7 ms·

I was born in the US and lived abroad for 10 years before returning recently. It was a big and very demoralizing culture shock when I returned and, being in the

by pault 5y ago

I was born in the US and lived abroad for 10 years before returning recently. It was a big and very demoralizing culture shock when I returned and, being in the habit of being friendly to strangers, saw how withdrawn and mistrusting people here have become. More so because I'm in Austin, TX, which is widely reported to be a friendly city. Everyone is so obsessed with work and virtue signalling. I didn't notice how competitive Americans are until I had a frame of reference to make the comparison. Living in South and Central America, my impression was that people are far more accepting regardless of whether you are a career professional or a not, or your hobbies or political alignment. In Belize I made a dozen good friends within six months of arriving, and I haven't made a single friend in three years here. I've been extremely depressed since I returned. I'm considering leaving again now that the lockdown has made remote work easier to come by (which was the primary reason I returned to the US in the first place). I'm not trying to slander Americans, and I understand that you can't make sweeping generalizations about any group of people, but the pressure and stress of our society is overwhelming.

anm89 5y ago
That's one of the weirdest things you figure out traveling. There are really no rules to what life is. It can have a drastically different texture based on things about your environment that don't feel that meaningful when you just think "that's the way things always are" with no alternative to compare it to.
- pault 5y ago
  I encourage everyone to take an extended trip to a country with a different culture if they can afford it by any means. The greatest effect it has on you is making it obvious which aspects of your personality and values are just picked up from your surroundings. Every time I moved to a different region it stripped away a little bit of the parts of me that weren't really me, and left me feeling much more confident in my goals and desires, and generally more comfortable with who I am. You really can't put a price on this.
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    Hm. I never heard anyone explain it so well before, or why, one would "find oneself" (sorry for using this awkward phrase..) in travelling. Thanks. :)
  - engineeringwoke 5y ago
    It's very much a cliché but I did it as well. Cheers
  - anm89 5y ago
    Yeah completely agree. Also forces you to admit to some of your personal faults.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Spain. France. Switzerland. Japan. - Sit in a cafe in the morning and watch people go to work. - Sit in a cafe in the afternoon and watch people go to lunch. - Sit in a cafe at night and watch people eat dinner. Really made me see and reflect on my own ways of going about them.
    - t0mbstone 5y ago
      I always find it interesting how people travel and sit in cafes to people watch, but they never do that in their own home towns. I would be willing to bet if you took a week off work and just went around relaxing at cafes in your home city, you would discover all sorts of interesting things and people without even having to leave the country. People are people, and you can find stressed out people everywhere. You can also find relaxed, easy going, loving people everywhere too, if you look hard enough.
SmellTheGlove 5y ago
This is a good, somewhat related read: https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78wpz/covid-changed-our-relationship-to-busyness-can-we-keep-it-that-way-v28n2 https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78wpz/covid-changed-our-rel...
daenz 5y ago
When "silence is violence" and "the personal is political", what can you expect? Everything is polarized and people want it to stay that way.
- ben_w 5y ago
  As a non-American who has visited for a total of four months, east and west coast, the political differences between America and other countries are way broader and deeper than just a few superficial memes. Especially those from young activist personalities, personalities which are present and busy in many other countries, each of which has its own zeitgeist. Your roads are scarily broad while your sidewalks are narrow and sometimes just stop suddenly; everyone seems to have a car even if they shouldn’t; the rules of the road seem to be treated as suggestions (at least for cars — jaywalking is verboten), while also being a source of arbitrary revenue precisely because everyone treats them as suggestions; “family” is a much stronger trope in America than in the U.K. or Germany, yet “I love you daddy” is a real Valentines’ day card I’ve actually seen, in a supermarket with many others like it in different variations of phrase and relative; guns feel like a trivial hobby or possession barely worth mentioning, and suggesting even the slightest of limits to the right to bear arms is one of the quickest ways to be compared to a 20th century dictator and some of the critics insisting “a well armed society is a polite society”; your billboards are covered in adverts for loans to cover bail costs, yet sex is hidden away; you’re as loud about Christianity as a minaret is about Islam, far more so than the churches and cathedrals I’ve seen around Europe; there is a constant bombardment of adverts for insurance and health products I don’t see elsewhere (everything from magic drugs to teeth so straight and white they could be a metaphor); there are regional things like the Californian everything-causes-cancer warnings matched only by one British tabloid newspaper; and yes, race related issues are so much louder and in-your-face that even I couldn’t miss them. (I know the U.K. seems weird to visiting Americans, because they’ve explicitly told me. But the U.K.’s weirdness is different to yours, just as the cultural pain-points are).
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Thorough and accurate! I'd hazard the sharper edges of American culture stem from less constrained (and better funded) capitalism than other parts of the world. If someone can make a buck on it, it exists.
mrkstu 5y ago
If you live/can meet in the northern part of town I’d be happy to have lunch with you some time so you can at least have one friend in town… email is my username @ gmail.com.
failwhaleshark 5y ago
