From the happines of survival-mode poverty to an anxious ‘better life’.

A journey from the struggles of a ‘developing country’ culture to the ‘lucky’ developed west.

I’ve spent a lot of time travelling through developing countries and diverse cultures over the last 10 years. I’ve trudged the gritty streets of Manila, navigated auto-rickshaws, cows and swarms of bodies in Mumbai, witnessed the horrific results of the Khmer Rouge on disabled children in Cambodia, trekked rural Thailand and taken in landscapes as juxtaposed in rich and poor as night is to day.

I’ve stepped out of 5-star hotel lobbies, air soupy with essential oils and delicate notes of a well-dressed pianist, only to step over human faeces on the sidewalk just minutes after exiting the hotel’s grand doors and past traditionally dressed porters. Some of these experiences are becoming increasingly Westernised through tourism and international business but, they still seem a world away from my home culture in Australia.

So what?

Well, the one thing that always strikes me about these cultures, is people’s relentless happiness that exudes from their beaming faces no matter what the circumstance. When I’ve wandered through shanty towns in the Philippines and the sprawling improvised slums of India, I’ve always been greeted with kindness, hospitality and an unwavering positivity amidst what Western culture would consider abject poverty.

I’ve been invited into tiny homes for dinner, smiled at by locals in Chennai as they queue to use a putrid public toilet, buckets of water in hand… and had smart and beautiful homeless kids tour me around ancient ruins in Cambodia, laughing and making jokes all the way.

Even “well-off” jobs in countries like India and the Philippines pay disgracefully low salaries. Having worked in the call centre industry, I’ve had first-hand experience setting up sites in various countries and can attest to people’s dedication, despite poor pay and poor conditions.

In Manila, I’d see staff turning up at 6 am smiling, soaking wet from the spicy, damp deluge of the wet season. They’ve just endured a 3-hour commute in a rattling Jeepney, gurgling and belching diesel fumes as black as the Manila night but they don’t complain.

I know a lot of Australians get frustrated with outsourcing and the fact that most (if not all companies) now outsource their customer service to counties that speak English as a second language. But, if you saw what these people endure day-after-day to deal with pissed off Aussie and American customers, with little training or support from the companies whose customers they support, it gives you a different slant on the whole topic.

Usually ’empathy’ or ‘understanding’ is a theme in such interactions with offshore folks but, for me, if I’d got up at 4-am to commute for hours to earn what most of us spend on coffee in a day, I’d probably find it pretty hard to empathise with someone who has a complaint about the battery life on the new iPhone. Especially given I likely need to support my family with the small daily wage I’m earning.

India is no different. Dedicated workers endure tiny living conditions shared with extended family. A cold shower with a bucket and hose starts the day before haggling with picky auto-rickshaw drivers to take them to their destination. Dressed in long trousers, long sleeves and with slick-backed hair, they grind through Mumbai traffic under the 40-degree Indian sun.

Depending on what you do and where you do it, even these comparatively affluent call centre jobs pay about $10 – $15 AUD a day (if you’re lucky), and they’re run like military camps. One company I worked with fired their staff if they were even 5-minutes late more than once… Lateness is not really something you can control amidst the chaotic and unpredictable commute in South East Asian countries.

I met my wife in just this sort of situation. Working for the prestigious, 5-star Shangri La Hotel, she earned about $8 AUD a day often working over 12-hour shifts. Meanwhile, staying there on a business trip, I was spending $300 a night. She was also the main income earner who supported her siblings.

Earning a decent wage isn’t something easy in the Philippines. Most Filipino’s try to do their best at home or choose to go abroad to countries like Saudi, Qatar and UAE to earn a slightly higher wage and send money back home to help their families.

So, what’s my point?

Well… I’ve observed something very interesting and it’s something more common than I realised. A conversation over Christmas drinks with Filipino friends, as well as similar conversations with my Indian friends, all have the same theme. It seems that, once these people leave the ‘struggles’ of their poverty and migrate to a ‘lucky’ Western country (such as Australia), they experience anxiety and depression that they’ve never experienced before.

One friend broke into tears recently after discussing how difficult life in Australia can be financially. Before I proceed, I need to be clear here. These aren’t people who left their own countries in search of a better life. I’m talking about people who met Australian partners, came here to study, work, or came as tourists originally before settling into the Australian culture, which is when the heaviness of life in a consumer-driven ‘first-world’ country affected their mental state.

