The Closing of the Bulgarian Frontier

I&#x27;ve been abroad and compared to it Bulgaria does feel like a frontier, like a good place for a certain type of nonconformist, especially in terms of career and business. There is no playbook and beaten road for a lot of things.<p>If you try to have your career go the same way as you would expect in Western Europe&#x2F;USA - go to the best school, get the best internship in the best company and be rewarded for following the rules you&#x27;ll be infinitely disappointed in this country. There is no shortage of people who feel unrewarded and unappreciated for their qualifications and credentials.<p>But if you try to make your own way - getting a skill by practicing yourself and searching out people who need that skill it might work surprisingly well and take you far.<p>Btw if you enjoy the linked writing you should check out Time Shelter, it won the Booker prize recently.

&gt; My mother left her state job (she’d had a leading role in developing Bulgaria’s first information system for traffic control) to run the risk-assessment and anti-fraud management system of a large French bank; my father was promoted, at age 38, to medical director of his hospital. My paternal grandparents transformed their garage in a provincial town into a general store, while my maternal ones started a rabbit farm on the premises of their village property. Almost everybody, regardless of age, wanted to do something bold with their newfound freedom, to risk and experiment.<p>No, they didn&#x27;t, maybe some of the newly well-off people wanted to do that, like the parents and grandparents of the author of the article here, and that was mostly happening because they could afford to fail because they had money, but the great, great majority of people in Eastern Europe back in the &#x27;90s most certainly didn&#x27;t &quot;want to do something bold with their newfound freedom&quot;, they just wanted to be able to, like, literally live, meaning to be able to pay the bills and to put food on the table. Both of those things (paying the bills and putting food on the table) had become impossible for many of our parents back then, my parents eventually did have to sell their one-bedroom apartment in the early 2000s because of unpaid bills.<p>But I get it, the children of the well-off people from the 1990s went on to study in the West and now they&#x27;re back lecturing us about this and that and that other thing. Maybe they could just try and open their eyes a little more and realise how difficult and excruciatingly hard life was for the majority of us back then, people who didn&#x27;t have our parents join well-paid jobs in Western companies.<p>I&#x27;m not Bulgarian, but I did grew up in a city just 11 kms from the border with Bulgaria, one of my first memories as a kid is going with my mum to a Bulgarian border city in order buy some stuff from there (in the mid-80s the Bulgarian stores had more diverse stuff compared to stores in Romania). I&#x27;m also about the same age as the author of the article, I think a year older, thereabouts.

A couple of gems here:<p>&gt; The States felt like an old place, weirdly older than Europe, a place where, for all its breathless movement, time seemed to have stopped. There was too much of everything: rules, work, wealth, poverty, guns, art.<p>&gt; Perhaps that was why the Communist regimes all across Eastern and Central Europe collapsed in the final run. Not so much because of their beleaguered economies, although that was an important factor, but because no one believed anymore.

Parts of this essay remind me of the 2020 novel <i>Time Shelter</i> [1] by Georgi Gospodinov (another Bulgarian). Especially this part:<p><i>My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition. In most cases, these attempts are ridiculous, ersatz, misguided imitations of ideologies borrowed from the past, exposing their own imaginative shortages—they aspire to move the hands of the clock, even if backwards—but it’s hard to deny they represent dissatisfaction and resentment with the way things are. There is, it seems to me, a subconscious craving to be taken out of the boredom of timelessness and be thrown back into the flux of time, even if that means violence or war—anything but the broth! </i><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;58999261-time-shelter" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;58999261-time-shelter</a>

As someone who&#x27;s a bit older than the author and from the same corner of the world - this was a really nice piece.<p>Brought a lot of memories from the early 90s. The blackouts, the queues for bread and fruits, and the empty shelves... I was a kid back then and I didn&#x27;t had any perspective. But I wander how my parents dealt with all that. I can&#x27;t recall they complaining too much.

Here, in case you don&#x27;t want to read the entire piece, here&#x27;s the conclusion it&#x27;s all there to lead up to:<p><i>Today, we have become citizens of a global, Brezhnevian capitalist state, which, in its failure to provide an inspiring frontier—gone are the days of Kennedy’s “New Frontiers” or Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”—has slowly ossified and wrapped back upon itself. My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition.</i><p>(And when the author mentions a Brezhnevian state, bear in mind he actually grew up in one: he knows whereof he speaks.)

