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The author seems to have a penchant for taking the most dangerous assignments. I'm a "diplomat brat" and most diplomatic careers are much more boring and pedes

The author seems to have a penchant for taking the most dangerous assignments. I'm a "diplomat brat" and most diplomatic careers are much more boring and pedestrian. I (US citizen) grew up in Japan, Venezuela, and Costa Rica. I echo the other current top level commenter's sentiment that diplomacy should not be a family business. I recognize many of the advantages I have in terms of having a broad worldview and understanding, as well as language skills. However I would trade it all to grow up in a stable suburb and graduate from high school with a few handfuls of folks I'd been to primary school with. Being uprooted every few years has led to an inability to form long-term relationships. I was essentially trained to have a timer on my friendships: approximately 3-5 years. In my time we didn't have the internet so once I moved it was over. Not a fun time. I do not recall my childhood very fondly. In my case it was especially hard because I'm an only child. I often wondered, as a child, why it was so hard for me but not my peers. When I was in high school I realized that all of the "better adjusted" kids I was comparing myself to had siblings similar in age. To those of you thinking of a diplomatic career: don't try to raise a family and be a diplomat. Just don't. It's not worth it. Do it while you're single for as long as you can, but the term "settle down" exists for a reason.

kemiller2002 6y ago
My friend grew up as an "army brat" and said the same thing. They moved every few years, and I asked if it was difficult to keep losing friends. I was pretty much told that, "You just stop making long term friends." They mentioned the same thing about the "timer" concept you mentioned too. Every few years they would get restless and want to move one, because it's what happened always before.
- nrjames 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's unique to military, diplomacy, or other itinerant careers. Staying in the same place but switching jobs every 2-4 years can have the same impact, especially when it comes to "feeling the itch to move on." I think of this often in the context of my grandparents, who worked for the same companies/institutions for their entire careers.
- joncrane 6y ago
  Luckily for me, I'm living in the same first house I bought straight out of grad school, 18 years and counting. All I ever wanted growing up was a sense of permanence. I am thankfully now able to provide that for myself physically. However, in terms of human relationships it's still a struggle, especially on the romantic side. The only person I can truly consider a "long term" friend is a fellow diplomat brat I met in Costa Rica. Even then we've had about a decade where we weren't in touch much. But I think we both recognize that there are very few people who "get" what it's like to have the types of parents we had, so we can bond over that.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
It would probably be difficult to staff the diplomatic corps with childless people only. Among other things, I don't know how moral or legal it would be to ask people to remain childless or face the end of your career. Having met maybe a dozen or so people in your situation, my general impression is that they share your concern, but not necessarily to the degree where they would consider it to outweigh the benefits of growing up under these circumstances. Letting diplomats remain at the same post for longer would seem to be a possible improvement. Unfortunately, there is a purpose behind all that moving around, namely avoiding networks of corruption to form and/or practices diverging. It'd be interesting to hear about the experience of children of military families. The problems are similar, but the benefits not: a diplomat's children get to life in the capital, usually attend the best schools, and enjoy all the variety of cultural happenings and high social status. For children on a military base, being mostly around others with the same background might be slightly more comfortable. But beyond that, I would imagine the environment to be drab and isolating.
toyg 6y ago
> The author seems to have a penchant for taking the most dangerous assignments. He says as much in the intro at the bottom - he literally volunteered for the posts his colleagues studiously avoided. I guess he’s the diplomatic equivalent of an adrenaline junkie. (To be fair, those places are precisely where low-ranked diplomats can actually make a massive difference, unlike in glamorous capitals where they are basically glorified office staff.)
- JackFr 6y ago
  In the US Foreign Service you also can make substantial bonuses for taking a “hardship post”, in particular posts considered too dangerous for dependents to accompany you.
rottingfruit 6y ago
I sympathize with what you’re saying but I don’t think you should be advising people to write off a diplomatic career if they have kids. I like many other people had a very volatile childhood for no real reason. I don’t think I particularly minded the moving a lot and enjoyed making new friends in different places. It’s also worth noting that if your kids are anything like my friends who grew up in really stable suburbs they’re going to be peeling their eyes out in boredom and waiting for the first chance they get to take off and go as far away from that stable suburb as they can. All I’m saying is that every kid is different and what was bad for you may be great for another kid and what sounds amazing to you may feel like hell to someone else.
- tokai 6y ago
  > what was bad for you may be great for another kid Great point. Don't have kids regardless of your career. Break the cycle.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Who cares about some cycles?
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    and thus lose the best thing that happens in most people's lives? great thinking
BrandoElFollito 6y ago
Interestingly enough - this is how I generally see people living in the US. I read somewhere that they move about 6 times in their lives and that children are used to get friendly quickly because it will not last. I would say that the general superficial openness of Americans supports this (to be clear: there is no negativity in that expression - it is actually the only reasonable way to live a normal life in a quickly changing world of "friends"). I do not have scientific data about that - it is just what I read and the ~30 times I travelled to the US and met some people there (both in larger cities and in remote areas - but mostly larger cities and tech people). I am French and we do not move much. We stay with our parents a long time, possibly go somewhere to study but a lot of people will not move spontaneously. It is not unusual to have friends form a very young age - my children go to high school with the ones they went to kindergarten, all this right next to Paris. I think that it is even more pronounced in Italy.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  I've seen some of these studies and the average is higher (closer to 10-12) and biased by age. For example, many of people's ~10 moves happen in their 20s when they're starting and establishing their lives, career, etc and even then most move are in the same county. Most likely they don't have kids yet and almost definitely haven't bought a home, so there are few roots. But on the other end, by the time someone is 40, they'll likely only move 1-2 more times. Still probably not good but not as bad as you might think. Anecdotally: From my own life, I moved 3 times before graduating high school (same school district), 5 times in my 20s, 1 time in my 30s, and probably again in the next few years.