When I was growing up I never felt particularly attached to my country of the UK (England). It felt pretty much an accident of birth to be here rather than Canada or the Phillipines or India. During my teenage years I had a couple of really nice holidays in the south of France. It was so lovely that I planned to move or at least retire to the south of France, or some other lovely european region. When I was a little older and going through university (the first time) I was completely open to where I'd end up and was looking to experience other cultures, although in the end I stayed in Britain. At the time my view of the UK was fairly average to negative, I had a dim view of the political system and culture and couldn't see much reason to hang around, aside from my parents.

Something happened maybe around the time I hit my late 20s, and my mindset reversed. I began to take comfort in the character and little idiosyncracies of Britain and the manor of it's people. After a time the thought of forgoing these things and settling elsewhere left me cold. Instead I began to feel gratitude for the positives of my country and it's contribution and place in the world, and a strong sense of belonging. No way was I going to forgo the quaint english pub, rainy riverside walks, the TV schedule, the british seaside, humour and it's predictably reserved and polite people (mostly). I think when you are young it's easy to only see the negatives in things and try to tear them down. After a few more years, I gained a more balanced picture and can see the good but also the faults and now feel rooted in the country, a participant rather than a spectator. I feel a sense of pride now, which I suppose could be called patriotism, not because I believe brits are superior, but simply because I can share in the unique identity of the country and be proud of a thing I helped (in a tiny way) build.

Maybe it's because this place is an island, but I sometimes feel I'm a passenger on a huge ship travelling through time, guided by it's many generations of crew. Standing here now I feel gratitude, a sense of responsibility to help guide the ship and pride for my small part in the journey. That is my version of patriotism.

How do you all relate to your nations, whether adopted or born into?

I think it's fine, it's hard to avoid all tangential links to politics. Personally I think social media has a large hand in the polarisation and extremisation of the fringes.

There's an interesting phenomena where if you ask a large number of people to guess the answer of a problem, then the median of all the guesses is usually surprisingly close to the right answer (this was used by 800 people to successfully guess the weight of a bull within 1% error for example). A key caveat is once people are allowed to talk and influence each other that accuracy goes out of the window. Perhaps social media in over-connecting us is making us collectively dumber in a similar way.

Incidently this is another reason why something like slinging and the online slinging community is valuable, it crosses political lines and is unifying rather than divisive.

JudoP wrote on Apr 6^th, 2023 at 4:49am:

100% agree.  And something to keep in mind about social media is that the primary goal isn't to provide correct, or even necessarily good information.  The goal is to make sure you keep watching and clicking on other links.  So recommended content is usually providing the same kind of stuff that a person already looks at.  I don't think this by itself is a bad thing, but it does make it difficult for someone to find good information from a different point of view unless they're intentionally looking for it.  So much stuff is just too polarizing.


@Rat Man - Ha!  Me too.  I was looking at Cape Breton.  It was never much of a serious consideration though for the same reasons you mentioned.

I was born and grew up in Australia, though honestly I never felt any affiliation with the country. My heritage is Serbo-Croatian (more Croatian), and I feel it strongly. I speak the language, eat the food, have the attitude too I'd say. I'd always call myself Croatian to others and take insult at being called Australian just because I was born here.

Australia, especially Sydney, is a bit of a funny place. There's a certain pressure given to immigrants here to assimilate and loose their cultural identity. It's worked pretty well on the new generation, so many have just lost their culture completely.

Having said all that, I do love some things about this country, like the south coast (on the Eastern side of Australia). Feels like you're on the edge of the world there. And I can safely say the Aussie folks of small towns are much, much friendlier than those of Sydney.

What I love in my country : the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Duties of the Citizen.
It is a famous idea in the world even if it is not well unterstood. I am not under the tulelage of anyone (noble, religious...) to decide my life. But in exchange, I'm responsible  for my actions towards the others citizens.