I grew-up in San Jose, went to Davis, and came back to the Valley and commuted to Chico until 2019. Most Californians seemed bitter, angry, resentful, humorless, and ready to explode. I live in ATX now in overpriced, poorly-maintained apartments full of "stock-broker"-types, salespeople, managers, and software dev couples, and people who think they're hot sh%t either because of inheritance or university pedigree. $3k/month isn't like Valley prices; this is a 1400 sq ft cost-saver efficiency for me. I'd happily trade for a 3000 sq ft / $6k/month place if the people were more decent over there, if that's within the realm of reasonable expectations. There's no apparent stress of amongst the people with more money than sense, but there is stress amongst the hundreds of people living under I-35 when they've been told that their existence is illegal when they have nowhere else to go.
- celim307 5y ago
  The people you are describing are more a function of where you live, those people tend to congregate in what I calm “yuppie slums”, shitty made multi family units with names like “aloft” and “elevate” with art and random shit in the lobby. There’s a ton in every US city. And they are all the same. They attract people who don’t know the city very well and have a check list of amenities. When your lease is up I would encourage you to look at different neighborhoods, ideally a little away from the “revitalized former industrial/meatpacking district” which is probably bougie breweries and wine lounges now.
  - tolbish 5y ago
    Sounds like a result of poor urban planning. My travels have taught me that these generally aren't all stuffy people desiring "yuppie slums"—it just happens that these are the only types of housing available near where the jobs are.
  - failwhaleshark 5y ago
    Unfortunately, I may have mistakenly signed a lease in a yuppie slum in ATX because it was the only large apartment available. It's an "expensive" (for the area), boring, mixed-use development that gentrified an east side area, abutted right next to I-35 and neglected homeless (who's existence are now illegal thanks to hateful bandaid policies). And, it appears to be populated mostly by Millenial kidults who live to party hard, act like they're still in high school, got their jobs by lying on their resumes, let their dogs pee and poop in the common hallways, and live like their hedonism is more important than anything or anyone else. I dislike most of them because they resemble Seinfeldian, Kafkaesque caricatures and many offer nothing more than shallow, vapid, shitty, ignorant, infantile %sshole, consumerist, ephemerality manufactured by a steady diet of mass media and screen time. One woman walks around with one hand in the air like Peg Bundy from Married... with Children but seems like a WASP who works-out and dresses to climb up the next richest pole. She won't even acknowledge my presence with a friendly "hello."
Milkman128 5y ago
I am mistrustful as hell. I'm guilty of this as an ohioan. To devils advocate my position, a higher stressed group is more desperate and more likely to screw me over? IDK but there is definitely an atmosphere of us vs them watch your back.
sharkweek 5y ago
I spent some time in Central America radicalizi... err I mean traveling for fun, after college. One of the things that always stood out to me was how patient everyone generally was with one another. I remember riding around on chicken buses to get from town to town, and on more than one occasion, the bus would just pull over and the driver would get out, grab some lunch, talk to a friend. Nobody was in a rush. My friend that I was traveling with and I would stare at each other and be like "what the hell is going on?" as we looked around at everyone else on the bus and nobody seems to care at all that their day has this arbitrary delay. I can only imagine if a driver did that here in Seattle with 30+ people all trying to get somewhere. I like living in the US, I think it has some massive upsides, but I also think I'm a bit of a hostage to what I think my life is supposed to look like, versus simplification somewhere else.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Can you imagine coming to a client meeting 30 minutes late and telling him that the bus driver decided on a whim stop halfway through the route to chat up an old friend?
  - techsupporter 5y ago
    I mean, sure? How's that different from being 30 minutes late because someone dumped a load of frozen fish on the highway? This mad rush to be everywhere at a specific time, usually when tens of thousands of other people are also trying to be at a similar spot at the same time, is a major cause of people being traffic. Heck, as the pandemic has shown, we don't even really need to always be in the same physical place to have a meeting; technology can relieve us of that burden. My family gave up driving years ago, due to cost and stress, and it's been great largely for this reason. I don't worry about dealing with all of the people who have Very Important Places To Be. That's Metro's job, and they do it well.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      It's all perspective. If there is an accident then that's kind of unavoidable. The bus driver however is just stealing half an hour from the dozen or more people under his care on a whim.
maedla 5y ago
I always wonder how much the explosion of "true crime" media has contributed to American paranoia and fear
- Hamuko 5y ago
  True crime is pretty popular around the world.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Can't hold a candle to the american news stations when it comes to paranoia and fear
kwanbix 5y ago
I personally LOVE LOVE LOVE USA, Miami in particular. I don't know why. Maybe is the weather, the beach, etc. I would love to live there and work one day. That said, three things worry me: 1) How complicated the health industry is there. Being from Argentina where health is universal, or living now in Germany where is also universal, that is crazy for me. 2) How easy you are fired and that you basically don't get any protection if you are. Again, here in Germany we have insurance that covers for many months, etc. 3) How bad employees are treated there by (most but not all?) companies. Personal story. My sister, she had to travel in the middle of the pandemic to my home country as my father was sick. She asked for permission to work remotely for 3 weeks. She had to stay 2 more because my father's health was not the best. When she returned, the company told her that that is not what they expected of her and fired her on the spot. Now, I was in my home country so I know my sister worked all the normal hours and more, she was connected all the time, and giving her 120% (if such a thing exists). And still, they said, good by. Crazy.
