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It’s kind of ironic because a lot of Californians moving to Portugal are also trying to escape some aspects of their country’s culture they don’t like. Except they are also escaping insanely high cost of living, increasing violent crime and now almost yearly apocalyptic fires, power outages, dwindling tap water reserves and earthquakes. And unless you live in a very expensive part of town it’s hard to survive without a car in California or most of the U.S. I would love to live in a city like Lisbon where the public transportation is good enough that you don’t really need a car.

> public transportation is good enough that you don’t really need a car.

For having access to good public transportation with regular frequency you need to live somewhere central in most of the big European cities. It might work out for you but locals are getting priced out because of these relatively rich Californian immigrants moving in and pricing out the locals. Now the locals need to move out to suburbs and use cars or not so frequent trains and buses.

> most people "around me" who are in "the tech world" are pretty much diametrically opposed to most portuguese customs and culture. They don't really identify with the country, the history, the religion, the folklore, the politics, the sports

If you don't identify as Portugese, then most likely all these things will register as pretty decorations for your otherwise cosmopolitan life. If you do identify as Portugese, these things can register as an anchor preventing you from developing and exploring the possibilities of life.

That was certainly how I felt about the UK when I left in (3 decades ago).

The .com crash made me leave, it was almost impossible to stay employed afterwards, unless one would like to be jumping jobs every couple of months (many of my friends went through this, others created their own companies).

I left, now it is really hard to come back before retirement, due to the ways life drives us around.

It really feels like an ecochamber, or a generation thing maybe, because even with my regular visits I seldom meet people that think that way.

What I do meet, is the difference of working in Portugal, and how things work in central/nothern Europe.

What do you mean by “ I seldom meet people that think that way”? You seldom meet people in Portugal that think in what way?

OP's second paragraph in relation to our culture and heritage.

> I find it somewhat atrocious how much we like to tell the great stories of how we went and stole, raped, killed and enslaved during the time of the discoveries, all for our own pleasure (and that of our religion).

Is that really the general consensus over there? I'm trying to think of a way someone would rationalize decimating entire tribes over wood as a good thing but I'm coming up short.

Have you met Americans? And the myth of "conquering the West"?

Heck, we just had a president who thought Andrew Jackson was the best thing since sliced bread - and that guy is sort of the textbook definition of a cheerleader for genocide and slavery.

So, yes, people rationalize a whole lot of truly horrible stuff if it was "their" group doing the horrible stuff.

Edit: To be clear, that's not specifically about Americans or Portuguese. The "when we did it, it was good, but otherwise it's horrible" thing is a pretty universal trait.

My ancestors were Vikings. We all have skeletons in the closet

In my experience people mostly don't really think about these things too deeply. They see it as an epoch where their country was successful, proud, expanding etc. They look at this very superficially and don't think about the harm caused.

I think this becomes more prevalent the poorer/less significant the country is today compared to their great past. It's the "good old times" phenomenon.

> rationalize decimating entire tribes over wood

"Look at this cool palace we built and all the rare and exotic wood we used!"

"Where did you get the wood again?"

(See the general argument about decolonisation and re-contextualising within European countries, and fights over things like the Edward Colston statue)

Like someone has said, people don't really think about it that much. No one is out there saying we should "conquer the world like we did before", but they do look at that as the "greatest period in our history" and they praise our "courage" for "finding new worlds". Portuguese people were the discoverers, it's like the world is what it is because of our amazing courage and abilities[1]. The fact that we did that while pillaging, murdering and raping is often not even considered.

It does not help that we have "Os Lusíadas" which is a literary wonder in terms of its form, but whose content is basically emphatically praising those times. I hate "Os Lusíadas" not due to its form, like many young people do, but due to its content and how it praises the story of how we went about being warmongers and rapists.

So while you say that people "rationalize", most people really haven't thought about it at all.

[1] We're one of those countries that are so small or have such an inferiority complex that we are obsessed with anything in the news or history of the world that involves us. We go crazy because Obama's dog is a "portuguese water dog", or because "Cristiano Ronaldo" is well-known, or because some character in a sitcom mentioned us. So knowing that we were once "great" or "responsible" for something usually fills us with never-ending pride. I can't get this mentality, and I very much despise it. I guess it just shows how disconnected I am. I love our people, and I think we're genuinely nice, polite and have decent work-ethic, as well as a country with reasonably beautiful landscape, a safe environment and nice weather (not for me, but for most people). However, that's about it. In other words, if a war broke out and I had to choose between leaving the country or fighting for it, I would definitely not fight for it, as it means very little to me. There are many things that mean much more to me than my country, and those I would be willing to fight for.

That makes a lot of sense. I have Portuguese heritage and plan on acquiring citizenship in the future. It's nice to get some insight on the culture over there. Thank you.

Something interesting that I noticed learning Portuguese many years ago is that the word for "explore" is the same as for "exploit" (explorar).

Not that Portugal unique in its exploitative history, but this might speak to the mentality that the Portuguese "explorers" had when they went out into the world making their "great accomplishments".

I'd guess it speaks more to how the pronunciation of different words from an ancient language has in some cases converged -- and in other cases diverged -- over time, in its descendant languages.

If they were even all that different words to begin with. (Never actually learned Latin, just picked up words and phrases here and there.) In a mongrel language, originally Germanic but with massive direct and indirect Latin heritage, one can talk about someone's "daring exploits". Whose? Mainly, IME, those of people like Livingston, Stanley, Richard Burton (not the actor)... Explorers. "Exploits" as a(n English) noun does lead the mind more to thoughts of exploring than exploiting, doesn't it?

So go easy on your explorer-exploiters. The Portuguese ones were at least probably no worse, on average, than everyone else's.

("Verbing weirds language", they say, but it doesn't even need to -- language is plenty weird enough to begin with. All of them, probably. (OK, OK, except possibly Volapük and stuff.))