Yes, in much of the world the old people stay in the family, and the women of the family are supposed to take care of them on top of other responsibilities like caring for children, cooking, and often a full-time job. More likely than not, they also served you food while you held interesting conversations with the men of the family. I'm not saying multigenerational families aren't great, I'm saying that Western people, especially men, are quite often have very idealistic views of non-Western families.
Hi Julie, yes that's definitely the BIG question. I'm not saying it's fair - an immense burden of work falls on women in that structure - but the experience of my life FWIW has shown me that the current model we have in the West just isn't really working and that if family is a preeminent value, as I think it has to be, then there is a certain amount to take in from the older structure of a large family and a division of labor largely along gender lines. There is obviously a huge amount to debate in there.
Always enjoy how you write and think - it was one of the many push factors that made me subscribe. I so enjoyed this . Your para that begins 'on the other hand' could be a 'copy and paste' of my thoughts of my time in the Pacific islands. Thanks!
Super interesting post! Thank you, Sam! The cultural differences you note are very similar to what I noted when I was in the Peace Corps in the Russian Far East 2001-02. Also similar is what commentator Julie notes below: the women did all of the propping up of the family and all of the housework, even when they were also MDs and had engineering degrees.
On the point about forming online communities to replace traditional ones: it sounds really unsatisfying to me as an old Gen Xer. Maybe it's just because I don't live outside the US and have been in one place for a long time (and that place is not a coastal city like NYC or Los Angeles), but I haven't had trouble building "real life" communities with work friends, church friends and even neighborhood friends. Maybe it also helps that I've always known I wanted a family and married and had that family. But it's not just that. Even when I was in the Peace Corps, I was starting to form communities in the remote town where I taught and where I was the only native speaker of English for miles. True, the internet wasn't an option back then in the way it is now (and I had no money for it even if it had been). But the whole point of my being there was to get to know the culture and the ordinary people who made it up. Getting online would have stymied that. I'll never know, though: the Russian government kicked us out before we could serve our second year, which everyone had said was the fun year. That's another story, though. :)
Thanks Terzah! Of course you're right that IRL is irreplaceable, but I do think the fabric of how people live now is so deeply changed that it's just a reality that we're going to be living more of our lives online. The question is whether we stay in the deeply unsatisfying online frameworks we have now or learn how to build sustaining communities in those spaces.
Very interesting post, but don't give up on those offline spaces yet. As great as online community is, it can't replace offline community, and hard as it may be to believe, that still exists in some places. We need to cultivate more places like that, not declare them extinct. My neighbors and their kids keep barging into our house at weird hours of the day and we love it. Don't give up on offline communities just yet.
I had almost the opposite experience after spending nearly three years in Chiang Mai, another digital nomad hub.
I arrived not long after the pandemic, and I think that's an important part of the story. After years of isolation and a life increasingly confined to screens, I wasn't looking for a better online community. I was simply hungry to be around real people again.
What I found wasn't that community had moved online. Digital tools had become remarkably effective at bringing people together offline. Reading groups, independent film screenings, stand-up comedy nights, board game meetups, public talks, coworking spaces, and countless informal gatherings became some of the most meaningful parts of my life here.
Over the past year, as the Web3 wave faded and AI accelerated, I found myself less interested in waiting for community to exist and more interested in helping create it. AI made solitary digital work easier than ever, but that only increased the value of spending time with real people.
That makes me wonder whether what has really moved online isn't community itself, but coordination. The internet helps us find each other. Community still happens when people actually meet.
I also wonder whether part of what you observed in Kyrgyzstan reflects different stages of modernization as much as cultural differences. Much of what you describe about kinship networks would feel familiar to people who grew up in small towns and later moved to large cities. For me, digital nomadism didn't replace public life. It gave me my first real opportunity to participate in it.
Interesting. It would be cool to better understand if this holds up longitudinally. It could be the case that all these places are getting more WEIRD over time, even if cross-sectional differences at a given point in time are not shrunk. There probably exists the data to do such an analysis. The World Values Survey would be the first place to look.
Yes, WEIRDness is definitely spreading, but I think the Henrich thesis is that WEIRDness really is a long progression, so that you can get fast universalization in things like markets without that necessarily reaching some crucial underlying cultural structures.
Best thing you have written. The world was built on families and genetic tribes. From them evolved deeply rooted moral universes — the shared stories, rituals, loyalties, and cosmic meanings that held societies together. Over many centuries, people united through the DNA of family and tribe, building institutions on rituals of belief that glued the system into a coherent whole.
The modern idea that individuals can create new “societies” of commonality in the ether of technology — detached from kinship, land, ritual, and inherited meaning — is a failure to understand humanity.
As one of your regular readers, Sam, I was surprised to learn that you are living in Bishkek. A few years ago, we had a marvelous tourist visit there and to all the "stans." We saw the usual sites, witnessed some astoundingly marvelous instrumental local folk music and heard bizarre stories from our guide about kidnapping and horse race courtships, as well as about buzkashi. We visited a hippodrome but never saw a game. Your experienced personal observations about the "mentality" were fascinating and greatly augment my sense of the place.
All that aside, I really enjoyed your reflections on evolving worldwide culture and American values. My wife and I are well-traveled and enjoy how much we learn by leaving America for a while and then coming back and seeing it with fresh eyes. We just returned fromam month in the Baltics, a beautiful area to be a nomad by the way except for the weather. Thanks so much for this piece. Keep up your great writing and best wishes.
