The future has already arrived

What Thailand taught me about living without solid ground

In Thailand, you don’t really learn how the world works.
You learn how to live when it doesn’t.

My wife can sit calmly for hours at immigration, while every form is copied in endless multiples, with no one quite able to say why. I start to feel my Western irritation after five minutes. No explanation, just an apologetic smile and a mai pen rai. The same with internet outages, power cuts, suddenly changing rules. Where I smell chaos, she smells an ordinary Tuesday.

The difference isn’t personality. It’s history.

Thailand is a country that never had the luxury of believing the system would carry you. For centuries it has balanced between great powers and Buddhist emptiness — and, more recently, between coups and raw market forces. There has always been movement, always uncertainty, always another adjustment to make. People learned not to rely on structures, but on relationships, family, karma and improvisation.

You see it everywhere.

Thai people wait differently from Westerners. No restless scrolling, no sighing. They just stand or sit. The body relaxes, the gaze empties. Waiting isn’t frustration here; it’s a neutral state. Bad news is met with a brief silence, a nod, a soft uhm. Then it moves quickly to: okay, what now? And, surprisingly often, a laugh — not because it isn’t serious, but because humour releases tension in the group.

Politics works the same way. For me it is identity. For them it is a weather report. Important to know, but not something to build yourself around. I used to think Thai people were cowardly for not taking a stand. I now understand it differently: a culture shaped by the knowledge that direct confrontation with the state usually ends in loss.

That psychological flexibility is impressive — and troubling.

Because the same ability to endure, to bend, to laugh after bad news is also what allows inequality, patronage and stagnation to persist. There is little social safety net in Thailand. Those who fall outside family and networks fall hard. Here, resignation is often not a choice but a necessity.

I feel that double pull myself. Sometimes I admire it — a Thailand that shows me how little my Western hunger for control really brings me. Sometimes I imagine myself as mayor for a while, sweeping through the city and its bureaucracy with a broom. And almost at the same moment I know: no one here is waiting for my broom.

Thailand has lived for a long time in a world without solid ground.
That same reality is now becoming palpable in the West as well.

It simply means Thailand has been living with it for longer.

And perhaps that is why things here can feel so calm —
and yet, at times, so painfully stuck.