Europe.

Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I can never believe that there's a better country than England, not because England's particularly great but because wherever you live you'll find plenty of things to hate about it. Perhaps that's just me consoling myself for not having the ambition or backbone to move somewhere with higher happiness levels?

I went to Sevilla last year and it was a great city but it was also hotter than the sun and surroudned by arid scrubland. When we flew back into England over the green fields I felt a sense of profound thankfulness that I lived in a nice green and pleasant land with relatively mild weather. (Obviously this is changing every day.)

It'd be very hard for me to move somewhere else now, due to ties of friends and family. It must be an interesting experience to be a complete outsider to a culture, though. I admire people who DO live abroad.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
It helps if you can't understand the language. As soon as you can, the appalling things people are saying all around you become rapidly more evident.

Many good things about living in the UK (some under attack), but Europe has its charms in not hating pleasure quite so much.

Andalucia sounds terrible weather-wise. Northern Spain is much better.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
My cousin said that about Japan. As soon as he could understand the conversations happening around him it lost a huge amount of its charm.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
sadmanbarty said:
the europe of this thread is wholly human whereas scandanavia is the ahuman ideal. a sci-fi society. technocratic. devoid of humour and sexuality. generous welfare provisions. aryan looking clone people. all imperfection eradicated. the utopia that emerges from dystopia.
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I was going to pull out the old "but what about the suicide rate?" thing but a cursory glance at this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

Shows that suicide rate is highest in Eastern Europe (Russia, Estonia, Lithiuania, etc.)

Finland and Sweden are quite high up though, much higher than the UK. Denmark and Norway are both higher than the UK too.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110421082641.htm

"The research confirmed a little known and seemingly puzzling fact: many happy countries have unusually high rates of suicide. This observation has been made from time to time about individual nations, especially in the case of Denmark. This new research found that a range of nations -- including: Canada, the United States, Iceland, Ireland and Switzerland, display relatively high happiness levels and yet also have high suicide rates."
Click to expand...

The theory seems to be that if you're unhappy in a happy country you feel unhappier than someone who's unhappy in an unhappy country.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Not sure how they worked out happiness levels - people lie, and there's tremendous cultural pressure to develop a false self that is 'happy' (even if complaining/hateful).
 
C

comelately

Wild Horses
One of the things I liked about Bulgaria was the Cyrillic - like I could make out the odd word here and there but it required an act of will. Otherwise all the text was just pretty pictures, not really text at all - it was strangely liberating.

Obviously it's too easy to go the other way and just be glib about it, but the event of suicide......like there are some variables regarding 'how awful' a suicide is. Somebody enduring misery for decades isn't necessarily better than somebody 'deciding' not to. We don't easily think of it like that, as on a primitive level we're biased towards survival and enduring suffering - but stoicism is an idea that should be as open to question as any other.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Major cultural issue in understanding suicide is in the equation of deep depression with sadness, rather than anger that has not found expression.
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
Click to expand...

my parents very much subscribe to notions of european identity.

for my mum it's all tied in to her life-long effort to try and be middle class which is in large part informed by her working class essex idea of what being middle class is.

my dad's damascene conversion was in the 80's when he was squatting (and presumably consuming copious amounts of marijuana) and he put on this song. they sold him the dream.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I think we have a situation in which many people are absolutely furious, and in most cases for good reason (leaving aside genuinely gammonical idiots who are upset about the existence of vegan sausage rolls, for instance), but the way politics, media (everything from 'MSM' to sketchy sponsored content on Facebook) and popular culture is set up, much of that anger has been harnessed by the very people it should be aimed at, who've deflected it towards the usual array of scapegoats - immigrants, the EU, "experts", the "liberal elite".

It's like a man tormenting a pitbull to gear it up for attacking someone else, when really it should be attacking him.
 
entertainment

entertainment

Well-known member
When I studied in Rome, people there seemed to have a much stronger individual drive. In Denmark, most of the people at uni just go along with it because it's the expected thing to do. So subservient to the norms that independent motives never cultivate.

The contrast was especially noticeable between Italian and Danish girls.
 
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