This is the English translation of a post I originally wrote in Hungarian and published on Medium in 2016. Read the original Hungarian version here.
Today marks exactly five years since I boarded a WizzAir flight in Budapest at six in the morning and changed my life forever by moving to London. I flew on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, so the ticket was pretty cheap. There weren’t many people on the plane.
A lot has happened in five years. We finished a master’s degree, lived in Brussels for a year, then moved back to London. After three years and no small number of hours of work, I’m about to finish my PhD and am currently job hunting.
These five years have changed us - me for certain. Everyone changes over such a stretch of time, but when you also switch countries and cultures, this effect is exponentially stronger, especially if you do it young, while your personality and worldview are still plastic and still taking shape.
In the following three mini-chapters, I’ll try to summarise the main lessons of these five years, in the hope that they might be useful to others too.
Knowledge Is a Balloon
I’m endlessly lucky to have been able to learn so much, and especially to have done so in such an incredible place. Over the past years I’ve had the chance to meet a bunch of frighteningly smart and driven people. Working alongside them, and the healthy rivalry that came with it, constantly pushed me to get the absolute maximum out of myself.
There’s a cliché that if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. Over the past years I’ve come to agree with this 100%, and it’s become a kind of mantra for me: I try to create opportunities for myself where I’m surrounded by people far smarter than me. Such an environment can be intimidating and exhausting, but it can unlock astonishing energy and potential for growth in us, which is why it pays off enormously in the long run. To use another classic cliché: no pain, no gain.
For example, maybe you didn’t understand something in a meeting and just smiled and nodded along (so as not to look completely lost), but afterwards you go home and google the topic to death until you get it. Of course you realise that, like all knowledge, this topic is also like an onion, and the meeting only touched its outermost layer. So it’s three in the morning by the time you’ve chewed through dozens of Wikipedia pages and papers, worked your way from the core of the onion out to its skin, and finally understand what it was actually about. Or it might take you a week or a month to get there. But the point is, when you reach the onion’s skin, two important things happen:
A deep, spreading sense of joy takes hold of you, because you’ve overcome a difficulty, made your brain work, and learned something new - and through this, your knowledge of the world has grown a little bigger. Like blowing into a balloon and watching it expand.
Then you realise that if the balloon is your knowledge and the air surrounding it is the unknown, then by blowing into the balloon you haven’t just increased its volume (your knowledge), but also its surface area in contact with the unknown - in other words, you realise just how little you actually know.
If you do this enough, and get into the habit of learning something new practically every day, giving your mind a little workout each day without fearing failure or difficulty, then your brain settles into what’s called a growth mindset, which has incredibly positive effects on your mental health. If you’re curious about the background to this, it’s worth looking up Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s talk on the topic - it’s what got me hooked on the idea in the first place.
Luckily, it’s incredibly easy to learn something exciting every single day nowadays, when dozens of universities - from Harvard through Stanford to MIT - publish their courses completely free of charge.
By the way, it doesn’t really matter whether what you’re learning is technical, scientific, or related to your profession - the point is that it gives your brain some kind of mental workout. Numerous studies have examined the connection between mental effort and dementia or Alzheimer’s disease in old age, and a recently published meta-study (a research method that pools data from many studies) found an encouraging link between the two. Here’s a summary and here’s the original publication.
Beyond the benefits above, continuous learning is also fantastic because it keeps your ego in check. When you’re confronted every day with the fact that you don’t know or understand this thing or that thing, it inevitably teaches you self-restraint and humility. I still have plenty of room to grow in this regard, but at least I feel I’ve found a method that reliably pushes me in that direction. So one of the things I’ve changed in is that I’ve come to love learning, and it’s become a life goal of mine to stay curious and spend as much time as possible in a growth mindset.
Borders Only Exist in Our Heads
About every six months I watch a particular video, and every single time (no matter that I must have seen it forty times already) it gives me goosebumps.
