Growing up, my parents watched pretty much only PBS and listened to NPR / classical music. Riding the bus for the first time in middle school, I was exposed to a lot of popular things (music) that felt very foreign. Any joke that referenced song lyrics or a particular actor was lost on me for a while. It's like making a meme-related joke to my parents: they weren't exposed to it, they don't get it. In many ways they don't feel like part of my "tribe" (nerds?).

I can certainly see how being exposed to (or immersed in) a different culture could affect your feeling of belonging in a different one.

For example, I didn't grow up listening to rap. If all of my coworkers listened to rap music, and talked about it in Slack or the like, I would feel almost completely lost. I appreciate flow, interesting lyrics, and the mastery that the artists have over words, but there are many layers of references to prior artists or prior songs that I am not at all familiar with, and didn't even realize existed until I started looking at the Genius.com lyrics for some songs I'd heard on the radio. So, some new song comes out that references Big Names in the industry, and I would not get them at all (or even know they were references to things) unless I were already familiar, or were dedicated to pursuing that art as an interest.

The same kind of thing applies for things like TV show references (Friends, Seinfeld, Simpsons, Family Guy, Spongebob, Star Trek, etc) or movies or comic books.