Here’s my theory, based on decades of observation.
Israeli kids grow up in a thoroughly authentic and radically free childhood environment. They are little shits, don’t get me wrong, but they are (mostly… mostly…) confident, direct, feeling, extroverted, kind-hearted little shits… And the environment? It’s a super-crowded, high-tech, third-world, perpetual war zone, spiritually irreverent, amazingly tasty crazy chaos.
I often look in awe as my nieces and nephews (gorgeous souls that they are, and they truly are) rudely boss their parents around, who in turn smile fondly at them and say “ah, kids will be kids…” The kids run the show, go to friends’ houses, run the friends’ houses as well… It’s like there’s a whole other kids-run world out there, and they are the kings.
Bashfulness is just not a thing over there. Holding back your emotions is not a thing. Being polite is definitely not a thing. Rude, loud, fully expressive, confident little shits that receive doting service and fond amusement from all adults around them, just for being wildly themselves! What a crazy notion… Breeds authenticity, that.
Then I move here, to The US of A, and though there is some playful rowdiness here and there, what I mostly see is incredibly controlled, mostly well-behaved and rather tame children. Though it is an obvious relief to be in less chaos, less loudness, and less rudeness, for sure!.. Throughout the years I learned how oppressive it can actually be to the child’s psyche.
The Israeli child (and adult for that matter) who wants something? anything… be it a cookie or a concert ticket, will go directly to the resource - the plate, or the desk, or the booth. If someone is already standing there? something will start developing around the resource… A sort of… a.. uh… “huddle”.
People will shuffle-in from all directions until they get to the resource, and then they will take the thing, and leave. In a beeline. Parting the squeezing huddle as they push out. No one is going to assume that first-come-is-first-served, na-ah. What a funny idea… It’s first arrives to the resource in whatever manner possible, first served.
So. you learn how to wiggle-waggle, and shiffle-shuffle, through bumping into loving others as a child, and through crowds as an adult, huddling for resources. Everyone is in the same cloud with you, and that’s that. If you try to wait your “turn” in this universe, you will be fucked. Sorry.
This is a guide helping non-Israelis who attempt this “National Sport”. The gist? Don’t expect it to be vertical, or quiet, or efficient, or fast, or for people to respect your personal space. Don’t expect the resource provider to be kind or patient. Expect people to cut you, left, front and center (at least, in your own understanding of “cutting”). Expect to hear a lot of complaints, expect to make friends, and expect to feel a great sense of accomplishment once you’re done.
Speaking of guides to understanding Israeli culture, and how it pertains to standing in line, This is a guide on how to do business in Israel. The same principles that work in lines, work in regular conversation, and in business meetings - huddle, mix, push, co-create, wiggle waggle, resource, beeline. It is invariably irreverent, blunt, pushy, eye-level, agile brilliance that can create pretty much anything, and scales incredibly poorly. So poorly, in fact, that anywhere in Israel that needs a line and handles large numbers of people, forces you to get a number. That’s the only way to herd these cats.
I couldn’t find my favourite Guide For The International Businessman, but I swear that on the page about Israel it said “if you are in a business meeting in Israel and no one is interrupting you? It means that they are not listening.”
Yep. We listen by participation. If you speak and no one is actively speaking over and with you, sharing your wavelength? It means you are not in hive-mind, it means that you are on your own, and speaking to the wind. No one is actually listening to you. Israeli conversation is an ecstatic group contact dance, not a badminton tournament. And if you wait your turn? Well. You’re fucked. AGAIN.
In the US Israelis can be considered rude, and “interrupting”. (And I say “I did not interrupt you, I simply started talking before you finished talking!”) I heard this wonderful African woman say at a JEDI conference - “What do you mean I interrupted you? You took a breath, that means it’s my turn...” - I nodded vigorously.
Driving in Israel is absolutely crazy too. it’s bumper to bumper, but very very fast, it’s pushy, it’s fully trusting that the others will just move aside with your movement, it is mega crowded, and for the most part, it works, but it is also rather prone to utterly dumb and highly preventable gridlocks.