- rcurry 5y ago
  Yeah, the health care system here is bonkers. It wasn't so bad back around 2008 or so, I had private health insurance for my wife and I, and it was only around $400 or so a month with almost no deductible. Then the government decided to make it "affordable" so it's almost triple that now, plus you'd have an insane deductible.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Say what you want about the ACA, but it was the trajectory of US health expenditure (vs GDP per capita) that was the problem: increasing year by year. So doing nothing / business as usual wasn't a fiscally sustainable choice.
  - thatfrenchguy 5y ago
    Yeah, before, insurers could throw out people who have preconditions or have “maximum lifetime benefit”, obviously you were going to pay less in premiums. The bureaucracy / cost of new technologies have not made this any cheaper either, especially as cost-benefit analysis for new procedures and drugs is, somehow, not a thing in the US unlike everywhere else in the world. The US hates cutting costs via market intervention too (also see our crazy college costs problem), so until we decide to finally tackle it, they’ll keep on rising.
cocoa19 5y ago
Your comments are spot on. I wouldn't say either one is good or bad, I've learnt to appreciate the differences. Having lived in latin America and the US, US feels more concerned about individualism, achievements and efficiency and it shows in friendships. Outings are organized days in advance, people are expected to show up on time, calendar invites are not unheard of. In latin America, life is more about family and being happy. You can call a friend the same day and enjoy a cold beer after work (some time after work, punctuality not required). I think people would laugh in my face if I tell them I'll send them a calendar invite.
- nightski 5y ago
  These are also gross generalizations and seem to revolve around American big city life which is selective (but to be fair is where the majority of our population lives). But in smaller cities I've been able to find a great balance of both. Work on ambitious ideas but spend evenings and free time with friends and family.
  - pault 5y ago
    Do you have any recommendations? :) I've been trying to find a big town or small city with lots of natural beauty and nice weather. I grew up in Seattle and refuse to live anywhere with more than 90 days of cloudy weather per year. One heuristic I've come up with is small towns that are sustained by natural tourism. They tend to be much more laid back, and people are happier and more social because of it. Whitefish, MO is one example, but unfortunately it's too cold for me. :)
- ridethebike 5y ago
  Hi, Hope you're doing well. Wanna grab a drink?
- kelnos 5y ago
  I think it just depends, though you may be right that this "regimented life" is more common in the US. For myself, I'm happy to jump out in the middle of the day if a friend wants to go on an impromptu walk. But if I am planning a get-together at my house with more than a couple people, I probably will send out a calendar invitation. Not because I think the other people need it, but I do like to put things on my calendar so I don't forget when things are going on, and it's only a couple extra seconds to add the guests to it, so I might as well. As another data point, I know people who are introverted and need a little mental preparation before seeing people, even good friends, so impromptu meetings can cause social anxiety. > You can call a friend the same day and enjoy a cold beer after work (some time after work, punctuality not required) I've definitely been trying to get better at the last part of this. People finish work at different times some days, sure. So it's fine to just head to the bar whenever you're done, and whoever gets there first will grab a table and just chill alone with a drink until the other person shows up, and that's the norm, not the exception. But I feel like most of the time (where I live) you try to figure out when both people will be done with work and then only meet when you can arrive at about the same time, creating unnecessary anxiety around punctuality.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sybercecurity 5y ago
Being older now (Gen X) I've noticed a change as well. I've wondered if the US culture has grown an unhealthy level of competition. Young people internalize lessons that the people around them (classmates, neighbors) are competitors for spots in prestigious programs and later, jobs. You're taught that you should be friendly, but not "too friendly" as you are going to need to be better than them to get what you want. I don't think this explicit, but something that is incentivized through grades, tests, and gamification of everyday life. That and the deepening divide between classes. If you don't get good grades, get into a good school, get a good job, etc. you may fall off the cliff into the lower classes. If that means you need to be ruthless in your social interactions, that's just the price. It's like we've decided to let psychopaths dictate how society operates.
- yks 5y ago
  I feel like it's just been a shortage of everything going on - the shortage of housing, traffic throughput, the shortage of physical space in the national parks, the shortage of good schools, good jobs. There are many more people, but no more infrastructure than before. And this naturally breeds competitiveness on the already fertile soil of American individualism.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Well said. And unsustainability / past benchmarking too. Everyone can't live in a single family home with 3 acres, if we have the priorities we say we want (liveable cities, etc).
sound1 5y ago
I feel you brother. Even trust needs evidence in the age of social media :)
- sound1 5y ago
  Reaplying to my own comment - if I were you I would relocate to a VERY cold states in US if I had options (and I don't) Good luck either way
emerged 5y ago
I travel around the US working from different states/cities. The difference in behavior is astounding between the big and small cities. I have the absolute best experiences in small to mid sized towns, and in big cities everyone on the road and in person behaves sociopathically. It’s often beyond even simple competition / selfishness. You routinely see people going out of their way to be mean even when it doesn’t benefit them. But switch towns and the whole situation is flipped.

