Dear followers,

This post isn’t specifically about the IT world. However, it’s something we didn’t want to let go of because of how close to the heart this topic is to the person who suggested it.

Let’s go.

A lot of young people from the 90s onwards (we’re sorry if we’re excluding some people from the 80s and 70s who also relate to this), for better or for worse, are a product of a globalized culture. This culture is heavily influence by American culture since Portugal is in the western sphere. But what does this mean?

It means that we grew up with Cartoon Network, Disney, Nickelodeon, FOX, AXN, etc.. A lot of us are probably more knowledgeable about American pop culture when compared to our knowledge of Portuguese culture. This also brought a lot of American ideals to Portugal, like The American Dream, Pull yourself from your bootstraps, If you fail, try again until you succeed, and more. Modern age Americans are just as ambitious as their ancestors were with their Manifest Destiny to expand their territories (even though late stage savage and abusive capitalism has sort of been ruining a lot of the world for a few years, but… let’s not go there). This philosophies of an extreme ambition, to follow your own goals and trying until you get it right, aren’t completely positive nor completely negative. We won’t go there either. The important thing to extract here is that a lot of young people in Portugal had these ideals injected into their minds since childhood, and that ended up influencing them in their personal and professional development.

We can testify to what we wrote above about this divine level ambition from Americans by reading articles and studies about who works harder and is more productive when comparing Americans and Europeans. There are numerous references for this 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This ambition got to a lot of young Portuguese folks, but not everyone.

So let’s drill down a bit and jump to Portuguese culture. From the title of this post, you can already assume that our opinion isn’t going to be very positive. But before that, we need to go back a bit in history to understand why Portuguese culture is so deeply linked to, in our minds, “sacrifice” and “lamenting”. Our starting point is one of the 3 Fs (Fado, Fátima and Futebol).

Even though in recent years it’s been diminishing and even people not practicing a lot, Portugal has always been an ally to the Catholic Church. For every street you go into, there’s a Saint of something protecting us. Or even an amazing stage for the Pope to sit on for a few hours and then used for music festivals.

It’s not hard to imagine how over centuries a religion can influence a country’s population and subsequently, its culture. One of the great focuses of Catholicism, as well as almost all religions, is sacrifice 6 7 8. And in Portugal, we really do believe that this sacrifice perspective spread heavily throughout the population, almost becoming a pestilent disease.

You need to go through your life in sacrifice to be considered somebody. We can never have a lot, always very little, otherwise we can’t complain that we’re living badly anymore. It feels good to us to say that we’re in the shit and that our neighbour is better off because they’re rich. Wealth and well-being are seen negatively. What you need to do is be poor, and sick, and always be on the down-low and making sacrifices for others. That’s what makes someone great in our eyes, because we look and go “Wow, that person sacrifices so much and is in such a shitty situation. Congratulations, how did you do it?!”. We never think about reaching our own goals, because that’s bad. Portuguese people like misery, they like to be living in a crappy situation. They don’t want wealth and they don’t want anyone else to have it either. If we’re doing badly, others should be too. This mindset is very problematic.

We always remember a conversation between General Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and a Swede ex-prime minister Olof Palme. After the carnation revolution, Olof Palme visited Portugal because he was curious to know how the country would develop itself after tearing down a horrendous dictatorship that severely delayed the country’s socioeconomic, technological and scientific development. So Olof asked Otelo, “What does Portugal want with this revolution?”. Otelo replies “We want to end the rich people”. Olof answers back, “We’ve been trying to end with the poor for over 20 years and weren’t able to yet”. If this exchange does not paint a caricature of the Portuguese mindset of sacrifice, we don’t know what is. We should mention that it’s obviously important to regulate extremely wealthy individuals and tax them accordingly. But this doesn’t imply that we shouldn’t allow anyone to become wealthy. Why do that when you can instead make everyone wealthy?

And this is lived on a day to day basis. If our neighbour buys a new car, we get upset. If our co-worker grabs a promotion, we get jealous. If a female co-worker tries to ask a male co-worker that their salary is in order to know if she is being discriminated on a gender basis, the reply that one would typically get is “That’s none of your business. Desenmerda-te” (“Desenmerda-te” translates to “Unshit yourself”. Portuguese use it as a way of saying “You’re on your own, figure it out because I ain’t helping”. This attitude has its pros and cons. In this case it’s really bad.). Instead of celebrating others’ achievements and empowering them to live better lifes, we’d rather see them suffer as much or even more than we suffer. It’s important to note this doesn’t apply to every single Portuguese person. It’s a generalization. But what Portuguese person hasn’t gone through something like this in their lives?

Let’s change our suffering mentality to a more American perspective. Not one of “I’m the most important person on Earth, fuck everyone else”, but one of “if you reached your own goals, I’ll celebrate that with you”, “I’ll share my salary information with my co-workers to see if anyone is being treated unfairly”.

Don’t end with wealthy people. Au contraire, help each other amass wealth, whatever wealth is for you. Let’s throw suffering in the garbage and welcome a culture of empowering one another so that we can all live better lifes together.

UNCAUGHT_EXCEPTION: Class “Portugal” has suffered a memory leak at feelings.java. Would you like to think positive and empower others?