This reminded me of a quote from Zygmunt Bauman:<p><i>Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement – acknowledged as temporary and ‘until further notice’. Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, ‘modernity’ changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus . . . What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) &#x27;post-modernity&#x27; and what I&#x27;ve chosen to call, more to the point, &#x27;liquid modernity&#x27;, is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago &#x27;to be modern&#x27; meant to chase &#x27;the final state of perfection&#x27; -- now it means an infinity of improvement, with no &#x27;final state&#x27; in sight and none desired.</i>

The memoir &quot;Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria&quot; by Kapka Kassabova (2008) covers similar ground. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;3808716-street-without-a-name" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;3808716-street-without-a...</a>

I have never in my life felt that countries matter. That a person might be better off in one country than another. As such I cannot understand the feelings in this article even though I am Bulgarian and know the events by heart.<p>My parents spent 15 years of their life in Spain and hated every second of it. They hated it so much because I wasn&#x27;t there with them. And they had a horrinle opinion of the culture and daily life there. While in opposite my 2 uncles that went with them and took their own kids with them, like it there and have never went back.<p>I with half the life span of my parents believe that personal issues and events completely eclipse any effect the political and cultural environment has. For me political and&#x2F;or cultural events were just a new conversation topic in my social circles. Something to be part of because well everyone is part of it.<p>All my life I&#x27;ve been told that there is opportunity abroad, there is opportunity in the capital, in X large city. But opportunity isn&#x27;t somewhere it just arises sometimes. I know for sure that opportunity doesn&#x27;t come while sitting in one place you don&#x27;t like.<p>But what I am trying to say is that: cities and countries aren&#x27;t really colored in a specific way. They aren&#x27;t dull, closed, eventful and such, they just are places. They have as much effect on an individual as does a single individual on them. Even so undoubtedly some places have a personal color to us - my parents will never again try to work in Spain and it would not end well if they did. I myself will never go back to the town of my high school, but others like it there.

Great writing piece, thank you for submitting!

I don&#x27;t know if this comment will be found in the sea of great comments in this thread, but I think this article is the answer to Adam Curtis&#x27; film Hypernormalisation.<p>The premise is that humans are currently trapped in an endless cycle and we have no concept of how to break out of it, but I think this might at least provide some context as to why.<p>I highly recommend watching it (along with his other documentaries) if you found this article fascinating. It&#x27;s like this in video form.

&gt; Ukraine has turned into a rallying call for much of Europe, a vicarious way (dangerous, but not too dangerous) to experience once again the forward vector of time.<p>I wonder if Europeans understand these wars around them are not fought for their amusement...<p>Bombing Serbia or ISIS affair is &quot;dangerous, but not too dangerous&quot; for you but it means hundreds to hundreds thousands of dead and hundred thousands to millions losing their homes.

I find a lot fallacies in this essay.<p>The author accurately captures the overall picture during the 1990&#x27;s, yet he is talking about a frontier. He perfectly realizes that the political power was just consolidated into another form, so we never had a real frontier after the fall of the communist regime.<p>I am little bit younger than him, and grew up after the fall of communist regime, after 34 years of transition into &quot;democracy&quot;, and westernization, nothing really changed now the grandkids of the communist regime,are lecturing us about &quot;democracy&quot; again, because their fathers are getting old.<p>There is also this common comparison during this time era about the west(western culture and capitalism), and soviet union(communism), with the slight little nuance which is actually the elephant in the room that communism comes from the west... So the cycle continues.<p>What exactly is this western culture and values that we are constantly talking about, and being sold on, and advertised 24&#x2F;7?<p>The Brezhnevian capitalist state global citizen, just wants to offer me a slightly less different totalitarian regime, throw us in a violent war because of his boredom with the flux of time, and call it a day. No thank you.<p>The closing of the Bulgarian frontier was during the April Uprising of 1876<i>, which was the last time Bulgarians decided that are going to unite as a nation and will stood for something, their freedom, they will live free under their own sovereign country. You cannot exclude 500 years under Ottoman Empire rule, which rewired our survival instincts, if you are painting a picture of what and how happened next.<p>Like a fellow commenter said I prefer the kaba gaida to continue to echoes in the Rhodope mountains.<p>Despite growing with predominantly western influence after 1990, it is really hard to explain what happens with my body when I hear Valya Balkanska - Izlel ye Delyo Haydutin</i>, a song that is flying in the space with the Voyager probes.<p>The next frontier is currently happening, but this time information travels differently.<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;April_Uprising_of_1876" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;April_Uprising_of_1876</a> * <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jnxUYsf6GuU" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jnxUYsf6GuU</a>