by pault 5y ago

anm89 5y ago

That's one of the weirdest things you figure out traveling. There are really no rules to what life is. It can have a drastically different texture based on things about your environment that don't feel that meaningful when you just think "that's the way things always are" with no alternative to compare it to.

pault 5y ago
I encourage everyone to take an extended trip to a country with a different culture if they can afford it by any means. The greatest effect it has on you is making it obvious which aspects of your personality and values are just picked up from your surroundings. Every time I moved to a different region it stripped away a little bit of the parts of me that weren't really me, and left me feeling much more confident in my goals and desires, and generally more comfortable with who I am. You really can't put a price on this.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Hm. I never heard anyone explain it so well before, or why, one would "find oneself" (sorry for using this awkward phrase..) in travelling. Thanks. :)
- engineeringwoke 5y ago
  It's very much a cliché but I did it as well. Cheers
- anm89 5y ago
  Yeah completely agree. Also forces you to admit to some of your personal faults.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Spain. France. Switzerland. Japan. - Sit in a cafe in the morning and watch people go to work. - Sit in a cafe in the afternoon and watch people go to lunch. - Sit in a cafe at night and watch people eat dinner. Really made me see and reflect on my own ways of going about them.
  - t0mbstone 5y ago
    I always find it interesting how people travel and sit in cafes to people watch, but they never do that in their own home towns. I would be willing to bet if you took a week off work and just went around relaxing at cafes in your home city, you would discover all sorts of interesting things and people without even having to leave the country. People are people, and you can find stressed out people everywhere. You can also find relaxed, easy going, loving people everywhere too, if you look hard enough.

