some phony sense of privilege in the same way that Americans, Brits and Australians do.

This means the very same people who made me sick with their unoriginality masquerading as self-satisfied, self-indulgent, self-importance, all of which wholly unmerited, should have been ground out like a filterless cigarette in a maternity ward.

So, as I sat there, I realized that the true absurdity isn’t just the invasion of these superficial expats into an authentic space. It’s that they’ve managed to turn even the act of escaping into yet another performance of self-indulgence and privilege. In their quest to reinvent themselves in foreign lands, they’ve inadvertently become the very thing they sought to escape: a parade of cultural misfits, clinging desperately to the familiar and the fashionable, while remaining blissfully ignorant of the very essence they claim to embrace.