#162 Life is beautiful or life sucks

One of the beauties of the Latin American culture is the simplicity of its people. Recently, I was on the bus in Ecuador and as usual there was a vendor who got on the bus to sell something. He was telling people you don’t have to buy and don’t stress over things, life is beautiful. This is not the first time I hear someone say life is beautiful whether in Ecuador, in Colombia or other countries in Latin America. I also noticed many songs that has a similar theme where it says life is beautiful.

I was talking with a local Ecuadorian who works at the hostel and he told me he saw some people who cannot afford to pay for the electricity or other services but you find them doing parties at their houses for large number of people. Among many Latinos, life priorities are very different than what someone got used to hear and see in other places around the world.

As I am heading back to Canada I started to recall that people very often in North America say life sucks. You cannot ignore the hardship of life in Latin America in the material sense, life is not easy, and you see people trying to sell anything to make a living. Not only they face poverty but also corruption, bad politics and high crimes, and yet I still find Latinos very happy and very approachable. The way we perceive things make us see things differently and probably the negative talk does affect our perception about life.

While writing this post I read a recent article of a survey to find out the happiest people in the world. The top 10 happiest countries in the world are all in Latin America.

The country with the happiest people survey

I looked at the list and almost every country on the list is poor even compared to some other countries in Latin America. I think every study can be questioned, but what I can attest to the results of this study based on my personal experience during my travel.
From the countries I’ve visited that are on the list I can easily say that people in Colombia and in Ecuador are very happy. What I’ve noticed Latinos don’t think too much about the future and take life in its simple forms. They are also very respectful, they greet each other, they also take a little time to converse with one another, and they don’t over stress over time. Not to mention the sun and their beautiful music that put you in good mood.

I told the guy at the hostel about the finding of this survey. He told me the Latino mentality is very different that for instance an American. He said look at the light bulb, and he pointed at the light bulb on the ceiling, he said if this light bulb needs to be replaced someone from north America will jump right away to fix it, he said for us Latinos, we’ll say I’ll just do it tomorrow. We don’t have the sense of urgency and we don’t stress about it.
I hope these countries will continue to be this way in term of happiness, but what I’ve noticed and from conversation with the locals, things are changing. It seems the more a country becomes developed the more complex life becomes, People go from taking things and just accepting the little things in life to become more overwhelmed by overconsumption and over analyzing their future.