SmellTheGlove 5y ago

This is a good, somewhat related read: https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78wpz/covid-changed-our-relationship-to-busyness-can-we-keep-it-that-way-v28n2 https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78wpz/covid-changed-our-rel...

daenz 5y ago

When "silence is violence" and "the personal is political", what can you expect? Everything is polarized and people want it to stay that way.

ben_w 5y ago
As a non-American who has visited for a total of four months, east and west coast, the political differences between America and other countries are way broader and deeper than just a few superficial memes. Especially those from young activist personalities, personalities which are present and busy in many other countries, each of which has its own zeitgeist. Your roads are scarily broad while your sidewalks are narrow and sometimes just stop suddenly; everyone seems to have a car even if they shouldn’t; the rules of the road seem to be treated as suggestions (at least for cars — jaywalking is verboten), while also being a source of arbitrary revenue precisely because everyone treats them as suggestions; “family” is a much stronger trope in America than in the U.K. or Germany, yet “I love you daddy” is a real Valentines’ day card I’ve actually seen, in a supermarket with many others like it in different variations of phrase and relative; guns feel like a trivial hobby or possession barely worth mentioning, and suggesting even the slightest of limits to the right to bear arms is one of the quickest ways to be compared to a 20th century dictator and some of the critics insisting “a well armed society is a polite society”; your billboards are covered in adverts for loans to cover bail costs, yet sex is hidden away; you’re as loud about Christianity as a minaret is about Islam, far more so than the churches and cathedrals I’ve seen around Europe; there is a constant bombardment of adverts for insurance and health products I don’t see elsewhere (everything from magic drugs to teeth so straight and white they could be a metaphor); there are regional things like the Californian everything-causes-cancer warnings matched only by one British tabloid newspaper; and yes, race related issues are so much louder and in-your-face that even I couldn’t miss them. (I know the U.K. seems weird to visiting Americans, because they’ve explicitly told me. But the U.K.’s weirdness is different to yours, just as the cultural pain-points are).
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Thorough and accurate! I'd hazard the sharper edges of American culture stem from less constrained (and better funded) capitalism than other parts of the world. If someone can make a buck on it, it exists.

mrkstu 5y ago

If you live/can meet in the northern part of town I’d be happy to have lunch with you some time so you can at least have one friend in town… email is my username @ gmail.com.

failwhaleshark 5y ago

I grew-up in San Jose, went to Davis, and came back to the Valley and commuted to Chico until 2019. Most Californians seemed bitter, angry, resentful, humorless, and ready to explode. I live in ATX now in overpriced, poorly-maintained apartments full of "stock-broker"-types, salespeople, managers, and software dev couples, and people who think they're hot sh%t either because of inheritance or university pedigree. $3k/month isn't like Valley prices; this is a 1400 sq ft cost-saver efficiency for me. I'd happily trade for a 3000 sq ft / $6k/month place if the people were more decent over there, if that's within the realm of reasonable expectations. There's no apparent stress of amongst the people with more money than sense, but there is stress amongst the hundreds of people living under I-35 when they've been told that their existence is illegal when they have nowhere else to go.

celim307 5y ago
The people you are describing are more a function of where you live, those people tend to congregate in what I calm “yuppie slums”, shitty made multi family units with names like “aloft” and “elevate” with art and random shit in the lobby. There’s a ton in every US city. And they are all the same. They attract people who don’t know the city very well and have a check list of amenities. When your lease is up I would encourage you to look at different neighborhoods, ideally a little away from the “revitalized former industrial/meatpacking district” which is probably bougie breweries and wine lounges now.
- tolbish 5y ago
  Sounds like a result of poor urban planning. My travels have taught me that these generally aren't all stuffy people desiring "yuppie slums"—it just happens that these are the only types of housing available near where the jobs are.
- failwhaleshark 5y ago
  Unfortunately, I may have mistakenly signed a lease in a yuppie slum in ATX because it was the only large apartment available. It's an "expensive" (for the area), boring, mixed-use development that gentrified an east side area, abutted right next to I-35 and neglected homeless (who's existence are now illegal thanks to hateful bandaid policies). And, it appears to be populated mostly by Millenial kidults who live to party hard, act like they're still in high school, got their jobs by lying on their resumes, let their dogs pee and poop in the common hallways, and live like their hedonism is more important than anything or anyone else. I dislike most of them because they resemble Seinfeldian, Kafkaesque caricatures and many offer nothing more than shallow, vapid, shitty, ignorant, infantile %sshole, consumerist, ephemerality manufactured by a steady diet of mass media and screen time. One woman walks around with one hand in the air like Peg Bundy from Married... with Children but seems like a WASP who works-out and dresses to climb up the next richest pole. She won't even acknowledge my presence with a friendly "hello."

