Brazil is for the rich... In patience!

On August 22, 1940, an Austrian writer arrived in Rio who would go on to create the most internationally used expression to describe Brazil. Stefan Zweig was fleeing Nazism and chose a land he fell in love with. He traveled through much of the country, was amazed by the grandeur and richness of the territory, and enjoyed the cultural shock, describing Brazilians as calm, thoughtful, and sentimental people, always with a little coffee ready to offer.

Faced with a land of such potential, Zweig wrote the book “Brasilien: Ein Land der Zukunft”, or:

Brazil, Country of the Future.

A pause for an experiment: If you take any song criticizing Brazil from the 80s/90s by Legiao Urbana and post it on your Facebook with “Unknown Author,” how many of your friends would know it’s not a current lyric?

…Let’s celebrate the stupidity of the people. Our police and television. Let’s celebrate our government. And our state, which is not a nation. Celebrate youth without schools. The dead children. Celebrate our disunity. Let’s celebrate eros and thanatos. Persephone and hades. Let’s celebrate our sadness. Let’s celebrate our vanity. Let’s commemorate like idiots. Every February and holiday. All the dead on the roads. The dead for lack of hospitals. Let’s celebrate our justice. Greed and defamation. Let’s celebrate prejudices. The vote of the illiterate. Commemorate the dirty water. And all the taxes…

I grew up listening to these songs and trying to assimilate the paradox of feelings and convictions of adults who, at times, convinced themselves that the future of the “country of the future” was finally arriving, and at other times lamented: “Brazil is hopeless!”

And time keeps passing, passing… Many things improve, but the most basic things remain a complete disaster. Worse still, the basics keep getting worse. Is there anything more bizarre than a patient on the floor of a hospital? Or having to stay locked in your own house, with high walls, bars, and electronic security? How about having to get in the car quickly or drive with windows closed to avoid being kidnapped? This can be called anything but “life”!

But between us, Brazil is too enjoyable! Amid my various escapes over the last fifteen years, fighting for opportunities in other countries, I always needed five minutes of reflection when I came across someone quoting that famous phrase by Tom Jobim:

Living abroad is good, but it sucks. Living in Brazil sucks, but it’s good.

But everything has a limit! Or should have. I really tried, but I couldn’t keep renewing my hopes in Brazil, year after year, tax after tax, disappointment after disappointment. And over time, even that enjoyable side fades away, until it no longer makes any sense. Some people criticized me a few years ago for leaving and talking about problems without being on the streets fighting for change. I completely understand and even admit a certain selfishness, since I decided to put my life and my family’s life first. Life is short, and wanting to have quality of life with the people I love is my priority.

The Indaia water exchange

A few months ago, I woke up hungover on a rainy Saturday here in Sydney and went to the office to sort out some pending matters. Working with a hangover at thirty is definitely not a mere discomfort like at twenty. During one of my many trips to the kitchen sink to drink tap water, I stopped to remember my old business days in Brazil, negotiating with my great friend and partner at the time, Fernando Belchior, about who would be responsible for buying and changing the Indaia water jug at the office that week. I spent a few minutes realizing how something so basic (drinking water) is a serious problem in many regions of Brazil and bureaucratic/laborious in many homes and businesses in the country. I even started calculating how many Reais and how many hours I lost just to ensure the office always had drinking water.

From something so small and discreet in daily life, I decided to start observing and noting all these subtle improvements in my life here in Australia, compared to my years in Brazil.

After having lived in a smaller city in Australia, my fiancee and I arrived in Sydney, the largest city in the country, a bit suspicious about safety. In the first days, we were attentive to all the news about deaths and robberies. I remember being convinced that we couldn’t “slip up” (as we call it in Brazil when someone gets robbed). Well, that fear has completely disappeared. Obviously, tragedy can happen anywhere in the world, but the feeling, even in Australia’s “least safe” city, is one of total tranquility. I can take the bus or train, working with my computer on my lap, I can take my phone out of my pocket without fear of “attracting attention,” and I can enjoy the breeze, driving with the window completely open. The truth is that you live without that dark cloud of fear around you, having to pay attention to everything and everyone, regardless of where you are or what you’re doing.

