Explanation is easy, but understandably it's very hard for an American to grasp such a concept of life. People in Yugoslavia didn't work a lot, it's true, but

Explanation is easy, but understandably it's very hard for an American to grasp such a concept of life. People in Yugoslavia didn't work a lot, it's true, but not because of some lazy Sloven mentality, but because they simply didn't have to. And it even didn't make much sense to work hard in socialism, because you could work a little or you could work a lot, at the end of the month you would still earn the same salary as everyone else. But it was OK for the majority. You had a decent living, no stress, health care was good. Country wasn't rich, but society was much more non-consumeristic back then and generally people had a lower expectations, so none of us who grew up there felt that we are missing something big. We were mostly part of the middle class and had our jeans and TVs and VCRs and music systems and ZX Spectrums and Commodores, watched MTV and listened to r'n'r, had long vacations and a chance to travel the world or spend summers in our parents' holiday houses on the Adriatic seaside. Social differences were not big, everyone was more or less equally poor (or equally rich). I know it sounds unreal from the todays world, but it was a really nice country to live in. Of course, such system was not competitive enough to be sustainable without external financing, so it all started to collapse in 90s, and then it progressed into wars and nationalism and now life is not like that anymore. Now people are happy with their 8hx7 work at MacDonald's, because there are other even worse ones...