Happier Abroad Forum Community

There start being members from all around the world on this forum.
What connects them is being misfits in their own cultures.

When Winston and other people here talk about America withdrawing socialization from misfits more than other places, it might be true due the competitiveness there, but there might be a more universal pattern at play.
Namely, people who grow up in a culture, and then miraculously have a better experience in another culture might be experiencing this:
If you are different and grew up since childhood in a particular culture, experiencing large amounts of social exclusion, rejection and pain through the time of growing up, you will associate the negative attitude of people towards you with your own country, and when you go abroad, people do not react to you the same as you have been suffering throughout all your life growing up, because the other culture uses different punishment mechanisms, has different ways to determine who will be socially excluded, and will less likely identify you as a misfit as fast.

If you are raised in one country, you receive large amounts of rejection and social exclusion, and develop reactions to it anyway still somehow dependent on the culture concerned. Therefore when you get older and meet new people, their reaction keeps being negative toward you even though they are supposed to be strangers and should give you a new chance unlike all the people who had bullied you growing up.
I think in one's own country, one will with the higher reliability nevertheless keep getting negative stares, reactions, keep for of all cultures most reliable getting excluded - because every culture has a way misfits are conditioned and programmed to behave. It is the way one moves his body, the face has hundreds of muscles which one can not consciously control all the time - and every culture has very specific types of behavior which if you show to have, people automatically regard you as a person of those undesirable traits.
If you feel uncomfortable, socially anxious and so on (these all being emotions which resulted from long term social exclusion in your home country), anytime you have these feelings in its society, people in your own country are 10 times faster to identify these emotions within you and without you saying a word or asking for it, they will simply treat you according to this.

My conclusion is that a misfit will struggle most with his own country (or in the cultural region if near countries have related culture). I personally come from central Europe, a place Winston and others here might see as far more friendly than America. Maybe in many ways from an unbiased perspective or the perspective of an Asian or an American it is quite a free society. On the other hand, for me as a misfit, believe it or not, it is easier to have conversations and get romance from western girls like American, west Europe, than those from Slavic countries and before all locally here.

It is the biggest paradox. Had I been born in America, I am not saying I would not have Winston's experience. But what I am saying is it really depends on where you are from. Even if Winston is a misfit in America, he still is programmed to speak the language like a native and have a very usual American intonation. Even this intonation turns a misfit's speech against himself. The way he is forced to speak based on past trauma reminds every new American he meets of his social standing - because he can not control the way his speech's vibe is socially received. Locals are the ones best at identifying who is an outcast merely by the way he learned to express himself (excluded person in culture A grows up to be only able to express himself in a way with which he always appears inferior and unattractive to girls of his own culture). If you are a foreigner somewhere, people will far less likely judge you for being different, because even if you were different in your country of origin, in another culture you are always expected to behave different from locals, even if you had no differences in your home country.

Therefore I can announce many misfits from Europe miraculously might do well with western women, while Slavic ones will dismiss them as insecure, weird and awkward, with no benefit of doubt or excuse, just like happens to misfits who were born in America and then they experience a similar treatment overseas.

This is an interesting theory globalwonder. Did you come up with it yourself or did you read about it somewhere? True body language speaks volumes and is unconscious. But this is a chicken or egg problem. How much of your thoughts and behaviors and body language determines how other treat you? It's not clear. If your theory is true, then I could act confident in America and get girls that way. But that doesn't work because confidence has to be based on something real. Just acting confidence doesn't do anything. An ugly guy can act confidence but it doesn't make him attractive, it just makes him an annoying loud person. I don't think it's that simple. I think there are intangible factors.

The matrix also seems to assign your destiny to you too. For example when I was in 4th grade suddenly I had a loser status, as if the matrix assigned it to me and everyone played along with it because most people are NPCs and follow whatever the simulation says, just like in a video game. Or it was a divine curse. I don't know. All I know is that suddenly all 30 kids in my class didn't like me and were hostile to me and persecuted me. It made me depressed everyday but I had no power to change it and no one cared. How to explain that? Even intellectuals like my friend @publicduende have never been able to explain it. My friend @Lucas88 has many deep explanations though, most of which involves having asperger's.

What about you @globalwonder? Are you a misfit in Europe? If so, how did it happen? When did it start? Did you feel you had a choice of whether to be normal or a misfit? Or was it all just pushed upon you out of nowhere? Usually European kids are down to earth. Did any psychologist tell you that you have asperger's? Whether we have autism or not, we are definitely not neurotypical here. We must be neurodivergent in some way. But the question is: Did being ostracized cause us to be neurodivergent or the other way around? This is a chicken or egg problem. It could be that our souls are different from others too, not just our brains.

What happens when you go to another European country? Do you notice a difference?

I'm a misfit in my own country (UK). In my case I'm neurodivergent and speak with some level of dysprosody, although I suspect that the latter has more to do with ASD itself rather than a history of social trauma.

In light of my neurodivergence and dysprosody, I absolutely don't feel comfortable interacting with British people most of the time. It's as though they can tell that I'm atypical and different and view me as weird because of it. I much prefer speaking foreign languages and interacting with non-British people — the foreign language serves to mask my usual awkwardness to a degree while non-British people don't act as judgemental towards me.

However, I think that there are multiple layers to this question rather than simply a foreign language masking my awkwardness or non-British people not perceiving me as a misfit:

1. Some cultures — e.g., Spain, Mexico, Brazil, etc. — are more open-minded and tolerant of individual quirks and don't punish social awkwardness or ASD traits as harshly as cold, mechanical, conformist cultures do. This has certainly been my experience.

2. Speaking Spanish — or more recently Portuguese — changes my personality 180º. I immediately become far more sociable and vibrant. Even speaking Japanese during my year-long stint in Japan brought me out of my shell a bit more than when I'm speaking English.

3. When I'm in a fun and vivacious country like Spain, I feel a lot more energized and motivated to engage with other people, which in turn serves to bring out my better traits.

Nevertheless, my problem with British people still stands and I feel the need to avoid them due to their perception of me as a misfit and my inability to mask during interactions with them.

Curiously, I feel considerably more comfortable with Americans than I do with British people. My conversations with them tend to flow better and I don't feel like I'm being constantly judged and walking on eggshells.

Winston wrote: ↑

July 20th, 2025, 7:25 am

This is an interesting theory globalwonder. Did you come up with it yourself or did you read about it somewhere? True body language speaks volumes and is unconscious. But this is a chicken or egg problem. How much of your thoughts and behaviors and body language determines how other treat you? It's not clear. If your theory is true, then I could act confident in America and get girls that way. But that doesn't work because confidence has to be based on something real. Just acting confidence doesn't do anything. An ugly guy can act confidence but it doesn't make him attractive, it just makes him an annoying loud person. I don't think it's that simple. I think there are intangible factors.

The matrix also seems to assign your destiny to you too. For example when I was in 4th grade suddenly I had a loser status, as if the matrix assigned it to me and everyone played along with it because most people are NPCs and follow whatever the simulation says, just like in a video game. Or it was a divine curse. I don't know. All I know is that suddenly all 30 kids in my class didn't like me and were hostile to me and persecuted me. It made me depressed everyday but I had no power to change it and no one cared. How to explain that? Even intellectuals like my friend @publicduende have never been able to explain it. My friend @Lucas88 has many deep explanations though, most of which involves having asperger's.

What about you @globalwonder? Are you a misfit in Europe? If so, how did it happen? When did it start? Did you feel you had a choice of whether to be normal or a misfit? Or was it all just pushed upon you out of nowhere? Usually European kids are down to earth. Did any psychologist tell you that you have asperger's? Whether we have autism or not, we are definitely not neurotypical here. We must be neurodivergent in some way. But the question is: Did being ostracized cause us to be neurodivergent or the other way around? This is a chicken or egg problem. It could be that our souls are different from others too, not just our brains.

What happens when you go to another European country? Do you notice a difference?

The theory, I sort of came up with independently, but I am not sure. I could be influenced by things heard over the years or something from the internet, or by something others say and remixed it. I think it is mainly a conclusion from personal experience, always feeling like in a different reality every time travelling to another country, even close in central Europe, although the closer the faster the degree of this effect seems to wear off.
If I was to closely describe my social past, it would probably take very long, but in short I have been having problematic experiences whole life. But where I started caring is around adolescence when conscious self-reflection kicked in. And with all that self reflection even when I wanted, I could not organize things in a way socially so I could get exactly what was imagined. I used to worry a lot about having no friends but then I changed this to having no romance and success rate in trying to get some date. Unfortunately shortly after this I was absorbed by the red pill pickup artists attitude online, which sticked with me for years and probably now there are still remains of it.
But my experiences did not change. In Prague I would approach many girls according to the pickup advice from the predominantly western guys on Youtube, and even though almost always the girls gave me a number, they either did not respond or responded a bit and stopped shortly. I thought it could be due to my style of texting (following too much of the pickup artist advice to a degree of probably seeming weird for Czech culture). Also it is worth noting, I managed to very often approach foreign girls who live here instead of Czech native ones, often east European. But the experience was same as far as the result. It always seemed to feel far better to approach a foreign girl than a Czech one, because I simply thought my experience would be smoother if I could avoid a local girl. Nevertheless, nothing ever came out of any attempts. And here I catch myself using the pickup artist doctrine: "all the lack of romance is due to lack of your skill, not the fact that Czech girls do not match you on dating apps anyway and even if you met on in some clique, she prefers someone more Czech-behaving and who has somehow different looks."
And I generally feel there is this big tension between me and Czech people which appears to different degrees one time than another. I do admit there is aversion from my side also, because I simply can't stand most of the same cultural attitudes, ways of talking, behaving that everyone follows, because I got to travel a lot and see the comparison. It just feels like I am sticking myself into this one allowed way of behaving just to gain access to dates. There are cliques, maybe even down-to-earth, but always that one Czech way, and the moment I show something too unconventional compared to the Czech way of behavior, it seems even the "down to earth" clique does not want me to be in it. I should state that in online dating, which could be the only way to get dates without engaging in real life, did not bring me any results in Europe. So I can conclude that when a girl here sees me, and it does not matter, poor or rich European country, or here, she does not feel an urge to (match with me) go on a date with me based on seeing me. But then again, after many years of constant rejections in real life by Slavic girls, I once met an American girl when staying in west Europe, and she met up with me later and kept in contact, so just imagine...after being ghosted by countless eastern European girls. I can not explain it, but maybe I have been applying American pickup artist attitudes to Slavic girls who are turned off by it, and meanwhile I found out I can have better time with an American girl I meet here in Europe. But of course, I see on dating apps American girls do not match me similarly like Czech. Also, because when I met her I asked my friend to guide me and tell me what to text the girl to invite her out.

And in other European countries, I feel I have more space to "impress" girls in countries that are not Slavic, like if in Slavic ones they think I am inferior and nothing I say has a value to change this, but in maybe Britain or Germany, I could talk to girls and get somewhere because they have that culture where innovation or interesting ideas are valued, while in central European Slavic countries I am met often with ridicule and arrogant stares. But I also approached a British girl visiting east Europe and she never replied to my message...

I think Hungary is a very different place. I have not approached enough girls to be able to say something, but I got one positive experience once there, although never developed a romance. But because they are neither Slavic, nor Germanic and so on, it feels like, especially using the exotic Hungarian language, there can be chances. But again, online dating told me girls there do not want to date me if they see my photo. And also, after deciding to stop pretending to be someone I am not, I no longer enjoy approaching girls in public if it feels bad (unlike what pickup artists advice says), so I almost never like to do it.

And then to conclude, I found in Asia I can meet girls from online dating without being always reminded no one matched my dating profile. I can then go on a date with someone (verified) and I can even behave soft and forget all macho attitudes. I can be nice and introverted, or talk about things in a soft voice, and the girl won't hate me for it. And also, the girl does not have prudish attitudes toward me.

So now when I know girls from my country treat me infinitely worse than in Asia, I will have to decide whether approaching some without pickup artist attitudes and working out 70% of the week like other guys is a good thing to do, or if I just simply stop caring about Czech girls altogether for a longer time. I can approach 10 girls in regions outside Prague, especially east part of this country, although I feel very bad emotionally when doing it. The only downside I would not like to experience is to either seem as one of these pickup artists when doing it, or to get tons of numbers that never respond, or ending up approaching girls that I am not attracted to.