Should American Retirees Put Up With All These "Rules"?

In the 1990s Vicki and I moved to Lake Chapala, Mexico. For the first time we lived near large numbers of other retired Americans. After a while we began to notice that some of them smoked. Happily, contentedly. Few people in Mexico cared if you smoked. Or if you bought medicine without a prescription. Or if you sent a small child to buy a six-pack of beer when friends dropped over.

Now we live part of each year in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Thais, too, have a more laid back attitude about acceptable behavior.

Vicki and I retired overseas for many reasons, including a more live-and-let-live attitude abroad. Americans share a penchant for controlling personal conduct that other countries find bizarre. Our American attitude comes from the Puritan ethic. Puritans believed that enjoying oneself was sinful. We were supposed to wait for the afterlife for that. Therefore laughter, happiness, or anything that smacked of pleasure was out. But the Puritans went further and attempted to control not only their own conduct but their neighbor's, too.

Four hundred years later we know that laughter and pleasure lead to healthier, happier lives. But we're stuck with the ethic from the old days. Everyone in America, it seems, presumes to tell us how to raise our kids, where we can smoke, when we can dance. I recently read that New York City now bans transfats in its 20,000 restaurants. I suspect that the Puritan notion at least partly underlies this kind of law: "It's not enough that I avoid transfats, I have to impose my views on others."

Last week I told a friend about our active social life in Argentina, going out nearly every night. Argentines love to party, to stay out late. The friend wrote back from California, "We don't go out much anymore, everything's illegal here anyway." He was kidding. Then again, he and his wife lived abroad most of the past 20 years--he knows what he's talking about.

In the 1990s Vicki and I lived near a park in Austin, Texas. Enter the park and a sign greeted you with 14 rules. It was as if someone had come up with a list of everything you'd ever want to do in a park and prohibited it. Go elsewhere if you want to picnic, kick a ball, play music, roast marsh mellows, run your dog, smoke, take a nap, show up after dark. Do these things in our park and you'll be fined or arrested or both. As a friend in Austin puts it, "In this city everything not mandatory is prohibited."

The park near where we live part-time in Chiang Mai manages to get by without any signs at all. People have picnics, take naps, walk their dogs, and cook food. They could put up a sign, I suppose, but no one would pay attention. (And I couldn't even read it, if in Thai script.)

Move overseas and you'll find fewer restrictions on personal conduct. Even if you only want to picnic in the park.

Paul Terhorst
Roving "Retire Early" Editor, International Living

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