I’m writing the Expat Chronicles book about my 10 wild years in Peru and Colombia. I’m re-reading the posts from my first year and it reminds me how much Latin America has changed. For reference, see Not Your Old Man’s LatAm Expat Scene. Or read this version condensed to one paragraph.
The gringo expat scene in Latin America has been transformed by three forces: perceived safety, remote work and the internet economy. The community has exploded in size and gone from delinquent oddballs to educated remote workers, leaving old-school voices like Expat Chronicles largely forgotten by a new crop that never needed a pioneer to show them the way.
Reading my old posts, I realized that the way things used to be made me stronger. They gave me better lessons on Latin America. I wondered if the conveniences that today’s digital expats enjoy are a kind of crutch, a disadvantage. They’re missing a full education in Latin American culture.
Don’t go down to Latin America to make life easy. Doing hard things is what makes you strong. If you’re over 50, maybe you deserve to take it easy. But life on Easy Street makes you soft. Nobody becomes tough doing boxercise or using the machines at Planet Fitness. Only a fool brags about turning in an essay written by ChatGPT, and associate’s degrees in general studies don’t earn much more than if someone hadn’t gone to school at all.
Going to live in the rich enclave surrounded by gringos is the equivalent of boxercise. A remote job renting from a landlord who speaks English in the nice part of town is like joining Planet Fitness. Sure, you get a participation trophy. But why not do something hard? Something edifying? Something you can be proud of?
I did not move to Peru to live on Easy Street. It was a huge challenge. If I were smarter, I would have been a little scared. Good.
If you’re not scared, you’re not doing anything hard or interesting. You’re being a pussy. Face your fears. It not only makes you stronger. It makes you happier.
Chasing comfort makes you soft. Pursue pleasure and become miserable. Especially pleasure. It leads to religion, death or jail. Trust me on this. I’m old and wise.
If I were starting out today, I probably would have taken an online job too. I’d be a fool not to. But you can adopt activities that have the same educational immersion and character-building effects that I benefited from in the 2000s. Here are some ways you can replicate the edification of an old-school LatAm expat.
Don’t do remote work only. Take a part-time job teaching English or volunteering. Do some kind of work where you must show up in person and be surrounded by natives every day.
Join a sports team where you are the only gringo. The most intense language immersion I experienced was playing basketball on a team of Peruvians who all grew up together in the same Jesuit, primary-through-secondary school. Try running plays, following instruction and talking smack in that environment.
Don’t live in the nicest part of town. Live in a neighborhood where you can go weeks without seeing another gringo. It doesn’t have to be poor. Middle-class, “midtown” districts were my favorite. They’re usually located in between the rich enclave and the historic city center.
Don’t use dating apps. Go out dancing. Take a dance class if you need. Don’t date anybody who speaks English better than you speak Spanish.
Don’t buy your food at the fancy supermarkets. Go to the wet markets. And do NOT call them “farmers’ markets.” Don’t eat at any restaurant with a menu in English or English-speaking staff unless it’s a special occasion. Like showing your visiting family around.
Don’t take Ubers. Take the bus whenever possible. If you’re in a hurry, hail a taxi in the street. Get a bicycle. Don’t be a pussy about riding it in the street.
Don’t use online maps when out and about. You can confirm the address and route on your laptop at home. But once you’re on the ground, no online maps. Ask around for your destination.
Don’t carry plastic. Pay only with cash. Everything all the time. Cash.
Don’t stream video. Get a cable package. Watch the local news. You don’t have to watch the network primetime entertainment programs, but be aware of what they are.
Don’t stream all your music. Pick a favorite radio station and listen to that more than you stream.
Don’t hire fixers to do your government legalese. Queue up with the masses. Feel the bureaucracy.
Don’t go secular. Attend a Mass or whatever religious service applies to you. At least once. It will be different. You’ll learn something.
I didn’t choose all these harder ways for personal growth, but necessity. The modern conveniences weren’t there. And I am better assimilated for it. I didn’t just live in Latin America. I let it change me. That’s the difference between a decade of immersion and a digital nomad’s glorified tourism. I don’t live in South America anymore. But South America lives in me.
Stay off Easy Street, which keeps you soft. Comfort is forgettable. Difficulty is formative.
And of course, don’t be a pussy.
If you like what you read and are interested in the South America before Airbnb, Uber and credit card processing, you’ll love my upcoming book.