There’s something thoroughly ironic and comic about how humanity spent millennia, and an unimaginable amount of bloodshed, carving this planet up into borders among ourselves, only to realise by the 21st century that every serious problem threatening our survival (global warming, antibiotic resistance, terrorism, etc.) crosses those borders and can only be solved through cooperation. Like it or not, we’re all sitting in the same boat, and the captain has just announced over the tannoy that we’re heading for an iceberg - so it’s time we started working together.
For me, one of the most defining parts of our life abroad has been getting to know people from other countries and cultures. Over the years we’ve gained Greek, Turkish, English, Belgian, Dutch, Israeli, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, German, French, American, Saudi, Thai, Ghanaian, Chilean, Caribbean, Australian, and who knows how many other acquaintances - and, I can proudly say, friends too.
Megacities the size of London have plenty of hateful qualities (a city the size of Budapest is far more liveable), but if there’s one thing I’ve truly come to love here, it’s the incredible range of people you bump into over the years.
It’s one thing to learn about the world from a Lonely Planet guide or the Travel Channel, travel there, and strike up a conversation with a local. It’s an entirely different thing to actually know someone from a given country, to have them as a friend, to let them open up and talk about intimate or sensitive political, historical and cultural matters you’d otherwise almost never hear about. Of course, one data point isn’t a dataset, and just because I know a Chilean and we’ve talked for ten hours doesn’t make me an expert on Chile. Just as knowing five or six Greeks doesn’t qualify me to write a Wikipedia article about Greece.
But I know a lot more about these places, peoples and cultures than before I met these people, and more importantly, these relationships have blown my balloon up bigger. And we already know where a bigger balloon leads.
The most interesting thing in all of this, for me, was that the more people I met with completely different backgrounds, the more clearly I saw that, deep down, almost all of us want the same things. We want to live in a free country, in peace, where we collectively and democratically decide our own fate, where we choose leaders who can be held accountable, and where strong, transparent institutions look after and serve their citizens. The overwhelming majority of people want to live in a fair society, one where the state reaches out to those who’ve been pushed to the margins, one way or another, and gives them a real chance - whether that’s in education, healthcare or employment. We all want to leave our children a healthier, cleaner planet, with less famine and suffering, and more equality. Beneath our many surface-level differences, these simple but sincere wishes connect all of us. If we look at the world through this lens, our problems seem just a little less unsolvable.
The Elephant’s Trunk
Of course, anyone who claims that multiculturalism is flourishing flawlessly in cities like London is either deluded or lying. Anyone who’s lived in a place like this knows that alongside its countless benefits, the coexistence of different cultures also breeds plenty of problems and tension. It’s obvious that we still have a great deal to learn about one another, and this process could take a long time - potentially even centuries.
I’ll admit that lately this process seems fairly frightening and hopeless when I think about Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, and the rise of the far right. The elephant-shaped chart below might help explain these events, which at first glance seem to have nothing in common. It shows how real income (vertical axis) changed for different segments of the global population (horizontal axis) over the preceding twenty years.
Source: Lakner and Milanovic, 2015
The right-hand side of the chart (the tip of the trunk) shows that the top 1% - the wealthiest people on the planet - grew their wealth by 60%. Oh yes! Good for them. On the left (the elephant’s body) we see that the poorest people on the planet got nicely richer too (of course, it’s always easier to go from one to two than from fifty to a hundred). Among other things, this is nicely backed up by the fact that the UN’s Millennium Development Goals were achieved ahead of schedule. Of course, we can’t just lean back - there’s still plenty to do - but this is nonetheless a remarkable success story for the 20th and early 21st centuries.
The real problem is with the trunk - the section of the horizontal axis between 75% and 85%. These are the middle classes of rich countries. More specifically, the lower middle class that forms their backbone. As we can see, the past 20 years haven’t exactly been rosy for them. In some places, far from moving forward, they’ve actually become poorer than they were 20 years ago. Understandably, this breeds strong tension and social discontent, especially in light of the top 1%’s ostentatious spending, unrealistic bonuses, and the complete absence of any accountability following the 2008 crisis. On top of this comes the wave of refugees arriving from the east, who, as cheap labour, will once again put the lower and lower-middle classes most at risk.