I remember the first time I left Red Rocks Amphitheatre. The place was packed - 9,000 people and a full venue. And I was looking with nothing less than AWE, at the efficiency with which we got out of there. One person from this side, one from that side, badaboom, badabang, and after 10 minutes we were on the road again. In Israel the same situation would have taken 2 hours, a massive gridlock, many honking horns and lots of stress and frustration. It’s actually rather amazing how inefficient the israeli system scales, and how efficient the American system does, and what it does to the collective…
On the other hand, I attended a festival in NM last year, where the entrance was not a 100 yards past a bridge. a person was directing traffic, giving way to either cars or pedestrians. On the other end, was the booth for the person who was checking people in.
I walked off the bridge, and saw an odd-looking line-ish pack of people, dozens of them, standing in a line that didn’t actually go anywhere, both ends were leading into the middle of the line.
Being an Israeli, I saw it immediately, and simply went around it straight to the resource, and entered the festival without a line, but the absurdity of it was rather amazing to me… At that point, both the bridge and the gate were fully available and open, and everyone was standing ever so politely, not going anywhere!
If there is a line, you stand at the end of it, and wait your turn. NO QUESTIONS ASKED. There wasn’t a line, it was a figment of behavioural training.
This would never happen to an Israeli. I barely even saw the cluster of people, I went straight to the resource. If I got feedback that I was cutting, I would course-correct.
And I still haven’t even gotten to my theory. Here it is:
Israeli kids experience the ultimate freedom to be fully who they are pretty much from birth to 18, they speak whenever, go wherever, demand whatever, and rule their worlds with authentic, and in my opinion, developmentally appropriate, radical, connected, self-centeredness (there are really no words to explain this. Anything I will say to describe this will most likely be misconstrued. It’s a different way of being and growing, so the words of this culture will invariably fail to explain it..)
At 18 they go to the military, and though FULLY equipped to be adults? Everything is suddenly extremely regimented, and they suddenly have to follow orders. Yikes.
The IDF is the most chaotic people’s military that you can possibly imagine, don’t think that they have anyone ironing white collars, straightening any sheets, or bouncing any coins on ANY beds y’all. That’s not what the IDF is about.
So, suddenly they just cannot be the messy, cocky, wildly feeling shits they were all their childhood anymore (at least most of them can’t) and they cannot control many aspects of their lives for roughly 3 years… So what happens? They go to nicotine. It’s a stress reliever and anxiety reducer, it takes them outside, to more quiet and introverted spaces, where they can slow down and regulate. Because the ultimate freedom of their growing-up turned into zero agency and high structure.
Here though, in the US, what happens seems to be the exact opposite.
You take fully tame kiddos, (or kiddos who were absolutely not tame, you wild being, you…) so, kiddos who internalised that tame is what is expected. That they have WAY less permission to express their feelings, be messy, boss anyone around, run in packs, touch anything or do whatever they want, and you send them to college at 18. Moving from rather rigid control to the ultimate freedom without knowing half a thing about who they truly are as independent and fully authentic human beings, let alone as adults who choose their own paths and move confidently through them.
What do they do? I mean, who wouldn’t do that under these circumstances… They start consuming alcohol. Lots of it. The ultimate social lubricator, loosen ya up a little bit, give ya some liquid confidence…
The following numbers are from Google, very unacademically referencing academic research.
The alcoholism rate in the US, in the past year, meaning, people with active Alcohol Use Disorder, not those in recovery - is over 10% of the population. That’s dozens of millions of people. Israel has a 4% lifetime prevalence of alcohol abuse.
I mean, there’s also genetics, and the fact that Alcohol (red wine) is our sacrament and we use it as part of our weekly ritual, which may explain the genetics… But I think that most importantly, socially, Israelis do not need much in order to blatantly and freely be loudly themselves. We’re actively raised this way.
Tobacco has also been in Jewish Kabbalist’s use through the generations, still, nicotine is now very highly abused by Israelis as a main (false) stress-reducer, in a nation that is ridden with ADHD and Generational and direct PTSD.
Among people aged 12 or older, in 2020, in the US, 8.5% (or about 23.6 million people) had nicotine dependence in the span of 30 days (some-time, when some research was done). These are no small numbers, and I will be the last person to claim that there is nothing to be stressed out about here… However, according to the Ministry of Health, 27.3% of men in Israel smoke, compared to 12.6% of women. At a given moment. And not counting underage people. The smoking rate is higher among men than women, and among Arabs than Jews. Which makes perfect sense.
