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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Someone's pretty fixated on thinking people all live in the same cosy village forever being cared for by kind and loving relatives from cradle to grave.

There's more than one type of culture on the planet, more than one way to live and die, and people often make compromises and different choices in life. If your outlook and way of life comforts you, great. No one here will try to lock you in a room to die alone. [/quote]

OK, well as a child of immigrants I both (1) understand that sometimes you need to leaves bad situation but also (2) realize America is an outlier in terms of how disconnected people are from their families and communities.  Personally I find the latter sad.  I guess a lot of people don't.

I wish you well with your independence during the prime of your life when you need the least support from anyone else.  Just remember choices have consequences and humans have notoriously short time horizons in their decision-making.  Good luck.[/quote]

My prime was many decades ago. You assume this view is only held by people in their prime, and only by "Americans." As the child of immigrants, your view is skewed by your parents' culture, if you grew up in their home, so what you see is "Americans" from the outside, who you assume are sad and disconnected simply because you don't accept that there are gradations of independence and interaction within families according to cultural differences. I agree with you that Americans would benefit by having more options to stay near family and maintain connections more easily. In reality, most of us have to go where jobs take us, and this is a huge country.

My in-laws are immigrants from a culture where everyone is entangled in what my husband admits is a suffocating web of obligations and rules that get enforced with shunning, shaming, and invalidating any individual feelings that don't fit with the group's agenda. In their culture, it's implied that your elders basically own you until they die, and can overrule you in everything. In this type of culture, the individual's feelings and needs have to come second to those of the group (or the whim of the eldest). Under the surface of this family unit that appears so cosy and strong is plenty of dysfunction, shame, and seething resentment, and personality disorders that come from having your individuality beaten down all your life.

My in-laws and their first-generation adult children think everyone operates the way their culture does, and if they don't, they should. They assume I'm estranged from my own extended family simply because we don't live in each others' pockets and run each others' lives, as they do. I consider my family to be adequately close and very caring. We have actual boundaries, though, and respect privacy, individuality, and independence while still managing to care for each other. I guess that makes me a "disconnected" American. Of course I'm used to and prefer the freedoms of my culture, and I acknowledge it has its price in a certain insecurity that you don't feel. But I'll take freedom of choice over your sense of safety. There is something in the middle that's healthy. [/quote]

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