So the tense resistance is understandable, and I believe that reducing inequality has to be one of the biggest political tasks facing Western societies in the coming decades. But it’s important to stress that there isn’t really much of an alternative to an increasingly tightly-woven global economy. If you think there is, I’d suggest you look at how many thousands of components, and how staggeringly complex a supply chain, went into making the phone or computer you’re reading this article on right now. To me it seems that the global economy has reached such a degree of interdependence and interconnection that we simply can’t move forward, develop, or manufacture things unless we cooperate.
But what matters far more than phones and laptops is, for instance, global warming or antibiotic resistance - things that could easily wipe us out within a hundred years, and which couldn’t care less what borders or cultural differences exist between us. All things considered, then, it’s clear that globalised, tightly integrated economic and governmental cooperation is vital for the development and survival of our species. This inevitably comes with labour migration and the mixing of cultures. So, after years spent in London’s melting pot, it seems to me that getting to know people from elsewhere isn’t just a positive, heartwarming experience - it’s something we actually have to do, staying open to one another, because our problems are shared and lock us all into the same boat.
Everything Has a Price
Over the past five years, both of my grandmothers and several other relatives have passed away. Thankfully, they all lived to a good age and didn’t suffer much. Even so, it’s terribly heart-wrenching to fly home for funerals and be confronted with the irreversible passing of time, and with the fact that you only have a day or two, in total, to grieve together with your family.
Almost without exception, every single one of our friends stayed behind and still lives in Hungary, so the weekly beers, get-togethers, trips to the cinema, the park, or on hikes that we used to have before we moved abroad, dropped down to 3-4 times a year. Truly good friendships can withstand this, of course, but they undeniably suffer for it. It’s painful, but you learn to accept that, since you’re no longer part of the group, people ask after you less often, and even when you do talk over Skype, it can barely substitute for actually being together.
You go through the same thing with your family. Children are born and grow up, marriages happen, weekend lunches and get-togethers pass without you, and you find out from Facebook alone what you’ve missed out on this time.
I’m not saying this situation is unbearable or unendurable, but I think we talk too little in Hungary about just how enormous a psychological burden it is to emigrate into a completely new culture, where most of the time you have no one, and often you’re no one. People living abroad generally don’t even dare complain about this to those back home, because the salary is good, everything looks great, and they don’t want to come across as whiny and cause resentment. But this prolonged suppression tends to harden you a little, after a while.
For me, the only silver lining in this was realising that if I’m going to do something, I’d better do it at 110%, because every minute I spend here is a minute I’m not spending with my family and friends back home. As a result, there’s (mostly) no slacking off or beating around the bush. There’s just work. There are surely less psychologically taxing ways of self-motivation in the long run, but this one is certainly effective.
Five Years and a Day Ago
The day before I boarded that particular flight five years ago, we were at a wedding. That was my last experience in Hungary. Although I’d always enjoyed my parents’ support for studying abroad, I remember my mum getting very emotional that evening. She sadly admitted that what she feared wasn’t that I’d never come back, but that I’d change so much that we’d no longer understand each other. I kept insisting this was silly and unimaginable.
As these things usually go, neither of us turned out to be entirely right, and we ended up landing somewhere between the two extremes. I’ve undoubtedly changed (as has my mum), and perhaps on a few things we now see the world differently. Honestly, it would be strange if a 29-year-old and a 58-year-old agreed on everything, so maybe that’s just as well.
But of course, as is so often the case, my mum’s instinct was right this time too. Everything and everyone around us changes, constantly and continuously. Anyone who says this isn’t frightening is lying (or at least stretching the truth). Beyond our loved ones and friends, what gives me direction these days amid all this chaos is trying to learn something new every day, staying curious and open to others, and working persistently towards my goals.
And if, every now and then, all this also happens to make me happy, well, that’s just the icing on the cake.
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