My Diplomatic Life
mydiplomaticlife.com
mydiplomaticlife.com
I'm a "diplomat brat" and most diplomatic careers are much more boring and pedestrian. I (US citizen) grew up in Japan, Venezuela, and Costa Rica.
I echo the other current top level commenter's sentiment that diplomacy should not be a family business. I recognize many of the advantages I have in terms of having a broad worldview and understanding, as well as language skills. However I would trade it all to grow up in a stable suburb and graduate from high school with a few handfuls of folks I'd been to primary school with.
Being uprooted every few years has led to an inability to form long-term relationships. I was essentially trained to have a timer on my friendships: approximately 3-5 years. In my time we didn't have the internet so once I moved it was over.
Not a fun time. I do not recall my childhood very fondly. In my case it was especially hard because I'm an only child. I often wondered, as a child, why it was so hard for me but not my peers. When I was in high school I realized that all of the "better adjusted" kids I was comparing myself to had siblings similar in age.
To those of you thinking of a diplomatic career: don't try to raise a family and be a diplomat. Just don't. It's not worth it. Do it while you're single for as long as you can, but the term "settle down" exists for a reason.
Having met maybe a dozen or so people in your situation, my general impression is that they share your concern, but not necessarily to the degree where they would consider it to outweigh the benefits of growing up under these circumstances.
Letting diplomats remain at the same post for longer would seem to be a possible improvement. Unfortunately, there is a purpose behind all that moving around, namely avoiding networks of corruption to form and/or practices diverging.
It'd be interesting to hear about the experience of children of military families. The problems are similar, but the benefits not: a diplomat's children get to life in the capital, usually attend the best schools, and enjoy all the variety of cultural happenings and high social status. For children on a military base, being mostly around others with the same background might be slightly more comfortable. But beyond that, I would imagine the environment to be drab and isolating.
He says as much in the intro at the bottom - he literally volunteered for the posts his colleagues studiously avoided. I guess he’s the diplomatic equivalent of an adrenaline junkie. (To be fair, those places are precisely where low-ranked diplomats can actually make a massive difference, unlike in glamorous capitals where they are basically glorified office staff.)
Great point. Don't have kids regardless of your career. Break the cycle.
I read somewhere that they move about 6 times in their lives and that children are used to get friendly quickly because it will not last. I would say that the general superficial openness of Americans supports this (to be clear: there is no negativity in that expression - it is actually the only reasonable way to live a normal life in a quickly changing world of "friends").
I do not have scientific data about that - it is just what I read and the ~30 times I travelled to the US and met some people there (both in larger cities and in remote areas - but mostly larger cities and tech people).
I am French and we do not move much. We stay with our parents a long time, possibly go somewhere to study but a lot of people will not move spontaneously.
It is not unusual to have friends form a very young age - my children go to high school with the ones they went to kindergarten, all this right next to Paris.
I think that it is even more pronounced in Italy.
For example, many of people's ~10 moves happen in their 20s when they're starting and establishing their lives, career, etc and even then most move are in the same county. Most likely they don't have kids yet and almost definitely haven't bought a home, so there are few roots.
But on the other end, by the time someone is 40, they'll likely only move 1-2 more times.
Still probably not good but not as bad as you might think.
Anecdotally: From my own life, I moved 3 times before graduating high school (same school district), 5 times in my 20s, 1 time in my 30s, and probably again in the next few years.
I think you may have misinterpreted the statistic about moving 6 times in a lifetime. That’s less than once per decade, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re moving away from their friends and family.
In America, it’s common to buy a “starter home” as your first house and then move to progressively nicer houses throughout your life as you can afford different houses.
Some people do choose to move to different cities for jobs or families, but it’s not true that we’re all moving away from friends over again.
If your only experiences in America were traveling to large, expensive cities then you likely saw a disproportionately large number of job-related moves. It’s common for people in big cities to move there for career purposes for a while before relocating elsewhere to raise families later. If you were primarily talking to people at bars or after-work social events, your sample size was likely biased away from typical people with families, who generally are spending time with their children rather than out socializing after work.
When we do move away, it’s common to maintain friendships remotely and coordinate return visits. Most people don’t simply forget their friends after moving.