I thought this was going to be an article about the Byzantine border with the Bulgars, and now I&#x27;m disappointed...

I come from a completely different background but am about the same age as the author. It sounds like many other commenters are in this same general bracket too. So are the sentiments expressed truly a period (or, maybe, cohort, given the post-communist contrast) effect, as suggested, or just an age effect?<p>I suspect that the middle aged in every society feel some closing of the frontier as possibilities seem to collapse and family commitments multiply.

I was born in Australia and live in Germany, and I think I see something of the same: in both countries, there is no sense of purpose, no raison d&#x27;etre. There is no national project beyond managing a series of externally-imposed and self-inflicted crises, and no obvious direction for the future to guide the decisions taken today.<p>So our politics (in both countries) becomes reactive and unanchored, solving whatever problem seems most pressing today, and ultimately devoid of meaning. What do individuals do in such an environment? They look after themselves, they partake in consumerism, they try to protect themselves against things the state can no longer be bothered to. It&#x27;s all very nihilistic, and thus the deep anomie that seems to have infected most Western societies, and the younger generations most of all.

This.<p>Quoting: &gt; My feeling is that all the troubles we’ve been witnessing over the last decade—Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, Russia’s virulent imperialism—are attempts to disrupt not just the dominant political systems, but the zone of eternal repetition.

It’s interesting how the various post-communist states in Central&#x2F;Eastern Europe have played out since the 90s. Having lived here for roughly the last ~8 years, it seems to me that the ones succeeding the most are those which have a nearly universal negative appraisal of the communist era. Poland, for example, is on a pretty great trajectory and will probably be in the top 2-3 EU economies in a decade. The Soviet system was forced upon Poland and very few people look upon that era favorably. The break between eras was also fairly clean and without too much internal conflict.<p>Compare that to some other states like Bulgaria or Ex-Yugoslavia, which have a more complicated memory of the communist era, and which also had a lot of conflict during the transition period. There is less of a pre-packaged “social imaginary” of what the country could be&#x2F;used to be prior to the communist era - unlike Poland, which was occupied and spent a couple centuries building an oppositional identity during the Partitions&#x2F;occupations.

I can barely understand the logic behind &quot;Hurtling toward a black hole, we seem to be endlessly stuck, horizonless, in the event horizon.&quot; and &quot;Ukraine has turned into a rallying call for much of Europe, a vicarious way (dangerous, but not too dangerous) to experience once again the forward vector of time. &quot;<p>Integrate Ukraine to EU and after that... What? &quot;Hurtling toward a black hole...&quot; again, but this time with Ukraine? ;-)

<i>The States felt like an old place, ..</i><p>I always felt that the States was &quot;tatty&quot;, more &quot;run down&quot; than old. Public places were considered to &#x27;belong to nobody&#x27;, so were often dirty or defaced because nobody took pride in them. Subway trains were covered in graffiti.<p>In many countries overseas, public places are always well looked-after because they &#x27;belonged to all of us&#x27; rather than &#x27;belonged to nobody&#x27;.<p>It&#x27;s just a difference in national cultures.