In comes the new research about the Anterior Midcingulate Cortex. THE ANTERIOR MIDCINGULATE CORTEX YOU ALL!!!! (say that 3 times fast ) You gotta love this type of research findings. It makes me chuckle every time. It’s as if centuries and millennia of recorded humanity are not enough as “proof” of what we need as humans, we need someone to “research” it and tell us that it’s a “Vagus Nerve” thing, or an “Adrenal” thing, or an “Anterior Midcingulate Cortex” thing… Aye yi yi.
Nevertheless… Nevertheless… The gist of it is this: When you are doing something YOU DO NOT WANT TO DO. And no, going happily to the Gym does NOT count. Your AMC GROWS. When you do things that you wanna do, it stays the same or it shrinks.
And people with a larger AMC seem to live longer, and they also seem to WANT to live. Longer.
Boom.
Maybe that’s why I love veterans! Or why I think that wilderness therapy is a full-on game changer. Life-altering stuff…
Spending a significant amount of time accepting completely arbitrary realities and living into them fully, be it following orders from your drill sergeant or just following your therapists, your guides, and the elements? Can change your life completely.
People who know how to live in arbitrary circumstances and fully embrace that they are just neutrally arbitrary and not malevolent, and still thrive?? People who do things that they do not want to do, with a smile on their face, again and again? Without being victims to the process? Those are some of the best people I know.
I could see time and again (at work in the wilderness) kids who spent their entire lives blaming everyone, their parents, their teachers, and the kitchen sink, for everything that's "wrong" in their lives, feeling righteous and indignant, not seeing anything that is done FOR them, running their lives into the ground. They perpetually create their own pained realities. I saw them realize (the hard way) that if they didn't build a proper shelter and then snow randomly landed that night?... That they had no one to blame but themselves. And how it made them show up and build a proper shelter that they didn’t want to build. Angry at first, for sure... but with no one to blame. They were grumpy, and then they became strong, and then effective, and then even positive, and easeful... then they showed up as leaders and mentors.
Again and again.
They showed up as people who can face challenges and do things they don't want to do.
The juice is in shifting your mindset, sticking courses, getting into conflicts, doing the hard thing, living into hard relationships with dignity, and not blaming your mom for anything that every went wrong in your life.
Of course I do not think that everything should be a ride-or-die situation, of course not! But the flip side is that when you consistently choose comfort, or not do things that you do not want to do? there’s a level of fragility that I think gets created by that. At the very least your AMC will shrink. Comfort seems to oddly correlate with crazy divorce rates, leaving communities, and breaking relationships. This contributes. in turn. to the same old same old - deep individual and societal disconnect. and disconnect breeds the current pervasive epidemic of loneliness, mental health issues, in particular major depression, and even early death. [cue somber music for wild leaps ]
Look. Nature is arbitrary AF.
As is the military. Regardless of what you think of what militaries do, and we’re very likely in agreement about that.
It's how we orient to them that changes us. In both the military and wilderness therapy there is a tribe around you, people who demonstrate by action what’s the better way to do things if you want your sleeping bag to not freeze at night. The group or team in the wilderness, or your fellow soldiers.
We live such comfortable lives, and as a society, we managed to get ourselves to a place where many call things that are merely uncomfortable "trauma" and blame the kitchen sink (or just men) for it all. Not everyone does that, of course, and not all trauma of course.
So I have been writing this post for a while, and I couldn’t finish it or get it out. I just realised why. If you follow the logic of what I am saying, this is the gist of it:
If you raise kids to be authentic shits, then send them to an arbitrary training for a few years, they will likely be stressed out cigarette smokers, but they’ll be happy and live longer.
If you teach them how to be polite and stand in line, then give them the freedom of a life of comforts, they are likely going to get out of giant concerts efficiently but die early of liver damage.
That’s not a great bottom line for a post, innit?
Here’s a better direction.
Raise your eyes up from the back of the person in front of you, go to the other side of the buffet, chat with someone about the semolina cakes, give yourself permission to gently speak out of turn sometimes, go to concerts, go to the gym, have the conversation you do not want to have, stay just a little bit longer when you want to leave, make new friends, drink less.
And try not to train kids, gently or otherwise, to be anything other than themselves. They will be shits for a minute, but they will be happy authentic little shits that will not have to go to many workshops to re-authenticate themselves, and they may even live longer.
There. That’s better.
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky