Culture Shock Isn't Dramatic. It's Quiet and Cumulative.

Once I moved to a city that many people dream of living in. It hadn’t been my dream to move there, but in that mysterious way life goes sometimes, an opportunity presented itself and I gratefully, excitedly seized it.

I remember a phone call with a friend back home I hadn’t spoken to in a while. She asked how I was settling in, and before I could answer, she was already there: the sunshine, the food, the pace of life, the views. It all sounds so romantic, she said. Those things were real. The freshness and taste of the food was extraordinary. The light in the evenings was truly beautiful. But romantic was so far from how I felt that something in me twinged. It wasn’t just that I didn’t feel the romance in that moment on the call; I knew that for the most part, of any given day, I didn’t feel that way. What my friend was saying wasn’t wrong, in fact hearing her lay it out and knowing it was true gave me a strange sense of disorientation. I turned to questioning myself: Why don't I feel the romance? Am I ungrateful? What's wrong with me?

The next day I made a plan: if I wasn’t feeling the romance, I’d make more effort to go and find it. I decided to take a scenic walk to the market, buy something delicious and eat it in one of the parks with stunning views. Simple, and exactly the kind of thing my friend was talking about.

At the market I headed to a fruit stall, piled high with all sorts of delicious looking seasonal produce. As I waited my turn, I couldn’t decide what to choose, it all looked so good. When I caught the attention of the vendor I landed on cherries, but as I opened my mouth I realised I didn’t know the word. I tried something, it got a puzzled look. I tried in English, that didn’t work either. Noticing the impatience of the vendor and the bustling queue of people around me I just pointed instead. I got the cherries. As I walked away, I felt agitated so gave myself a talking to: It doesn’t matter you didn’t have the word, you got what you wanted and the guy wasn’t rude, he was just busy.

Getting back on the horse, I went to the next stall and I tried again. I was prepared this time. I wouldn’t make any last-minute decisions. I had my vocab and phrases ready before I approached. I asked for what I wanted and the vendor replied with something I hadn’t prepared for. A question maybe, or a clarification, I didn’t know. I stalled and seeing the confusion on my face, the vendor switched to perfect English. I pushed down a sense of deflation. I got what I wanted. I thanked them and moved on.

I found a bench in the park and sat down with my lunch. The sky was clear blue. The views were stunning. I noticed families spread out on blankets, groups of friends, children running between picnics. I saw tourists in pairs and small groups, taking photos. I also noticed that I didn’t see anyone else sitting alone. Where I’d come from, eating lunch by yourself in a park was normal, unremarkable. Here, I felt conspicuous, I couldn’t see myself reflected anywhere.

I had got everything I set out for. I had the food, the prime spot in the park, time to relax in the sunshine. And underneath all of it, something felt off. It wasn’t sadness exactly, but a flatness or exhaustion I couldn’t quite account for. Again, I asked myself what was wrong with me.

The Cost Nobody Mentions

The answer, as it turns out, is nothing. What I was experiencing was something I couldn’t name at the time but is usual for anyone in my situation. A type of cognitive tax; the additional mental effort that even low stakes, enjoyable and successful exercises cost in a new location compared to a familiar, routine and deeply understood environment.

That afternoon was the easy mode version of my life in this foreign city. I had chosen it and I enjoyed it. And it still cost something. The cognitive tax doesn’t just show up on pleasant afternoons. It showed up every time I made a decision, entered an interaction or tried to complete a task in my new environment. And when the stakes were higher, the margin for confusion was smaller and the cost of the cognitive tax hiked up.

This sort of tax shows up when we need to see a doctor and discover that the system works entirely differently in this new place. The process for getting a prescription, or test results, the question of whether a referral is needed to see a specialist, navigating the insurance, none of it maps directly onto the former experience. And, typically, we don’t realise there’s a difference in advance with enough time and space to easily access calm and logic. Often the new and confusing information shows up in the moments we’re already low on reserves and most need things to be simple.

It shows up when the bus diverts unexpectedly, we don’t know where we are, and we don’t quite have the language to ask the person sitting next to us. It shows up in our local supermarket, when we notice others using a loyalty card, gather the courage to ask how to get one, only to find the process so complex and requiring documents we don't have, or have never even heard of, that we decide it’s easier to forgo the discounts. It shows up in the small print of every ordinary day. The systems, the customs, the unspoken rules that everyone around us absorbed years ago without thinking about, and that we are now learning, each painstaking moment of friction at a time.

In our previous lives, we had a shorthand for all of this. We built it up so gradually we never noticed it was there. It was a type of learning and ongoing experience that was so ingrained into daily life it was just the water we swam in, the air we breathed. Like an autopilot that reduced our mental load. And now it’s gone. This phenomenon is sometimes called culture shock.

What Culture Shock Actually Means

The word shock implies a short sharp event, an extreme change. I knew the term culture shock but didn’t associate it with my experience. I associated it with living in wild terrain; a jungle, desert, or polar environment. Being in a war zone or living in the wake of a natural disaster. I was still on the same continent. I had all my familiar modern conveniences; the internet, a bank account, a comfortable apartment, public transport and global chain stores. What culture shock actually refers to is the feeling of disorientation, confusion, exhaustion and quiet unease that happens during an ongoing adjustment to a new environment. It’s what happens when familiar social cues, daily routines, values, and expectations become replaced by completely new ones.

This was exactly my experience. There wasn’t a dramatic sense of shock or outward difference. The language was different, sure, I was conscious of that and practicing. Besides, most people spoke English anyway. I could get by. From a surface level, the building, shops, roads and infrastructure seemed similar to things I already had experience of. People looked, dressed and acted in public much like I expected. It was the smaller, seemingly insignificant things I wasn't paying attention to which quietly taxed my energy. The stilted conversations, repetitive minor misunderstandings, having a mirror held up to the different expectations and norms I had compared to those around me, not having a shorthand understanding of the daily rhythms of life in this new place. 

Exhaustion from Exercise Not Ailment

When I think back to the phone call with my friend now, I can understand my uneasiness. I'd made a choice, with clear intention and there was so much I enjoyed about it. What I felt but wasn't able to make sense of then, was the cognitive tax present for me every day, even on the best days. I was grateful, I did enjoy the romance of this place. And there was a cost that I hadn't budgeted for. The challenge of losing my cultural shorthand, the ongoing adjustment to a new environment and the way this would make me feel.

I’d been paying this tax, expending this additional cognitive effort daily, without appreciating or even acknowledging it. I'd even brushed off the uncomfortable feelings as irrelevant. I wanted to experience a different way of living, I wanted to learn a new language, I wanted to be challenged. Now I just saw the extent of the challenge more clearly.

Culture shock isn't necessarily dramatic. It can be quiet, cumulative, and easily mistaken for something being wrong. What I was experiencing as I ate my lunch on that bench, the flatness and unaccountable exhaustion, was the equivalent of sore muscles after a workout. It was evidence of effort, not failure. What I couldn't see yet, but would come to understand over time, was that things not only got easier as my short-hand for this place developed, but the effort wasn't a sunk cost. Over time it built something too.