I’m always fascinated to read outside descriptions of Americans on the Internet because they so often don’t resemble life here at all. Then again, whenever I read Reddit and Twitter it feels like many Americans are describing exaggerated versions of cherry-picked edge cases as if they were normal life here, so I can see how it happens.
This is one of the reasons I like the non-technical threads on HN that much (myself being uber technical): you have often well-balanced people providing a reasonable (and often sourced) perspective on topics I have a faint idea about.
This is also why I am trying to push my teen children to read HN, so that they get a really unique perspective from a dynamic source, where they can quickly select the points interesting to them (as opposed to, say, tech or sociological magazines where you need to have a interest to read longer articles). It sometimes work :)
Without sounding like HN marketing dept, it is actually sad that it is not advertised more in these circles (teenagers) who could benefit from the discussions. My children go to very good schools and exactly nobody there ever heard of HN (not one single person)
I've absorbed a lot of good information from HN comments, but I hate to say that the signal to noise ratio is not particularly high in 2020. Reading the comment section without a significant degree of skepticism could result in a lot of misinformation.
I didn't fully understand how off the mark the HN comment section could be until reading the comments for topics and companies I was closely familiar with. There are a lot of very confident posts here from people who don't really understand what they're talking about, mixed in with some great posts from people who know exactly what they're talking about. Take everything with a grain of salt.
I agree that there are plenty of incorrect comments, but that's life everywhere... You can't enforce truth for every comment, and especially not in a place with such general discussion.
Also, I've been reading HN for around a decade now, and I actually disagree that it's gotten worse. I like HN of 2020 too!
Are there any other similar sites that are better? (Asking seriously, I'd like to know!)
So if I have a choice to make, I prefer to push them towards a source where people who write nonsense are more likely to be corrected than a place where tribalism or conformism is so high that another opinion does not have a chance.
All of this is the introduction to discussions between us afterwards (where they get one more biased opinion - mine), but I prefer the topics they would get from HN than Instagram.
As an example, we spent a good amont of time yesterday when he brought up the case of a child (11 yo) that paid for the artwork of his mother. It was a very interesting exchange of opinions about what parents and children are entitled to vs responsibilities vs casual money management etc.
I can't imagine living somewhere for so long. And I'm far from a diplomat brat.
- home with the parents in one place until college
- then college in an another city or around their place (and so they stay with the parents), maybe a 50/50 split
- then they move for a job
This is 2-3 places.
Again, everyone is different and it depends on many factors, this is data from maybe 20 or 30 people (we've been discussing a lot about that recently as we have children who go or will shortly go to college and we were comparing them to us)
I don't mean to belittle the specific challenges/hardships of your childhood, but I think the 3-5 year friendship thing is pretty common. my childhood was almost the one you wish you had: I went to school with the same kids K-12 and I have a brother two years younger than me. I can't say it worked out much differently for me though. outside of the main clique, which I was not part of, all the friend groups seemed to get scrambled up every few years as people got older and grew apart. I had tables where I was welcome to sit at lunch throughout school, but it took me halfway through highschool to find a good group of friends. most of my classmates came from well-off families, so it was expected that we would go to college out-of-state. so we all went off to different colleges across the country. I'm now the only one from my highschool friend group to live in our home state. I made some good friends in college too, but again, we were all going to school far away from home, so we naturally went our separate ways after graduating.
I'm not sure whether it's better to be exposed early or sheltered for a while, but I think this is just the nature of our world. people move around in search of the best opportunities, making new friends and losing track of old ones along the way. as a CS major, I can get at least a decent job pretty much anywhere, but most people aren't this lucky. after living a different life in a different place for a few years, memories start to be the only things you have in common with your old friends.
It is easy to grass is greener, to think everything might've been better with a stable steady upbringing in a single location. It might. You might have instead run away from that staid small town and never looked back, hating everything about that narrow minded world.
Honestly telling anyone itinerant never to have children is some crazy projection.
No. Losing friends through the "natural cycle of friendship" is just as traumatic or even more so.
You are forced to "abandon" your friends regardless. This is true when you switch schools - from elementary school to junior high to high school. The same group of friends you had in your freshman year isn't necessarily the same as you'd have in your senior year. Heck, you can lose friends and make new friends just by having different classes/schedules. People just simply drift apart, fight, etc.