Milkman128 5y ago

I am mistrustful as hell. I'm guilty of this as an ohioan. To devils advocate my position, a higher stressed group is more desperate and more likely to screw me over? IDK but there is definitely an atmosphere of us vs them watch your back.

sharkweek 5y ago

I spent some time in Central America radicalizi... err I mean traveling for fun, after college. One of the things that always stood out to me was how patient everyone generally was with one another. I remember riding around on chicken buses to get from town to town, and on more than one occasion, the bus would just pull over and the driver would get out, grab some lunch, talk to a friend. Nobody was in a rush. My friend that I was traveling with and I would stare at each other and be like "what the hell is going on?" as we looked around at everyone else on the bus and nobody seems to care at all that their day has this arbitrary delay. I can only imagine if a driver did that here in Seattle with 30+ people all trying to get somewhere. I like living in the US, I think it has some massive upsides, but I also think I'm a bit of a hostage to what I think my life is supposed to look like, versus simplification somewhere else.

jandrese 5y ago
Can you imagine coming to a client meeting 30 minutes late and telling him that the bus driver decided on a whim stop halfway through the route to chat up an old friend?
- techsupporter 5y ago
  I mean, sure? How's that different from being 30 minutes late because someone dumped a load of frozen fish on the highway? This mad rush to be everywhere at a specific time, usually when tens of thousands of other people are also trying to be at a similar spot at the same time, is a major cause of people being traffic. Heck, as the pandemic has shown, we don't even really need to always be in the same physical place to have a meeting; technology can relieve us of that burden. My family gave up driving years ago, due to cost and stress, and it's been great largely for this reason. I don't worry about dealing with all of the people who have Very Important Places To Be. That's Metro's job, and they do it well.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    It's all perspective. If there is an accident then that's kind of unavoidable. The bus driver however is just stealing half an hour from the dozen or more people under his care on a whim.

maedla 5y ago

I always wonder how much the explosion of "true crime" media has contributed to American paranoia and fear

Hamuko 5y ago
True crime is pretty popular around the world.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
Can't hold a candle to the american news stations when it comes to paranoia and fear

kwanbix 5y ago

I personally LOVE LOVE LOVE USA, Miami in particular. I don't know why. Maybe is the weather, the beach, etc. I would love to live there and work one day. That said, three things worry me: 1) How complicated the health industry is there. Being from Argentina where health is universal, or living now in Germany where is also universal, that is crazy for me. 2) How easy you are fired and that you basically don't get any protection if you are. Again, here in Germany we have insurance that covers for many months, etc. 3) How bad employees are treated there by (most but not all?) companies. Personal story. My sister, she had to travel in the middle of the pandemic to my home country as my father was sick. She asked for permission to work remotely for 3 weeks. She had to stay 2 more because my father's health was not the best. When she returned, the company told her that that is not what they expected of her and fired her on the spot. Now, I was in my home country so I know my sister worked all the normal hours and more, she was connected all the time, and giving her 120% (if such a thing exists). And still, they said, good by. Crazy.

rcurry 5y ago
Yeah, the health care system here is bonkers. It wasn't so bad back around 2008 or so, I had private health insurance for my wife and I, and it was only around $400 or so a month with almost no deductible. Then the government decided to make it "affordable" so it's almost triple that now, plus you'd have an insane deductible.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Say what you want about the ACA, but it was the trajectory of US health expenditure (vs GDP per capita) that was the problem: increasing year by year. So doing nothing / business as usual wasn't a fiscally sustainable choice.
- thatfrenchguy 5y ago
  Yeah, before, insurers could throw out people who have preconditions or have “maximum lifetime benefit”, obviously you were going to pay less in premiums. The bureaucracy / cost of new technologies have not made this any cheaper either, especially as cost-benefit analysis for new procedures and drugs is, somehow, not a thing in the US unlike everywhere else in the world. The US hates cutting costs via market intervention too (also see our crazy college costs problem), so until we decide to finally tackle it, they’ll keep on rising.