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All true. A keen analytical take and yes, today’s expat gringos are mostly online nerdy-fags. They are people to avoid when you see them in public and characters that you can’t help but take advantage of if given the chance. I’ll say this, after 10 years you were just starting to warm up. Do you find that your spouse has become more americanized than you anticipated she would? That’s the flipside of the coin.
Long term gringo residents hate the new generation of remote workers even more than the locals do, totally understandable!
Hi Colin,
I’ve been experimenting with AI, I would ask how any historical figure be they alive today would describe any given Latin American society.
Here’s a Schopenhauer-esque portrait of Colombians, written in his style — pessimistic, elitist, cutting, and grounded in his actual philosophical framework (the Will, suffering, illusion, the intellect vs. instinct):
“On the Colombian People: A Merciless Meditation”
by Arthur Schopenhauer, had he suffered the misfortune of living there
On Their Vitality
“The Colombian is Will in its most unmediated form. He dances, schemes, prays, and fornicates with identical energy — not because he has chosen these things, but because the Will drives him and he has never once thought to resist it. Other peoples have developed the intellect as a counterweight to blind desire. The Colombian has not bothered. He is magnificent in the way that a waterfall is magnificent: powerful, beautiful, and utterly without reflection.”
On Their Religion
“They cross themselves before lying. They wear the Virgin’s image while picking your pocket. Their Catholicism is not a path to the denial of the Will — which would be its only dignified function — but rather a negotiation with God to make the Will more productive. They do not pray for salvation from desire. They pray for desire to be fulfilled. God, in Colombia, is a well-connected middleman.”
On Their Famous Happiness
“The world praises the Colombian for his joy. What a wretched compliment. His happiness is the happiness of the man who has not yet sat down to consider his situation. It is the contentment of the animal that has just eaten. The Buddhist monk who has transcended suffering is at peace — but the Colombian who has never encountered the question of suffering is merely… distracted. There is no glory in the happiness of the unreflective.”
On Their Relationship With Honesty
“They have constructed an entire philosophy around el rebusque — the hustle, the workaround, the clever maneuver that gets you from here to there without the burden of principle. They do not glorify virtue. They glorify resourcefulness. In this, I grant them a dark honesty: they have never pretended that ethics and success occupy the same territory. Most civilizations maintain that lie. Colombia abandoned it early and has been more efficient ever since.”
On Their Social Vanity
“They have numbered themselves by neighborhood — estratos, like livestock sorted by grade. And rather than finding this arrangement monstrous, they believe in it. The man of estrato two burns with shame and longs for estrato five. The man of estrato five trembles lest he fall to four. Nobody questions the ladder. Everyone is too busy climbing it. It is the most perfect imprisonment: the cage built entirely from the prisoner’s own ambition.”
On Their Noise
“The Colombian cannot bear silence. Silence, after all, is where the questions live — Why am I here? To what end do I suffer? What does any of this mean? The Colombian has solved this problem elegantly: he has made silence structurally impossible. There is always music. Always a party. Always someone talking at full volume about nothing. Pascal said that all of man’s problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room. The Colombian took this as a challenge and has been proving Pascal correct for five centuries.”
On Their Violence
“They are surprised by their own violence, which is the most revealing thing about them. A people that truly understood the nature of the Will — that blind, insatiable, cannibalistic force that animates all life — would not be surprised when men destroy each other over territory, women, and money. The Colombian is shocked each time. He lights a candle. He holds a vigil. Then the Will reasserts itself and the cycle continues. The candles are very beautiful.”
On Their Warmth
“I will concede one thing, and I concede it reluctantly: the Colombian receives the stranger with a generosity that shames the European. He will give you his food, his home, the shirt from his back — and mean it genuinely, without calculation. For a moment, the Will relents. For a moment, something that resembles compassion — what I called Mitleid, the only authentic basis of morality — flickers in him. It is the most human thing about him. And like all truly human things in this world, it is intermittent, fragile, and surrounded on all sides by everything else.”
Final Judgment
“The Colombian does not need philosophy. Philosophy is what you reach for when life has disappointed you enough times that you demand an explanation. The Colombian has arranged his life so that the disappointments arrive too fast, too loud, and too colorfully to ever congeal into a question. He is, in this sense, the Will’s most loyal servant — and its most cheerful victim. I find him exhausting. I find him, against my will, rather wonderful. This contradiction would have annoyed me greatly had I stayed longer.”