Breaking out of the culture you were born into

Wicked223

It's much, much harder than it sounds.

IanExMachina

Examples at all?

SotiCoto

Well, it isn't if it doesn't have any physical reminders and you're not raised in it.

Gelzo

Deciding on a belief system that's different from your family? Getting out of the ghetto? Living somewhere where they don't speak your native language?

┻━┻ ︵ ヽ(`Д´）╯︵ ┻━┻

It's only harder than it sounds if you don't want to leave it.

Or at least that was the case for me.

Well unless it's like what Gelzo said about the language and all.

IanExMachina

I was just trying to go with something definite as culture covers a lot of things, in all the things Gelzo mentions I'd say yes to varying degrees.

SotiCoto

Wicked223 ...... are you trying to leave teh Internetz?  =(

Wicked223

I suck at writing OPs, so here:

I was born in New York City, in a conservative fundamentalist Christian family, with everything that entails. The parts of New York that I've lived and gone to school in for most of my life have generally been immersed in turn-of-the-millenium hip-hop culture, and for most of my life I was too.

That all changed as soon as I discovered the Internet, and more specifically the larger Internet subculture, which led to a radical alteration in my entire worldview in a span of 5-6 years, and now I don't feel any strong connection to my current environment. I'd like to change that.

Deciding on a belief system that's different from your family? Getting out of the ghetto? Living somewhere where they don't speak your native language?

yes, no, and no.

SotiCoto

Oh... I helped someone out of a situation like that before.
I helped a girl escape from her oppressive christian fundie parents in Arkansas, where she'd been stuck living with them her entire life.

O'course when she tried to follow me back to Britain she failed to get through customs due to her naivety, got deported, wasted most of her money on phone-cards trying to call me every day.... and I dumped her because she was too clingy and had pissed off all her other friends (and several of mine, AND my family members)...
I still kinda have to take credit for unleashing her on the world.



But yeah. You HAVE to get out of there.
Just find a boyfriend / girlfriend / hermaphroditefriend / whatever who you can leech cash and a new life from for a while until you can get yourself set somewhere else and break off from them.

glennmagusharvey

Life experience is kinda like a metroidvania.  You gradually uncover more and more places that are further and further from where you started.

When I was a little kid, I thought that all men worked day jobs from morning till evening, all women were stay at home moms, all girls were nice and calm (except for tomboys) and liked dolls and pink things, all boys were rough-and-tumble and liked action figures and robots, and all of these people lived in single-family homes in suburban areas, complete with two-car garages that actually contained two cars (along with a lawnmower and other stuff), frontyard lawns, backyard lawns, wooden decks, two interior levels, separate bedrooms, family room, living room, kitchen, and so on.  Most impressively, I actually wondered, when I was a kid, why all these male composers wrote such pretty, lyrical music.

Now I know that people live in anything from bridge underpasses and tunnels and mountain caves to passenger cars to mobile homes to tiny cramped studio apartments with rent paid by the month to townhouses without windows on the side to basement rentals to penthouse apartments to million-dollar mansions.  And that many, many people don't have nine-to-five desk jobs with weekends and holidays, but instead work at odd hours and days.  And that there are many professional or otherwise working women, and that men and women don't necessarily get married, and they also have extramarital affairs.  And that there are some men who are open to or prefer relationships with other men, and some women who are open to or prefer relationships with other women.  And that there's nothing that actually says that girls are inherently placid and elegant and boys inherently rambunctious and loud, but it's societal norms that have caused this stereotype, and that "tomboys" are not at all weird.

And sometimes, just like in metroidvanias, you discover things very close to where you started, only very late in the game.  The concept of sexual intercourse is one such example.  I mean, where else did you get started?

glennmagusharvey

Oh, I also have learned that Tchaikovsky was gay.  So was Saint-Saëns, apparently.

Longfellow

Cool, I knew that about Tchaikovsky but not Saint-Saëns.

Schitzo

^^^ nice metaphor

SotiCoto

... Kewky....  
When I was a kid I thought for a while that living with a single mother and 12 cats in the middle of the Welsh countryside was normal.
Then I actually talked to someone from school and learnt that their mothers hadn't divorced their fathers yet, and that they got pocket-money, and got to eat things that weren't made of lentils or chick-peas.  I figured that was probably because not only did they have two parents to earn twice as much money, but at least some of them probably had a better way of doing it than busking with a flute in a shopping center.
My mother used to be really annoyed at me for not liking the taste of mushrooms... but I can't help it. They're disgusting... even if they are practically the easiest food to find in the Welsh countryside (at least without stealing someone's sheep).

MillerCross

Hmmm, I can't really say I have a culture of my own. This annoys me.

Vorpy

Mentioning Texas is relevant.

Gelzo

^^I used to think that until I realized that it's pretty much the same thing as thinking you have no accent.

Think about all the things that are strange to you that happen in other cultures. When there are things that you perceive to not be strange, that's where your culture influenced you.