Just like people have a romanticized view of your childhood, you seem to have a romanticized view of childhood in the suburbs.
Also, losing friends because you have to move falls under "the natural cycle of friendship".
Not like this doesn't happen to those people as well, and in this case you are literally never allowed to have any relationship mature past a handful of years during a key time in development of social skills.
Grass is always greener, obviously there will be benefits the person that moved will have that the other didn't recieve, but saying they are the same thing just isn't logically true.
Agreed. Even into young adulthood I realized many of my good friends were good friends for a season. We would change as people and the things that once brought us together were no longer engaging for one or both of us. It took me a while to get over this but now I can look back and remember the friends who were great friends then but wouldnt be now.
Imagine if one day you have N friends, and the next you have 0 and don't know anybody.
true-ish when I was a kid. although for most of my childhood I didn't have any friends anyway, either because I didn't "fit in" or because I'm just not a very gregarious person. since the age of eighteen, I've had the step-wise N to zero several times: once when I graduated highschool and went to college out of state, again when I transferred schools, and most recently when I graduated college and got a job. I'm not saying it doesn't suck, just that it's not particularly unusual, at least for adults. having only lived one path, I can't really say whether it's better to be exposed to this reality early, or to be mostly sheltered from it until after highschool.
It's not really the 3-5 year thing though. it's about whether you have supportive weak-tie friendships with people that you can easily visit [1][2], something I believe is especially missing for men in our current society [3]. Are you able to go and see people that hold some of your story - who you can lean on when things get rough in certain periods of your life? If there are thousands of kilometres in between you and you need to take expensive flights - because your parents continually moved/uprooted you to countries on the other side of the world (my case) - then the answer is no. This is a reality I am starting to wake up to. I have a lot of unprocessed and unexpressed grief about this, having grown up all over the world during my youth. I do not have many weak-tie friendships. it fucking sucks. big time. To me 'internet friends' are not a good replacement for in person physical friends who you can go and get a hug from, share some of your sorrows from daily life with, drink tea with, or hang out and watch TV or do your favorite shared activity with.
There is a well-known researcher who researched kids in highly mobile families who wrote a book called 'Third Culture Kids' [4]. I found it very insightful. Essentially the book coins the term 'Third Culture Kid' to describe a child who was raised in a foreign culture+country during their formative years (before 18). It has been useful to me to find communities online. There are now important arguments coming forward [5] that promote a wider use of this term, as it has mainly been used for childen in white upper-class circles.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200701-why-your-weak-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/smarter-living/why-you-ne...
[3] https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/tox...
[4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/121920.Third_Culture_Kid... + https://www.cmhnetwork.org/news/the-trouble-with-third-cultu... + https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home/transcript...
This is a fantasy not the reality of everyone else.
I do not have kids, but on our mid-career tour now. Generally speaking, everyone enjoys the lifestyle provided by the FS, but it is not for everyone. There are always a few people who do nothing but complain and try to make everyone else miserable. These folks often have kids, and they try too hard to replicate the US suburban lifestyle in foreign countries. They set themselves up for failure and cannot adjust.
Taking the FS exam is step 1 of many, although if you are trying to join as an IT professional, it's much easier because of how desperate they are to fill IT positions. The generalist positions, especially political and economic, probably have less than 1-2% success rate after passing the FS exam.
Such as the head of the American Institute in Taiwan (the de facto embassy), Brent Christensen (https://www.ait.org.tw/offices/taipei/director-christensen/), who has a dental degree.
I had a similar upbringing and can’t at all relate to this
Nothing wrong with misfits, but they often don't have the social network to help you be successful as an adult.
These sorts of environments just have a /lot/ less feedback. Pros and cons for sure, but being blindsided by basic life lessons in your 20s that others learned in adolescence isn't particularly fun.
What you are saying is true for many countries, still most of them do not have an embassy in North Korea. The reason being probably also that it is quite expensive (as every embassy is) while not providing a lot of benefits because trade/cultural relationships with North Korea are very difficult.
For example, there is no British embassy or consulate in Benin.
Embassies are how countries communicate. It makes sense to have an embassy there if you need to talk to a country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diplomatic_missions_in...
https://www.mydiplomaticlife.com/tirana-ambushed-and-2-diplo...
Considering how spies are mixed in, I don't doubt it