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > I read somewhere that they move about 6 times in their lives and that children are used to get friendly quickly because it will not last. I think you may have misinterpreted the statistic about moving 6 times in a lifetime. That’s less than once per decade, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re moving away from their friends and family. In America, it’s common to buy a “starter home” as your first house and then move to progressively nicer houses throughout your life as you can afford different houses. Some people do choose to move to different cities for jobs or families, but it’s not true that we’re all moving away from friends over again. If your only experiences in America were traveling to large, expensive cities then you likely saw a disproportionately large number of job-related moves. It’s common for people in big cities to move there for career purposes for a while before relocating elsewhere to raise families later. If you were primarily talking to people at bars or after-work social events, your sample size was likely biased away from typical people with families, who generally are spending time with their children rather than out socializing after work. When we do move away, it’s common to maintain friendships remotely and coordinate return visits. Most people don’t simply forget their friends after moving. I’m always fascinated to read outside descriptions of Americans on the Internet because they so often don’t resemble life here at all. Then again, whenever I read Reddit and Twitter it feels like many Americans are describing exaggerated versions of cherry-picked edge cases as if they were normal life here, so I can see how it happens.
cehrlich 6y ago
I wasn't technically a diplomat brat, but I went to diplomat brat schools and lived in 6 countries before my high school graduation. I agree with everything in your post.
RobRivera 6y ago
Eh - myself and lot of my friends grew up army brats, and we're fine. Really into vidya.
leetcrew 6y ago
> Being uprooted every few years has led to an inability to form long-term relationships. I was essentially trained to have a timer on my friendships: approximately 3-5 years. In my time we didn't have the internet so once I moved it was over. I don't mean to belittle the specific challenges/hardships of your childhood, but I think the 3-5 year friendship thing is pretty common. my childhood was almost the one you wish you had: I went to school with the same kids K-12 and I have a brother two years younger than me. I can't say it worked out much differently for me though. outside of the main clique, which I was not part of, all the friend groups seemed to get scrambled up every few years as people got older and grew apart. I had tables where I was welcome to sit at lunch throughout school, but it took me halfway through highschool to find a good group of friends. most of my classmates came from well-off families, so it was expected that we would go to college out-of-state. so we all went off to different colleges across the country. I'm now the only one from my highschool friend group to live in our home state. I made some good friends in college too, but again, we were all going to school far away from home, so we naturally went our separate ways after graduating. I'm not sure whether it's better to be exposed early or sheltered for a while, but I think this is just the nature of our world. people move around in search of the best opportunities, making new friends and losing track of old ones along the way. as a CS major, I can get at least a decent job pretty much anywhere, but most people aren't this lucky. after living a different life in a different place for a few years, memories start to be the only things you have in common with your old friends.
- joncrane 6y ago
  Regardless of whether the average friendship length is similar, being FORCED to abandon your friends based on someone else's schedule is much more traumatic than friends entering and exiting your social circle due to the natural cycle of friendship.
  - Ntrails 6y ago
    Everything has tradeoffs. Yes living a military childhood has hardships, but it also gives a different, often broader, set of experiences to draw upon. It is easy to grass is greener, to think everything might've been better with a stable steady upbringing in a single location. It might. You might have instead run away from that staid small town and never looked back, hating everything about that narrow minded world. Honestly telling anyone itinerant never to have children is some crazy projection.
dangerface 6y ago
> However I would trade it all to grow up in a stable suburb and graduate from high school with a few handfuls of folks I'd been to primary school with. This is a fantasy not the reality of everyone else.
wayanon 6y ago
I grew up with a father in the army so moved around a lot also but I found the best friendships have come from those I was at college with in my 20s. I'm in my 40s now.
charliepark 6y ago
I'd be curious to know your thoughts on the Foreign Service as a post-child career. My wife and I were young when we had kids, and will be empty nesting at 46. I took the sample FSO exam online this summer and actually loved it, enough that I'm wondering about diplomacy as a second career. Did you encounter anyone in that scenario when you were younger? Did they seem happy?
- brynx97 6y ago
  A significant portion of the FS are second or third career people. I put people into a few different buckets which covers almost all of the FS. (1) Joined straight out of graduate school (2) join after a military career (3) join in their mid/late 40's for a second career. I do not have kids, but on our mid-career tour now. Generally speaking, everyone enjoys the lifestyle provided by the FS, but it is not for everyone. There are always a few people who do nothing but complain and try to make everyone else miserable. These folks often have kids, and they try too hard to replicate the US suburban lifestyle in foreign countries. They set themselves up for failure and cannot adjust. Taking the FS exam is step 1 of many, although if you are trying to join as an IT professional, it's much easier because of how desperate they are to fill IT positions. The generalist positions, especially political and economic, probably have less than 1-2% success rate after passing the FS exam.
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    >A significant portion of the FS are second or third career people. Such as the head of the American Institute in Taiwan (the de facto embassy), Brent Christensen (https://www.ait.org.tw/offices/taipei/director-christensen/ https://www.ait.org.tw/offices/taipei/director-christensen/), who has a dental degree.
peteretep 6y ago
> Being uprooted every few years has led to an inability to form long-term relationships I had a similar upbringing and can’t at all relate to this
pnutjam 6y ago
I was an Army Brat with similar experience, but several bothers and sisters that moved with me. We may have been less lonely, but it still meant I had essentially no adult role models in the community. All the well adjusted kids have strong peer groups so you always end up being approached by the misfits when you move to a new place. Nothing wrong with misfits, but they often don't have the social network to help you be successful as an adult.
jmoss20 6y ago
(Air Force brat): There's a lot of interesting game-theoretic stuff here too. If none of your prisoners dilemmas are iterated (or only iterated few times), defecting is always advantageous. There are lots of tradeoffs with "long distance" consequences you can make, but get pulled away from before they ever hit home. These sorts of environments just have a /lot/ less feedback. Pros and cons for sure, but being blindsided by basic life lessons in your 20s that others learned in adolescence isn't particularly fun.
bernardv 6y ago
This is a common experience with a lot of expats, diplomatic or not. Very similar experiences here and I hear the same from my expat friends. Forever ‘in transit’ and there’s no going home.

