Journalled on Thursday, 27th of March 2025 | Santo Cristo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: 28 degrees, hot, sunny and slightly overcast.
It is Thursday, and I am trying to let go. Let go!
How can two little words carry so much weight? Not taking everything so seriously. Going with the flow. Not needing to control every corner of your life. Letting things come as they come, trusting that whatever happens, even the big stuff, will work itself out.
I would not call myself a controller. I do not think I tried to control either of my ex-wives, Cibele or Nalva, although they might disagree if you asked them. What weighed on those relationships wasn’t control, exactly.
It was something more cultural: my need, my desire, my stubborn insistence on doing things properly. Not more, not less. Properly.
That insistence puts me at odds with something I have come to see as one of the things holding Brazil back from being the international powerhouse it should be: the ‘more or less’ mentality, the shrug that says close enough is good enough.
Brazil is enormous, and its cultures are just as varied, shaped by richer and poorer ancestors who settled the country in very different ways. So this mindset does not look the same everywhere. Sometimes it hides in plain sight, tucked under the surface of daily life, and only shows itself when you run into it directly.
I trace a lot of my own need for order back to a rigid childhood.
My mother was a housewife obsessed not with the house, not with the back garden, not even with the garage- with housework, with keeping the house and garden perfect at all times. My brother and I could barely have friends over to play, not in the house, not in the back garden, not even in the garage, because she could not stand the mess.
We are, in the end, products of our childhoods. I like to think I am the exception to the tired stereotype of the useless husband who cannot do a thing around the house, the ‘mobile mess generator’ who drives his wife or partner up the wall. Being organised, tidy, and clean is a good thing. But even good things have a limit, and I am still not entirely sure where mine sits.
My mother was a slave to a spotless house, a habit she inherited from her own mother, who probably inherited it from hers. My brother and I picked up plenty of it too. When I visited him in England, brief as that visit was, he cooked dinner and cleaned the kitchen without a second thought. That alone told me how deeply our mother’s example had stuck with us.
It also told me something about why his marriage to Debbie has lasted as long as it has. He pulls his weight at home, sharing the chores in a way plenty of men still will not in 2025.
For what it is worth, research on infidelity in the United States has pointed to something similar: women who cheated were disproportionately likely to have a partner who left them to handle the home alone. So if you would rather your partner not stray, doing your fair share at home is a reasonable place to start.
Years ago, I was on a Ponte Aerea shuttle from Rio to Sao Paulo, not long after I arrived in Brazil, and I started talking with an Italian businessman who had worked here for years. We talked about Brazil, its culture, what it is like doing business here, and he told me plainly that Brazil’s real problem is management.
The Brazilian people, he said, are good people and good workers. At least 90 per cent of them, in his view, are simply badly managed.
Almost 40 years into living in Brazil, pretending rather convincingly to be a Brazilian myself, I can tell you he was right, and he was right from my very first months here. I still don’t know whether it comes from the emotional pitch of Latin culture or something else entirely. Still, a recurring pattern of mismanagement and disorganisation emerges whenever Brazil has to face a hard problem head-on.
Part of it, I think, comes from a long inheritance of cheap labour. When labour is cheap and undervalued for long enough, efficiency stops mattering, because nobody is paying for it anyway.
I am talking less about today and more about the middle decades of the last century, when Brazil was competing, as it still is, with the rest of the world on production and growth, and always carrying that reputation for cheap labour. Cheap things get treated as cheap. And when something has no perceived value, people stop caring.
That is a shame, because labour here is no longer cheap, and in a world where every country and every business competes on efficiency, where efficiency is money and its absence is waste, this old habit has become deeply embedded in Brazilian culture and stubbornly hard to shake. I saw it, felt it, and lived through it in both my marriages, more so with Nalva than with Cibele, and it caused its share of arguments in both.
To finish this thought: in any hierarchy, what happens at the top runs straight down through every layer beneath it, and Brazil makes that painfully visible. I watched a government I consider deeply corrupt undermine the country with inefficiency, broken promises, and whatever scraps were left after the politicians had already taken their cut.
Right should be right and wrong should be wrong, but where is the line? At what point do we just let go and say, ‘fuck it’?
I have spent my whole life trying to do what is right. I am no saint, but I have tried to act correctly, and mostly what that has earned me is survival. Surviving is not the same as living, even when it looks like it from the outside. That, too, is something I see everywhere in Brazil: 99.9 per cent of people here are not really living. They are surviving.
These days I am trying to take life less seriously, because it is short and it moves fast. The harder we grip something, the further it seems to slip from us, while letting go tends to leave room for it to arrive on its own.
Be kind and be happy. If you cannot manage to be happy, at least be kind. Just never be naive.
In bed by 9 p.m.
Thank you for reading. Please explore my other posts and let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Richard