&gt; Like Communism, capitalism is a teleological system at its root, relying on a narrative of progress, on a forward-moving vector of time, but when that time turns cyclical, repetitive, without a clear direction, the system begins to disintegrate, not under the weight of its own contradictions, as Marx would tell us, but under the weight of its own uniformity.<p>Capitalism is economic freedom and a government to enforce it. It isn&#x27;t teleological.<p>The apparent telos of capitalism comes from people. It turns out that people, in the presence of freedom, have certain goals which they choose to pursue. Prominent among those goals is the accumulation of wealth. When it becomes excessive, that goal may be worth criticizing but people will choose to pursue it whenever they are free.<p>&gt; Today, we have become citizens of a global, Brezhnevian capitalist state, which, in its failure to provide an inspiring frontier—gone are the days of Kennedy’s “New Frontiers” or Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In”—has slowly ossified and wrapped back upon itself.<p>Do we need politicians to pick our frontiers? Actually there&#x27;s plenty of frontiers. Some examples are: eradicating human disease, extending human lifespan, replacing fossil field, exploring the solar system, changing how humans interact on the internet, inventing AGI, etc. It&#x27;s beyond me that someone can claim with a straight face that there&#x27;s no inspiring frontier.<p>The problem here is people who find these frontiers too boring. They secretly want a do-over of the 20th century. No thanks.

I am a Bulgarian, born in 1986 and immigrated to Austria in 1997. But it pains and scares me that an exiled Bulgarian now wants to take on the Bulgarian collective with postmodern, cosmopolitan and American ideas. The cycles he describes exist mostly in the minds of postmodern cosmopolitans. And these arise because cosmopolitans in reality cannot produce anything other than ideology and services. Yet the terrible and boring every day bread still comes from the bakery! And since you can&#x27;t invent a new ideology or service or produce a new work of art every day (except for journalists of course, who mastered the producing of &quot;nothingness&quot; every single day), at some point you get lost in pondering and start looking for the culprit. Of course, the first scapegoat is politics, society, people - always the others. Just because you can&#x27;t free yourself from your nihilistic mental wheel, you have to conjure up and condemn the entire collective. Herein lies the birth of all &#x27;structural arguments&#x27;, I claim, ad hoc. &#x27;My dissatisfaction must have structural reasons, otherwise I wouldn&#x27;t be dissatisfied.&#x27; The eternal lamentation of the upper-urban-class cosmopolitans.<p>No, I know and admire people for whom such complaints are distant, even annoying. People who don&#x27;t have time for it. And you can just as freely and willingly decide to lead a calm and regulated life. This life is not a danger to humanity, as the postmodernists and cosmopolitans have always wanted to tell us, and I do not want Bulgaria to be &#x27;Americanized&#x27; that way. I would rather listen to a Kaba Gaida in the mountains than have to read through a capitalist-cosmopolitan lament. The former gives me power and strength, a connection to the world, the latter just makes me sick and weak.<p>I know Bulgaria has its issues, but losing its uniqueness to solve them, is for me the bigger issue.

I feel like this article could be a lot better, but it stopped in its metaphorical tracks, turned its turrets and started shooting darts at US readers. All for the sake of controversy&#x2F;publicity.<p>But TFA&#x27;s points can traverse the cheapness easily, just a small push:<p>&gt; The States felt like an old place, weirdly older than Europe, a place where, for all its breathless movement, time seemed to have stopped. There was too much of everything: rules, work, wealth, poverty, guns, art.<p>Many HN readers are probably familiar with how does it feel to start a greenfield project. The magic that happens on a greenfield project is not so much about your beliefs or your open mind, it&#x27;s more about <i>all the other people</i> mentally unblocking you and not putting spokes in your wheel.<p>So, yeah, if the whole hierarchy crumbles and entire lifetimes of curated opinions, thoughts, social norms become garbage, people let others be. For a time.<p>I&#x27;m just pointing out that there is a specific recipe offered here for unblocking &quot;the time&quot;, and that recipe has a huge cost.<p>&gt; Perhaps that was why the Communist regimes all across Eastern and Central Europe collapsed in the final run. Not so much because of their beleaguered economies, although that was an important factor, but because no one believed anymore.<p>Hah, that alone? Roman Empire was falling for hundreds of years (thousand, actually, if you count Byzantium).<p>Actually two factors were needed for Communist downfall.<p>1. Lack of belief.<p>2. A better model how to prosper, proven and readily available just across the border (or two borders).