Yes, in much of the world the old people stay in the family, and the women of the family are supposed to take care of them on top of other responsibilities like caring for children, cooking, and often a full-time job. More likely than not, they also served you food while you held interesting conversations with the men of the family. I'm not saying multigenerational families aren't great, I'm saying that Western people, especially men, are quite often have very idealistic views of non-Western families.
Hi Julie, yes that's definitely the BIG question. I'm not saying it's fair - an immense burden of work falls on women in that structure - but the experience of my life FWIW has shown me that the current model we have in the West just isn't really working and that if family is a preeminent value, as I think it has to be, then there is a certain amount to take in from the older structure of a large family and a division of labor largely along gender lines. There is obviously a huge amount to debate in there.
Always enjoy how you write and think - it was one of the many push factors that made me subscribe. I so enjoyed this . Your para that begins 'on the other hand' could be a 'copy and paste' of my thoughts of my time in the Pacific islands. Thanks!
Appreciate it. Thanks Gordon!
Super interesting post! Thank you, Sam! The cultural differences you note are very similar to what I noted when I was in the Peace Corps in the Russian Far East 2001-02. Also similar is what commentator Julie notes below: the women did all of the propping up of the family and all of the housework, even when they were also MDs and had engineering degrees.
On the point about forming online communities to replace traditional ones: it sounds really unsatisfying to me as an old Gen Xer. Maybe it's just because I don't live outside the US and have been in one place for a long time (and that place is not a coastal city like NYC or Los Angeles), but I haven't had trouble building "real life" communities with work friends, church friends and even neighborhood friends. Maybe it also helps that I've always known I wanted a family and married and had that family. But it's not just that. Even when I was in the Peace Corps, I was starting to form communities in the remote town where I taught and where I was the only native speaker of English for miles. True, the internet wasn't an option back then in the way it is now (and I had no money for it even if it had been). But the whole point of my being there was to get to know the culture and the ordinary people who made it up. Getting online would have stymied that. I'll never know, though: the Russian government kicked us out before we could serve our second year, which everyone had said was the fun year. That's another story, though. :)
Thanks Terzah! Of course you're right that IRL is irreplaceable, but I do think the fabric of how people live now is so deeply changed that it's just a reality that we're going to be living more of our lives online. The question is whether we stay in the deeply unsatisfying online frameworks we have now or learn how to build sustaining communities in those spaces.
Very interesting post, but don't give up on those offline spaces yet. As great as online community is, it can't replace offline community, and hard as it may be to believe, that still exists in some places. We need to cultivate more places like that, not declare them extinct. My neighbors and their kids keep barging into our house at weird hours of the day and we love it. Don't give up on offline communities just yet.
I think if you have that, great. But it's a 21st century reality that that's not going to be available for a lot of people.
I had almost the opposite experience after spending nearly three years in Chiang Mai, another digital nomad hub.
I arrived not long after the pandemic, and I think that's an important part of the story. After years of isolation and a life increasingly confined to screens, I wasn't looking for a better online community. I was simply hungry to be around real people again.
What I found wasn't that community had moved online. Digital tools had become remarkably effective at bringing people together offline. Reading groups, independent film screenings, stand-up comedy nights, board game meetups, public talks, coworking spaces, and countless informal gatherings became some of the most meaningful parts of my life here.
Over the past year, as the Web3 wave faded and AI accelerated, I found myself less interested in waiting for community to exist and more interested in helping create it. AI made solitary digital work easier than ever, but that only increased the value of spending time with real people.
That makes me wonder whether what has really moved online isn't community itself, but coordination. The internet helps us find each other. Community still happens when people actually meet.
I also wonder whether part of what you observed in Kyrgyzstan reflects different stages of modernization as much as cultural differences. Much of what you describe about kinship networks would feel familiar to people who grew up in small towns and later moved to large cities. For me, digital nomadism didn't replace public life. It gave me my first real opportunity to participate in it.
Interesting. It would be cool to better understand if this holds up longitudinally. It could be the case that all these places are getting more WEIRD over time, even if cross-sectional differences at a given point in time are not shrunk. There probably exists the data to do such an analysis. The World Values Survey would be the first place to look.
Yes, WEIRDness is definitely spreading, but I think the Henrich thesis is that WEIRDness really is a long progression, so that you can get fast universalization in things like markets without that necessarily reaching some crucial underlying cultural structures.
Best thing you have written. The world was built on families and genetic tribes. From them evolved deeply rooted moral universes — the shared stories, rituals, loyalties, and cosmic meanings that held societies together. Over many centuries, people united through the DNA of family and tribe, building institutions on rituals of belief that glued the system into a coherent whole.
The modern idea that individuals can create new “societies” of commonality in the ether of technology — detached from kinship, land, ritual, and inherited meaning — is a failure to understand humanity.
As one of your regular readers, Sam, I was surprised to learn that you are living in Bishkek. A few years ago, we had a marvelous tourist visit there and to all the "stans." We saw the usual sites, witnessed some astoundingly marvelous instrumental local folk music and heard bizarre stories from our guide about kidnapping and horse race courtships, as well as about buzkashi. We visited a hippodrome but never saw a game. Your experienced personal observations about the "mentality" were fascinating and greatly augment my sense of the place.
All that aside, I really enjoyed your reflections on evolving worldwide culture and American values. My wife and I are well-traveled and enjoy how much we learn by leaving America for a while and then coming back and seeing it with fresh eyes. We just returned fromam month in the Baltics, a beautiful area to be a nomad by the way except for the weather. Thanks so much for this piece. Keep up your great writing and best wishes.