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Comment by nickbauman | Hacker News Reader

A German-born American with 11 years total living in Germany. Almost all of it with the iron curtain in place. A white guy, I now live in a neighborhood that's 3/4 black, 10% Hmong for 16 years, I feel very normal being permanently out-of-place. In Germany I am the "Amerikanischer". Here it's "he's German".

But I'm permanently alone in a crowd, too. Always on the outside looking in. Suspicious of the herd. Skeptical of consensus. Circumspect. Cantankerous at times. I am, simply, permanently, "the other".

It's all not bad. You notice things other people don't wherever you go. You're the first person to seek out the people who don't fit in and hold out your hand in friendship. Because you know, deep down, that with all the divisiveness we're experiencing right now, that we will never get through it any stronger without the greatest concern for each other.

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Hi. I feel the same way. When I was a kid, once a week my family would drive to the other side of town (the 99.99% black side) to visit my grandparents and uncle (they were the .01% white folk). I would spend all day Sunday hanging out in this area of town full of dirt poor people (just like my family there). I've never felt at ease and at home as I felt there. The people were friendlier than I could imagine. There were very, very few black people on my side of town, and it seemed weird and wrong.

When I was in my 20's at college, I would sometimes find the bad part of town and just ride around on my motorcycle. I'd do this when I was lonely and needing that "belonging" feeling.

So, from that early age on the other side of town, I've embraced otherness, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

10,000 to 1. Very different indeed.

Were you ever 'eyed down'? I got that recently at my childhood home.

I'm unfamiliar with that phrase, but I'll say:

I went back in the 80's to see my uncle, after my grandparents died. The house was falling down around him, but the rest of the neighborhood was in a similar state (still poor, still all black). When I knocked, a girl on a stoop across the street told me "the white man that rides the bicycle" wouldn't be back for a while. So I hung around. Because I was there during the week, instead of the weekend, it felt different. But, I was a lot older, too. I still felt at home, though.

A few years later the church across the screen bought my uncle's house and made it a parking lot. It was a good deal for them, since the house had been condemned by then. I haven't been back to my home city, but I did look at the street on google street view. Made me sad.

Given an aggressive stare as a nonverbal threat.

That sounds similar to what's happening to my dad's place. The city reconnected a main street to circumnavigate his entire mobile home community a few years back.

Never had that, but as an adult I only went back that one time. Who knows what it'd be like now.

Mexican-Americans have a saying for that "Ni de aquí, ni de allá" - "Not from here, not from there".

I remember a quote from a Mexican-American movie (Selena) "We have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time! It's exhausting!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUZ5Yhwzz80

Here's the scene from Selena, it's pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw5bA8cVF-E

I know what you mean. I don't really belong anywhere anymore. I even wrote a short rant about that recently (http://b1nary.ch/2017/03/12/nationality-austria-but/)

I too think I get better insights sometimes and it let me learn how wrong this kind of border thinking actually is.

I had similar upbringing and I can say I feel the same. Definitely something to be said about being averse to groupthink.

I am an Indian who has grown up and lives in UAE most of my life. I really enjoy the feeling of being an outsider here & in India.

I feel like I am an alien on parent earth with no place to call home.

I call the internet my home and I welcome you to do the same!

I relate to what you are saying. I started feeling like this after I came back to reality from the world of warcraft, where I spent 2 years from age 11.

> But I'm permanently alone in a crowd, too. Always on the outside looking in. Suspicious of the herd. Skeptical of consensus. Circumspect. Cantankerous at times. I am, simply, permanently, "the other".

This is exactly where I ended up, there's no going back now, no 'home' where I feel I belong. Biggest contributing factors were hitchhiking across the planet and experiencing Ayahuasca. But I also feel that just understanding the importance of free software as a political right puts a huge rift between me and the people I meet.

A society is built on shared assumptions, a mutual understanding if you will. When you reject an assumption required for participation then you stand alone and the understanding is no longer mutual.

I've met a few people who moved across continents in their youth, sometimes multiple times. Almost without a fault, they are somewhat obsessed with the concept of 'home'.

My longest time abroad was a year in Chicago, and the place where I grew up is far too boring to ever be considered 'home', so I really have no idea where 'home' would be for me. But I'm largely just indifferent to the idea.

FWIW: I have many American friends living here in Berlin, and none of them are really struggling with their identity. But it may be different if you never had the experience of being part of the 'native' population... It's probably a similar fate to what members of other minorities (religion/race/disability) experience.

Plenty of folks in the LGBT community have this feeling as well - rejection or a feeling of not belonging from where one comes from touches most of my friends there. There's communities, cities and cultures that people attach to, and many people trying to find what home means.

This is why the furry community is majority LGBT+. I went to my first furry convention last year, and it was like coming home. Furry Twitter is close, but doesn't quite match it. I'm going to my first Pride later this year, so I'll have something demographically similar to compare with.

Next year would be my 14th year - it's been home to me since I found it, and there's really nothing quite like it.

It's nice to know that there are other "third-culture" people out there.

As an American-born Saudi, living most of my life to and fro between the two countries I'm from, I had quite the same experience.

Though it's a lonely frame of mind you describe, it's likely not rare, given modern globalization by the numbers. Even if most reform into cliques derivative of both parent cultures, some small percentage of singletons is still a fair number of people.

I can from experience say it's one that some children of immigrant parents (or parents that moved a lot, and/or both) identify as, when they don't identify with their own culture nor have complete familiarity with their surrounding one (nor have a 'derivative clique' of similar parents-of-immigrants to identify with - though even if they did, they'd likely have a common 'outsider' mindset w.r.t. 'everyone else').

It's funny, iirc the whole "thankful for the outsider's perspective" thing was essay/application fodder for me at one point, and something which I considered might be useful for a particular career path.

All this to say - thinking of yourself as "alone in a crowd" is likely a risky supposition if what you're after is the true state of things. https://xkcd.com/610/

Narcissism aside, the feeling is more akin to the part of Herman Hesse's novel Siddhartha where he finds himself walking alone through a pass in the Himalayas at night. Realizing for the first time he's completely alone, a tiny, tiny fleck in the maelstrom of the cosmos, his ego is obliterated. But he's also completely free.

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