This feeling of peace and security has a very strong foundation that starts through the respect and kindness of Australian society in general. In Brazil, the reality is that our automatic protection mechanism is activated all day and we already assume that people will try to hurt us, rob us, or take some kind of advantage, and this is terrible! We have incredible and innocent people around us, but distrust and fear are intrinsic to Brazilians. On this point, I noted two examples here that, once again, are super simple, almost imperceptible: During the day, I noticed that my business partner occasionally leaves the gate of our warehouse (loaded with wine boxes from around the world) completely open, with no one around, while we’re upstairs. It took me a while to get used to the fact that people working in neighboring companies, or some stranger from the street, wouldn’t come in and take everything. Could it happen? Of course! But the general and primary feeling here is that no one will (or needs to) do this, which completely changes the dynamics of relationships. The second example is in traffic: “Kindness breeds kindness”! The traffic light seems like magic, just wait and 95% of cars will stop or slow down to let you pass, right away. Last week, I was looking for a parking spot and a woman who was walking beside the car sped up and shouted, “My car is right there in front, I’m leaving, you can wait there.”

Well, what if I tell you that even my health is better away from Brazil? I know it sounds arrogant and exaggerated, but with the explosion of accusations about the sale of spoiled meat and various videos of expiration date tampering in supermarkets, I decided to touch on the subject. First, I always found it curious that when living in different parts of the world, my health improved 90%. Whenever I returned to Brazil, I commented on this to my parents, who are doctors, but I always thought it was some kind of allergy. After that, I met my fiancee in Brazil and got used to the number of medications she needed to take for a headache one day, nausea the next, and so on. We moved to Australia, and within a few weeks, this changed completely. Today, we rarely touch a medication. Our assumption is precisely the food. Australia is known for strong regulation, even being classified as a “boring” country by many. As an example, I had the dream of bringing my dogs from Brazil, but it’s an extremely complicated process (especially for them) because it’s a high-risk origin (Brazil), which I could understand, despite suffering from the decision to leave them. As a consequence of so much inspection and control, I can say that we feel much more protected and have more confidence in what we consume. I have no concrete data on this, I repeat that it’s an assumption, but we have very strong indicators that our health improved IMMENSELY overnight.

The problem with Brazil is that everything ends up becoming “normal,” we get used to it, we stop complaining, and we just live… “That’s just how it is, right?” But how can you take seriously a country that tries to solve problems of developed countries, like building bike lanes, when we don’t have basic sanitation? Basic Sanitation! Basic! We’re talking about more than 35 million Brazilians without treated water, less than 50% of sewage treated, and obviously, many people getting sick and ending up on hospital floors.

The education model is simply the opposite of almost all developed countries: You need to pay to have quality education in the first years of life. What is this? We need to stop everything, study models that have worked, and hit “reset.”

And what “blind shouting” is this that we hear in all corners of the country about “guaranteeing my rights” when it comes to employment/labor laws and retirement/social security? The government is “holding the candle” in these relationships; we need much less government. Again, look at any fairer country and you’ll understand that these “rights” are propaganda that the government sold you and you buy without even questioning, even though you’re losing. Here in Australia, you contribute to retirement through private funds, which are competing to give you the best return, best investments, etc. What competence and track record does the Brazilian Government have to manage your money? Any reason to meddle in negotiations between companies and workers? You think labor laws are protecting you, but you never stopped to understand that you could be earning more at the end of the month, making your own decisions, without having the inconvenient and omnipresent State as your babysitter!

Starting a business or working with innovation in Brazil is simply living in a state of daily war with the Government. There is a giant loss of talent as a consequence. This is a topic for another post, but it’s no wonder that, even in my circle of friends, I can list top professionals who could be making a difference in the impoverished state of Maranhao, but didn’t think twice and are spread around the world, opening companies or working for big names like Microsoft and The New York Times.

One must agree with Zweig for classifying Brazil as a strong candidate for a future power. We have all the characteristics, all the hardware, we just lack quality managers to make the software work well. But the same comparison we make of Brazil with the rest of the world, I always made of Maranhao in relation to Brazil. Vast territory, deep port, greater proximity to the USA and Europe, good soil, absurd tourist potential, strong culture, and so on. The theory is beautiful, but it ends there, in the hardware.

Who knows, maybe we’ll have a turnaround and next year’s elections will bring us good surprises? The fact is that I just typed this and already thought it was an illusion.