This got me thinking… How is it that, someone like my wife and her friends can go from such poverty where they literally weren’t sure where the next meal was coming from to the “lucky country” that is Australia and suddenly experience a very Western epidemic of mental distress… a level of anxiety and mental noise they NEVER experienced before?

My wife tells stories of when they were so broke, they had only rice with soy sauce to eat. Yet, she recounts these stories of provincial life with a positive sentimentality. And, I don’t mean a “look how far I’ve come” mentality. It seems there’s a stark difference between what could be deamed as ‘survival-mode poverty’ which is getting on with doing what you can in life, versus modern-day stress and financial worries in so-called ‘developed’ countries obsessed with notions of success.

How can this be? How can someone go from not eating regularly, earning peanuts, and supporting a family, to a Western life which is, allegedly, a better quality of life, only to suddenly experiencing anxiety and depression for the first time?

I think this phenomenon is quite simple to understand and it has to do with our values and beliefs and how the culture we’re brought up in dictates those values. The difference is this:

In a developing country such as the Philippines or India, simply surviving, supporting your family and putting food on the table is considered success (and why not?). The cultural mindset is that, no matter how simple the roof over your head or the food on the table, you’re blessed and fortunate to be able to provide that for your family and have good health and you outwardly express this gratitude.

The philosophy is that life is not in your personal control (in some cultures it’s in the control of the Gods but, even then, my point is that the cultural message is you can’t control it individually). It’s unpredictable and often tragic but the responsibility isn’t on the individual to control it. They simply do the best they can, given the circumstances dictated by an unpredictable universe, and they’re grateful for whatever they have (and even accept what they don’t).

Now, in Western culture success is defined as how much you have. Simply providing is not deemed a successful life.

In our passive, plastic consumerism, we’re defined by what we have and what we do… Why? Because we’re taught, from a young age, that we’re in control of life.

We may think that it’s a good thing to raise children to believe they can do ‘whatever they want to do in life’ and be ‘whatever they want to be’ and sometimes you can. However, when we imply such control over the chaos of life, we create a deep-set feeling of burden where we experience guilt and failure if we’re not succeeding by society’s standards. We upward compare ourselves to others and there’s always some mug doing better and who has more.

Walk into any bookstore and make your way to the self-help section and you’ll be overwhelmed by hundreds of books preaching how to control your life and how to mimic the habits of millionaires. Yes, apparently habit replication is now a ‘recipe’ to become the next Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg and more.

A previous manager of mine once gave me the book ‘The Power of Habit’ for Christmas. The following Christmas, he gave it to me again. Either, he forgot he gave it to me, or he was putting into practice habitual giving? Still unsure… He was simply quite odd.

Anyway, I read the first page of one of these the other day and the author’s advice was to ‘make your bed every morning before you leave the house’. That’s very well and good but my wife, who came from sharing a small mattress with her two sisters under a lethargic pedestal fan fighting the humid Manila night, probably doesn’t connect with such advice.

When you have a cultural mindset that, no matter what, life is unpredictable and sometimes cruel, it creates an appreciation that simply providing for your family and having health is successon all levels. It encourages happiness and resilience.

But, when you then migrate to a country where the national psyche encourages you to take control of your life and grab the reigns of the universe, it can trigger anxiety and depression that was never experienced during previous times growing up in conditions of relative hardship and poverty.

I think this problem isn’t simple and I do believe (to an extent) that suffering can be relative depending on the resilience that’s been instilled in us from childhood. However, depression and anxiety are rife in Australia and America and many other Western (‘successful’) cultures and the fact that it affects people who have experienced sheer life-and-death survival before coming to these countries makes me think that there is something deeply flawed in our national psyche and culture and, I believe, it has to do with the notion of perceived control over chaos.

Like the famous Yin and Yang symbol, there’s always an element of chaos in order and order in chaos. Perhaps the success to life is finding the fine balance between the two and accepting chaos when it inevitably happens and appreciating order when we can. Put simply, we can’t control everything in an ever-shifting quantum universe where we are now learning that even reality is nothing like what we perceive it to be. So, maybe what we can do is work on our response to chaos, relinquish control, surrender ourselves and learn. 

I love Australia and its culture, and I do appreciate the quality of life I’ve grown up with but, maybe we need to take a leaf out of the Filipino, Indian, and Thai cultures where we count our simple blessings and discard this notion that control leads to success. A theme that’s become defined on a spectrum of comparative consumerism and peddled on the pages of glossy books by self-help ‘gurus’ trying to teach us how to be more successful.

Success itself is subjective and never static and I don’t think any one person or culture has the right to claim a single definition.