kemiller2002 6y ago

My friend grew up as an "army brat" and said the same thing. They moved every few years, and I asked if it was difficult to keep losing friends. I was pretty much told that, "You just stop making long term friends." They mentioned the same thing about the "timer" concept you mentioned too. Every few years they would get restless and want to move one, because it's what happened always before.

nrjames 6y ago
I'm not sure that's unique to military, diplomacy, or other itinerant careers. Staying in the same place but switching jobs every 2-4 years can have the same impact, especially when it comes to "feeling the itch to move on." I think of this often in the context of my grandparents, who worked for the same companies/institutions for their entire careers.
joncrane 6y ago
Luckily for me, I'm living in the same first house I bought straight out of grad school, 18 years and counting. All I ever wanted growing up was a sense of permanence. I am thankfully now able to provide that for myself physically. However, in terms of human relationships it's still a struggle, especially on the romantic side. The only person I can truly consider a "long term" friend is a fellow diplomat brat I met in Costa Rica. Even then we've had about a decade where we weren't in touch much. But I think we both recognize that there are very few people who "get" what it's like to have the types of parents we had, so we can bond over that.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

It would probably be difficult to staff the diplomatic corps with childless people only. Among other things, I don't know how moral or legal it would be to ask people to remain childless or face the end of your career. Having met maybe a dozen or so people in your situation, my general impression is that they share your concern, but not necessarily to the degree where they would consider it to outweigh the benefits of growing up under these circumstances. Letting diplomats remain at the same post for longer would seem to be a possible improvement. Unfortunately, there is a purpose behind all that moving around, namely avoiding networks of corruption to form and/or practices diverging. It'd be interesting to hear about the experience of children of military families. The problems are similar, but the benefits not: a diplomat's children get to life in the capital, usually attend the best schools, and enjoy all the variety of cultural happenings and high social status. For children on a military base, being mostly around others with the same background might be slightly more comfortable. But beyond that, I would imagine the environment to be drab and isolating.

toyg 6y ago

> The author seems to have a penchant for taking the most dangerous assignments. He says as much in the intro at the bottom - he literally volunteered for the posts his colleagues studiously avoided. I guess he’s the diplomatic equivalent of an adrenaline junkie. (To be fair, those places are precisely where low-ranked diplomats can actually make a massive difference, unlike in glamorous capitals where they are basically glorified office staff.)

