Hi there,
One of the things that bothered me the most about Spain is the mediocrity that you find everywhere, at work, in people, in paperwork and even in the supermarket.
Born and raised in Venezuela, the mentality has always been to improve myself, to climb steps. No Venezuelan wants to spend his whole life as an administrative assistant, for example. I believe that throughout America (and in the countries that I have been able to visit) the mentality is the same, people want to grow professionally, excel, and obviously earn more and more money.
In Spain, the shock for me was that most people have no aspirations of any kind, neither to travel, nor to earn more money, nor to improve professionally. If you travel, you’re weird because “nowhere is better than in Spain”, if you learn languages, you’re weird, if you don’t settle for a thousand euros a month, you’re weird.
I remember that, speaking with my union lawyer, I told him that I wanted to move to another country because the worst thing in Spain was that you spent 50 years in a company and always in the same position. His response was, what’s wrong with that?
There are people who want to grow and in Spain it is impossible. The Spaniard is satisfied with a permanent position of whatever it is in which he earns the minimum that allows him to live, drink coffee at the bar and take a nap.
The few people with aspirations that there were, I imagine they left during the crisis.
Another thing that also struck me is that when I was going to buy an apartment, the Spaniards asked me how I could get into that, if I planned to stay in Spain for the rest of my life. It is not necessary to stay your whole life, the apartment can be sold as soon as you no longer want it. Even people who had been paying rent for 30 years did not think of investing that money in owning a property.
Apart from the labor issue that is absurd and insufferable, there is absolute conformism for everything. If they go to a restaurant and the food is bad, they pay the same, maybe they complain to each other, but it doesn’t go beyond that.
“They have the best healthcare in the world.” Even those who have experienced the incompetence of healthcare up close and who have even seen family members die, repeat the same phrase robotically.
The media also does a very good job of keeping most of the population completely ignorant. People repeat what they watch on television without taking the time to search for information on other platforms and disagree with what they are seeing.
It is unthinkable to claim, denounce, put a negative review. That’s why everything in this country works so badly because nobody does anything to solve it and not even complain.
Surely reading this any Spaniard would come to tell me how bad Venezuela is. Yes, my country is wrong, but we know it and we complain. No other person from any other country will ever tell you “My country is the best in the world”. They will tell you that their country has good and bad things, since there is no perfect country.
In France every time they are on the street demonstrating if there is something they don’t like. In Spain the Government and its politicians do what they want with the people, and nobody lifts a finger. The same parties will always continue to govern because every time a new one comes out, they begin to show stuff about Chávez or Maduro, only news from Venezuela begins to appear and everyone continues to vote for the same parties as always.
It occurs to no one to think that by chance when there are going to be elections, that is when all the tabloid news about Venezuela comes out.
My co-workers said, “what was the point of going to demonstrate if in the end they were going to do what they wanted?”. If this is what young people think, imagine the mental stagnation of the elderly. Regrettable.
Another thing that is in the future of the country is that surely young people will not receive pensions because the country does not have money. So now they take at least 10% of your salary to reach 65 years (if the retirement age is not extended) and not have your pension insured. This is the future of the country, but people still don’t believe it.
This is how it is understood how health system works so catastrophically, that to carry out a procedure costs your life (not to mention the absurd amount of money), that the working conditions and salaries are extremely poor, that the taxes that must be paid are outrageous if you consider the average salary, etc. But the average Spaniard will always repeat to you from memory that “Spain has the best healthcare in the world and that like there, you are nowhere”.