cocoa19 5y ago

Your comments are spot on. I wouldn't say either one is good or bad, I've learnt to appreciate the differences. Having lived in latin America and the US, US feels more concerned about individualism, achievements and efficiency and it shows in friendships. Outings are organized days in advance, people are expected to show up on time, calendar invites are not unheard of. In latin America, life is more about family and being happy. You can call a friend the same day and enjoy a cold beer after work (some time after work, punctuality not required). I think people would laugh in my face if I tell them I'll send them a calendar invite.

nightski 5y ago
These are also gross generalizations and seem to revolve around American big city life which is selective (but to be fair is where the majority of our population lives). But in smaller cities I've been able to find a great balance of both. Work on ambitious ideas but spend evenings and free time with friends and family.
- pault 5y ago
  Do you have any recommendations? :) I've been trying to find a big town or small city with lots of natural beauty and nice weather. I grew up in Seattle and refuse to live anywhere with more than 90 days of cloudy weather per year. One heuristic I've come up with is small towns that are sustained by natural tourism. They tend to be much more laid back, and people are happier and more social because of it. Whitefish, MO is one example, but unfortunately it's too cold for me. :)
ridethebike 5y ago
Hi, Hope you're doing well. Wanna grab a drink?
kelnos 5y ago
I think it just depends, though you may be right that this "regimented life" is more common in the US. For myself, I'm happy to jump out in the middle of the day if a friend wants to go on an impromptu walk. But if I am planning a get-together at my house with more than a couple people, I probably will send out a calendar invitation. Not because I think the other people need it, but I do like to put things on my calendar so I don't forget when things are going on, and it's only a couple extra seconds to add the guests to it, so I might as well. As another data point, I know people who are introverted and need a little mental preparation before seeing people, even good friends, so impromptu meetings can cause social anxiety. > You can call a friend the same day and enjoy a cold beer after work (some time after work, punctuality not required) I've definitely been trying to get better at the last part of this. People finish work at different times some days, sure. So it's fine to just head to the bar whenever you're done, and whoever gets there first will grab a table and just chill alone with a drink until the other person shows up, and that's the norm, not the exception. But I feel like most of the time (where I live) you try to figure out when both people will be done with work and then only meet when you can arrive at about the same time, creating unnecessary anxiety around punctuality.

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sybercecurity 5y ago

Being older now (Gen X) I've noticed a change as well. I've wondered if the US culture has grown an unhealthy level of competition. Young people internalize lessons that the people around them (classmates, neighbors) are competitors for spots in prestigious programs and later, jobs. You're taught that you should be friendly, but not "too friendly" as you are going to need to be better than them to get what you want. I don't think this explicit, but something that is incentivized through grades, tests, and gamification of everyday life. That and the deepening divide between classes. If you don't get good grades, get into a good school, get a good job, etc. you may fall off the cliff into the lower classes. If that means you need to be ruthless in your social interactions, that's just the price. It's like we've decided to let psychopaths dictate how society operates.

yks 5y ago
I feel like it's just been a shortage of everything going on - the shortage of housing, traffic throughput, the shortage of physical space in the national parks, the shortage of good schools, good jobs. There are many more people, but no more infrastructure than before. And this naturally breeds competitiveness on the already fertile soil of American individualism.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Well said. And unsustainability / past benchmarking too. Everyone can't live in a single family home with 3 acres, if we have the priorities we say we want (liveable cities, etc).

sound1 5y ago

I feel you brother. Even trust needs evidence in the age of social media :)

sound1 5y ago
Reaplying to my own comment - if I were you I would relocate to a VERY cold states in US if I had options (and I don't) Good luck either way

emerged 5y ago

I travel around the US working from different states/cities. The difference in behavior is astounding between the big and small cities. I have the absolute best experiences in small to mid sized towns, and in big cities everyone on the road and in person behaves sociopathically. It’s often beyond even simple competition / selfishness. You routinely see people going out of their way to be mean even when it doesn’t benefit them. But switch towns and the whole situation is flipped.