JackFr 6y ago
In the US Foreign Service you also can make substantial bonuses for taking a “hardship post”, in particular posts considered too dangerous for dependents to accompany you.

rottingfruit 6y ago

I sympathize with what you’re saying but I don’t think you should be advising people to write off a diplomatic career if they have kids. I like many other people had a very volatile childhood for no real reason. I don’t think I particularly minded the moving a lot and enjoyed making new friends in different places. It’s also worth noting that if your kids are anything like my friends who grew up in really stable suburbs they’re going to be peeling their eyes out in boredom and waiting for the first chance they get to take off and go as far away from that stable suburb as they can. All I’m saying is that every kid is different and what was bad for you may be great for another kid and what sounds amazing to you may feel like hell to someone else.

tokai 6y ago
> what was bad for you may be great for another kid Great point. Don't have kids regardless of your career. Break the cycle.
- emteycz 6y ago
  Who cares about some cycles?
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  and thus lose the best thing that happens in most people's lives? great thinking

BrandoElFollito 6y ago

Interestingly enough - this is how I generally see people living in the US. I read somewhere that they move about 6 times in their lives and that children are used to get friendly quickly because it will not last. I would say that the general superficial openness of Americans supports this (to be clear: there is no negativity in that expression - it is actually the only reasonable way to live a normal life in a quickly changing world of "friends"). I do not have scientific data about that - it is just what I read and the ~30 times I travelled to the US and met some people there (both in larger cities and in remote areas - but mostly larger cities and tech people). I am French and we do not move much. We stay with our parents a long time, possibly go somewhere to study but a lot of people will not move spontaneously. It is not unusual to have friends form a very young age - my children go to high school with the ones they went to kindergarten, all this right next to Paris. I think that it is even more pronounced in Italy.

caseysoftware 6y ago
I've seen some of these studies and the average is higher (closer to 10-12) and biased by age. For example, many of people's ~10 moves happen in their 20s when they're starting and establishing their lives, career, etc and even then most move are in the same county. Most likely they don't have kids yet and almost definitely haven't bought a home, so there are few roots. But on the other end, by the time someone is 40, they'll likely only move 1-2 more times. Still probably not good but not as bad as you might think. Anecdotally: From my own life, I moved 3 times before graduating high school (same school district), 5 times in my 20s, 1 time in my 30s, and probably again in the next few years.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> I read somewhere that they move about 6 times in their lives and that children are used to get friendly quickly because it will not last. I think you may have misinterpreted the statistic about moving 6 times in a lifetime. That’s less than once per decade, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re moving away from their friends and family. In America, it’s common to buy a “starter home” as your first house and then move to progressively nicer houses throughout your life as you can afford different houses. Some people do choose to move to different cities for jobs or families, but it’s not true that we’re all moving away from friends over again. If your only experiences in America were traveling to large, expensive cities then you likely saw a disproportionately large number of job-related moves. It’s common for people in big cities to move there for career purposes for a while before relocating elsewhere to raise families later. If you were primarily talking to people at bars or after-work social events, your sample size was likely biased away from typical people with families, who generally are spending time with their children rather than out socializing after work. When we do move away, it’s common to maintain friendships remotely and coordinate return visits. Most people don’t simply forget their friends after moving. I’m always fascinated to read outside descriptions of Americans on the Internet because they so often don’t resemble life here at all. Then again, whenever I read Reddit and Twitter it feels like many Americans are describing exaggerated versions of cherry-picked edge cases as if they were normal life here, so I can see how it happens.

cehrlich 6y ago

I wasn't technically a diplomat brat, but I went to diplomat brat schools and lived in 6 countries before my high school graduation. I agree with everything in your post.

