Every experience is a cultural translation

You are not a neutral observer of your own life. Every experience you have—grief, love, ambition, the taste of a meal—is processed through a cultural filter you didn’t choose.

This filter is your default setting. It defines your perception of ‘normal’ and ‘sensible’. It dictates the correct way to form a queue, to mourn a parent, to celebrate a victory. Most of us live our entire lives without ever realising this operating system is running, mistaking our particular cultural software for objective human reality.

Consider ambition. In one culture, it’s the relentless pursuit of individual achievement and public recognition. In another, it’s the quiet fulfilment of duty to one’s family and community, where personal aspiration is secondary to the collective good. One is not better than the other; they are simply different languages of success. To judge a person prioritising their family’s stability through a lens that only values corner offices is a failure of translation.

Love is no different. The Hollywood script of romantic love, with its grand gestures and soulmates, is a specific cultural product. For much of history and in many parts of the world today, love is a pragmatic partnership, an economic arrangement, or a familial duty. To see these other forms as loveless is to be illiterate in their emotional language.

The same applies to grief. In some places, mourning is a loud, public, communal performance of sorrow. In others, it is a quiet, stoic, private affair. Your internal software will tell you one is ‘healthier’ or ‘more sincere’ than the other. It is not. Each is an authentic expression, read through a different cultural code.

Recognising this code in yourself is the beginning of empathy. True empathy is not simply feeling sorry for someone. It is the intellectual and emotional labour required to understand that their response to a situation, however alien it seems to you, is logical and valid within their own framework. It’s the uncomfortable admission that your ‘common sense’ is not universal.

This is where the true purpose of travel lies. Most travel is mere consumption, a superficial tour of landscapes and landmarks that fails to challenge the traveller’s core assumptions. You can spend a week in Lisbon and come back with nothing but photos and a taste for pastel de nata. You haven’t travelled; you have simply relocated your existing self.

Useful travel is ethnographic fieldwork on yourself. It is the process of putting yourself in a context where your default settings fail. It’s the awkwardness of not knowing how to greet someone, the frustration of a different pace of life, the humbling realisation that your assumptions are not welcome here. The value is not in seeing a new temple, but in seeing the architecture of your own mind reflected back at you in a foreign mirror.

Every experience is a cultural translation, and your own fluency is determined by how well you understand your native tongue.