David Dovale is an online editor and writer in Curacao. In his spare time, he manages and writes for his own websites, including Curacao Connected and the Curacao Connected Network. He also found time to contribute to Meet Curacao.

Yesterday I put the finishing touches on a deal with an online network, a deal which will have this network “taking over” one of my websites. When I was faxing over the papers to the company headquarters in California, I told the gentleman who I was dealing with to keep in mind that I’m not a U.S. citizen and that I live in Curacao, a small island in the Caribbean.

The gentleman immediately replied how jealous he is of my living arrangements and how lucky he considers me to be. Mind you that this is not the first time that this has happened. This particular site has brought me into contact with a lot of people from the U.S. and every single one of them expressed some sort of envy when they found out where I live.

These people were all spread out over the United States but every single one wanted to be down here in the Caribbean. A blogger in New York, a blogger in D.C., a blogger in Virginia, a blogger in Pennsylvania, a blogger in California, a blogger in Florida, a blogger in Minneapolis, a blogger in Illinois and another blogger in Missouri. All of them kept telling me how happy I should be because I’m living in a tropical paradise.

Doesn’t this strike you as ironic? People in Curacao are usually the ones who are envious and jealous. We want to be in Europe, we want to be in the States, we want to be in Canada and Australia and everywhere else where we assume is better than where we currently are.

Yet here are people who are living in Manhattan and Chicago and Los Angeles telling me that they’d switch with me in an instant. That got me thinking. Would I switch with them in an instant? Would you? I guess it depends on what you value in life. If you value glitz and glamour and the more materialistic things in life, you’d probably make that switch. New York, Chicago, Miami, all big cities with cultural melting pots that have so much to offer. You can shop, go to concerts, find a great job, live in a great apartment with a great view and live the life that you see all those television characters living. That’s what’s it all about right? Come to think about it, I might make that move just for the broadband Internet possibilities.

We forget however that those places have their warts as well. There’s bad traffic, pollution, high crime rates and an economy that is trying to rebound from a horrible recession. Those people dream of what we have. They dream of a laid back, tropical, island that has sun, sand and no worries of terrorism and no mentions of the word “crisis”.
I guess it comes down to the fact that we as individuals are never happy. The grass is always greener on the other side and we always want to have bigger and better things. The funny thing is, when we finally reach the big top, we yearn to go back to the primitive and just have peace and quiet.

We want to be the CEO of a big company and have the jet-set life with a mansion and 3 cars but we forget that that same CEO comes to unwind on our beaches. He soaks up our sun, eats our great local food and enjoys the peace and quiet that a Caribbean island offers.

Is America perfect? No, they are not. I can go on for days over how much is wrong with that country and especially its inhabitants. But I won’t point any fingers; Curacao’s image abroad is not much better (depending where you look) and I’ll admit that Curacao is fatally flawed in certain aspects as well.

Abroad, they may see Antilleans as lazy, they may see them as thugs and many other people abroad who don’t know much about the island are even surprised when we tell them that we have things like electricity and running water down here (nothing irritates me more than seeing people act surprised when they realize that we have smart phones and flat screen televisions etc. etc. here as well)

I’ll admit, there are days that the island frustrates me a lot. Don’t get me started on the politicians or on a company like UTS, or over the horribly naive mindset that many locals have. But at the end of the day however, I’m still very happy.

The weather is great. The beach is a mere 5-minute drive from my house and I’m not worrying over possible terrorist attacks or if I’ll have a job or house tomorrow. On the contrary, I’m doing things that I want to be doing and I’m living comfortably (for my standards).

When I think about it, I do consider myself very lucky and while the grass may be greener on the other side, I’ll just stand here and admire it from a distance. Maybe you should as well.