RobRivera 6y ago

Eh - myself and lot of my friends grew up army brats, and we're fine. Really into vidya.

leetcrew 6y ago

> Being uprooted every few years has led to an inability to form long-term relationships. I was essentially trained to have a timer on my friendships: approximately 3-5 years. In my time we didn't have the internet so once I moved it was over. I don't mean to belittle the specific challenges/hardships of your childhood, but I think the 3-5 year friendship thing is pretty common. my childhood was almost the one you wish you had: I went to school with the same kids K-12 and I have a brother two years younger than me. I can't say it worked out much differently for me though. outside of the main clique, which I was not part of, all the friend groups seemed to get scrambled up every few years as people got older and grew apart. I had tables where I was welcome to sit at lunch throughout school, but it took me halfway through highschool to find a good group of friends. most of my classmates came from well-off families, so it was expected that we would go to college out-of-state. so we all went off to different colleges across the country. I'm now the only one from my highschool friend group to live in our home state. I made some good friends in college too, but again, we were all going to school far away from home, so we naturally went our separate ways after graduating. I'm not sure whether it's better to be exposed early or sheltered for a while, but I think this is just the nature of our world. people move around in search of the best opportunities, making new friends and losing track of old ones along the way. as a CS major, I can get at least a decent job pretty much anywhere, but most people aren't this lucky. after living a different life in a different place for a few years, memories start to be the only things you have in common with your old friends.

joncrane 6y ago
Regardless of whether the average friendship length is similar, being FORCED to abandon your friends based on someone else's schedule is much more traumatic than friends entering and exiting your social circle due to the natural cycle of friendship.
- Ntrails 6y ago
  Everything has tradeoffs. Yes living a military childhood has hardships, but it also gives a different, often broader, set of experiences to draw upon. It is easy to grass is greener, to think everything might've been better with a stable steady upbringing in a single location. It might. You might have instead run away from that staid small town and never looked back, hating everything about that narrow minded world. Honestly telling anyone itinerant never to have children is some crazy projection.

dangerface 6y ago

> However I would trade it all to grow up in a stable suburb and graduate from high school with a few handfuls of folks I'd been to primary school with. This is a fantasy not the reality of everyone else.

wayanon 6y ago

I grew up with a father in the army so moved around a lot also but I found the best friendships have come from those I was at college with in my 20s. I'm in my 40s now.

charliepark 6y ago

I'd be curious to know your thoughts on the Foreign Service as a post-child career. My wife and I were young when we had kids, and will be empty nesting at 46. I took the sample FSO exam online this summer and actually loved it, enough that I'm wondering about diplomacy as a second career. Did you encounter anyone in that scenario when you were younger? Did they seem happy?

brynx97 6y ago
A significant portion of the FS are second or third career people. I put people into a few different buckets which covers almost all of the FS. (1) Joined straight out of graduate school (2) join after a military career (3) join in their mid/late 40's for a second career. I do not have kids, but on our mid-career tour now. Generally speaking, everyone enjoys the lifestyle provided by the FS, but it is not for everyone. There are always a few people who do nothing but complain and try to make everyone else miserable. These folks often have kids, and they try too hard to replicate the US suburban lifestyle in foreign countries. They set themselves up for failure and cannot adjust. Taking the FS exam is step 1 of many, although if you are trying to join as an IT professional, it's much easier because of how desperate they are to fill IT positions. The generalist positions, especially political and economic, probably have less than 1-2% success rate after passing the FS exam.
- TMWNN 6y ago
  >A significant portion of the FS are second or third career people. Such as the head of the American Institute in Taiwan (the de facto embassy), Brent Christensen (https://www.ait.org.tw/offices/taipei/director-christensen/ https://www.ait.org.tw/offices/taipei/director-christensen/), who has a dental degree.

peteretep 6y ago

> Being uprooted every few years has led to an inability to form long-term relationships I had a similar upbringing and can’t at all relate to this

pnutjam 6y ago

I was an Army Brat with similar experience, but several bothers and sisters that moved with me. We may have been less lonely, but it still meant I had essentially no adult role models in the community. All the well adjusted kids have strong peer groups so you always end up being approached by the misfits when you move to a new place. Nothing wrong with misfits, but they often don't have the social network to help you be successful as an adult.

jmoss20 6y ago

(Air Force brat): There's a lot of interesting game-theoretic stuff here too. If none of your prisoners dilemmas are iterated (or only iterated few times), defecting is always advantageous. There are lots of tradeoffs with "long distance" consequences you can make, but get pulled away from before they ever hit home. These sorts of environments just have a /lot/ less feedback. Pros and cons for sure, but being blindsided by basic life lessons in your 20s that others learned in adolescence isn't particularly fun.

bernardv 6y ago

This is a common experience with a lot of expats, diplomatic or not. Very similar experiences here and I hear the same from my expat friends. Forever ‘in transit’ and there’s no going home.