Expat Lifestyle: How Many Cultures Are You Navigating in a Day?

By Doreen Cumberford

San Miguel de Allende has never been afraid of a contradiction. Indigenous and Spanish. Sacred and commercial. The deeply rooted and the recently arrived mingling together. For centuries this city has been a negotiation, absorbing artists and mystics, retirees and revolutionaries, the intentional and the accidentally permanent. Excellent preparation for the world we are navigating right now.

Because we are, whether we realise it or not, in the middle of yet another cultural revolution. And we are all in it together. Most of us, when we moved here, expected some version of culture shock. The bureaucracy. The different relationship with time. The gentle discovery that “no hay problema” does not always mean what we hoped. We arrived and found, as San Miguel has a way of arranging, that the adjustment was both harder and richer than anticipated. What none of us quite anticipated was arriving in the middle of an artificial intelligence revolution at the same moment.

In intercultural circles, the conversation right now is urgent and, frankly, reassuring. Not just what AI can do across cultures, but what it quietly reveals about us. In some cases it mirrors the cultures we already carry. In others it is completely culture blind, like being colour blind. Perhaps this is what we should be chatting about over coffee. Because we are not navigating one culture at a time.

We are navigating several, often within the same afternoon.There is the culture we inhabit when we have a phone in our hand, fast, frictionless, algorithmically fluent, a world that barely needs us to choose anymore. There is the culture we enter when we sit across from a local, slower, more layered, shaped by courtesies and silences that no translation app has decoded.

There is the culture we move through among other expats, familiar enough to feel like home, foreign enough to remind us that home is no longer quite what it was. Three cultures. One afternoon. And most of us are doing this simultaneously, which, when you think about it, is rather remarkable. Which brings us to a question worth asking, half seriously. We have talked about Third Culture Kids, those remarkable people who grow up between worlds, belonging fully to none of them but shaped by all. Now we have an entire generation growing up with AI as a native language, a fourth world they inhabit as naturally as breathing. Does that make those of us who arrived at artificial intelligence as bewildered adults Fourth Culture people? Just asking for a friend.

Daniela Draugelis, intercultural consultant, Cultural Intelligence facilitator, friend and   guest on my podcast Nomadic Diaries, frames the AI question with elegant clarity. “AI is a tool,” she writes. “You are the filter.” She is not warning us away from the technology. She is asking us to notice something: that in cross-cultural situations, AI cannot read the room, sense hesitation, or interpret what is not being said.

“While AI increases speed,” she adds, “Cultural Intelligence ensures relevance.” That, she reminds us, remains stubbornly the beautiful work of humans. The intercultural community agrees. This month, SIETAR gathered in Valencia, Spain, with the theme Across Difference: Old Questions and New Tools: Interculturality, AI and Shared Futures. The old questions are the ones that matter most. Identity. Belonging. What we owe each other across difference. The new tools simply make them more pressing, and more urgent to answer with kindness.

San Miguel has been doing this longer than any of us. The city rewards the attentive, not the distracted, and reveals itself slowly to those willing to stay at the table a little longer.

So here is the invitation. Simply notice. In the next twenty-four hours, count how many cultures you move through. The phone. The mercado. The expat lunch. The WhatsApp thread. The wordless exchange with your neighbour over the garden wall. Then add one more. Join a padel game. Brave the conversation at the book group. Sit in the plaza a little longer than is comfortable.

We are all finding our way through this. The least we can do is be gentle with each other along the way. Count your cultures. You may surprise yourself. And San Miguel, almost certainly, will surprise you back.

Doreen Cumberford is an intercultural trainer and author. She's recently created The Belonging Project, a podcast exploring what it means to belong across cultures. Learn moreat nomadicdiariespodcast.com