Comment by low_tech_love
1 day ago
I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing, not the whole world. I am a latin american living in Sweden and the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it). They trust the system so much that whenever it doesn’t work, it’s basically ”well bummer”. You become the 1% for which the system has failed, and you’re supposed to just take one for the team (since everyone else is having a good time anyway). The thing is simply that you have to learn to see the good side of the system and understand that you can’t have the cake and eat it too, unfortunately.
As another 3rd world citizen living in Northern Europe, I usually describe it as "processes and rules over common sense". They understand your situation, they agree with you, they can solve your problem, but they will not do it because it goes against some obscure rule, or it would not follow a specific mandatory procedure step by step, and who knows what are consequences.
And quite frankly, they don't give a fuck. They have been conditioned not to give a fuck from an early age; the system works 99% of the time, so nobody really has to care about each other. There is literally no benefit in giving a fuck about another person, in fact it is quite possible that you'll end up being punished by the system for breaking the rules. It is a Leviathan whale state swimming through the sea with millions of little fish sucking on it, and they sure as hell don't care about the few who fall off during the trip.
> I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing,
I think it's a "busy tracks" problem in general, which yeah, is a problem in Europe in general. You can't just stop a train in the middle of some track, there are a bunch of other trains coming too, who can't just pass unless you get to a place where that is possible, which isn't everywhere.
None the less, the rest of what you say is true of Sweden, but I don't think it's the reason a train refuses to stop on some train tracks.
My point is that, in a country where people act like well, people (and not robots), someone would be bothered by this and might try to solve the problem in some creative and unexpected way. Someone might think "damn, we're ruining these peoples' christmas, let's do something" and then fix it somehow. Here it's more like "well bummer, deal with it" in both cases. I doubt that a bunch of adult, highly-skilled people could not have a conversation over the phone and arrange for a train to stop 5 minutes on a track so people could get off. Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident? I think that a lack of willingness to give a fuck is much more likely.
> the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it).
Curious to hear what strategy you've learned over time.
The most important thing is to learn to expect and plan ahead, so that you don't get caught by surprise as much as it is reasonably possible. I do not expect anyone to act with humanity, so I start playing the system as early as possible. If I think something might be a problem in two weeks, I start calling them today, knowing that it'll take them two weeks minimum to take me seriously. If I go the the ER, I take movies and games with me (and lots of paracetamol) because I know it'll take several hours for anyone to even say hello to me, let alone do something concrete. I also, maybe more importantly, do not expect anything from the human side. Basically I see them as robots, so I deal with them as robots: explain everything calmly, repeat myself 100 times, and even more importantly, do not get angry. You get angry, you lose. It doesn't matter if you have an internal bleeding and you're dying, the moment you start screaming, nobody will take you seriously anymore. You have to be slow, strong, and systematic: repeat yourself, call again in 1h, then in 4h, then next morning, then next morning, until at some point something happens.