I Moved Here From Europe And Find The USA Needlessly Difficult — 'American Life Is Cruel, Abnormal & Unhealthy'
From Europe, America looks like a different planet.
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The Land of the Free still feels like The Wild Wild West.
This was my overwhelming thought the first time I stepped foot in the US as a European: America is intense and needlessly difficult.
It might have been nothing but the biased opinion of a coddled European. Still, life in America felt needlessly hard and riddled with impossible drawbacks that rendered the pursuit of happiness virtually impossible, reducing it to the quest for survival. If free means free to live or die with no one to lend you a helping hand, then yes, it certainly felt like that.
I was in awe of the hardcore people who lived there, their tenacity and resilience, and their unadulterated dedication to giving their all to what they view as the best country in the world. That’s how I fell in love with them.
The polite and warm people with stars in their eyes. Innocent like children, rambunctious like teenagers. Born free. Without the burden of past war on their shoulders. Living a life that is far from normal, healthy, or sustainable. And still doing their best, despite everything.
It’s every man for himself in America
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Women and children too. There is no protection for the individual. People are used for the benefit of the government, rather than protected by the government.
And I’m not saying this doesn’t happen everywhere. I’m not that naïve. Politicians are the same all over the world. But the systems they operate in are not. Some systems are created to protect the individual, and some are created to let the individual protect himself.
In all honesty, I’m not a fan of coddling people, telling them what to do every step of the way, and protecting them as if they were children who didn’t know any better. On the other hand, we’ll all reach a point when we need someone to take care of us when life renders us unproductive. For example, we’ll need medical care when we’re sick, and rest when we’re overworked.
And so far it seems that the US only helps people to be as productive as possible and completely forgets about them when they fail to function at maximum capacity. When I first entered an American supermarket (I think it was Ralph’s), I was mesmerized by how beautiful everything was.
There were perfectly aligned pyramids of vibrant colored fruit, everything packaged to perfection, ready-made salads, everything from enormous buckets of ice cream to individually packed bite-sized sweets, cubed watermelon, the works.
It looked like everything was perfectly designed to suit people’s every need so that when they came home from their tiring job they didn’t have to worry about dragging home a 20-pound watermelon and carving it on the kitchen table like a wildebeest they just slaughtered.
That’s my experience with watermelons. I might have been especially biased on that one. Don’t imagine we don’t have the same beautifully colored everything in Europe though. We do. We’re just more relaxed about the way everything looks. Or is it more negligent?
On the other hand, that’s as far as caring for the people goes in the US. The medical bills are astronomical. Insurance covers very little. There is no public transportation. The food is laden with chemicals. Paid vacation days and maternal leave are practically non-existent.
All of this is not normal. And it’s not because anyone gave Europe the right to define normality. But because zero protection and overwork are abusive, and if you live in a society that uses and abuses the individual, you need to redefine normality.
Universal health care is not a joke and it should be freely and readily accessible to everybody. That’s normality in a developed modern country.
Public transportation should be something the cities offer to their inhabitants. Otherwise, you’re forcing them to buy a car, so your main concern is not making the individual’s life better, but the car company’s life better.
The same goes for food. There is no reason to pump all your food full of chemicals. Some are necessary to preserve it, but most are not, and a lot of what the FDA allows in the US is banned in Europe. And what do you know, we still have plenty of delicious food to eat.
The same goes for paid vacation days and maternity leave. When you don’t give people paid vacation days you’re working them into the ground, just to punish and discard them like a used battery when they can’t go on any longer.
Plus, who is going to raise those children that American women are forced to have whether they want to or not? Maternity is not a walk in the park, it’s hard work, so why wouldn’t mothers be paid for it?
This is not normal. It’s abusive, cruel, and honestly outrageous. Americans are treated like battered wives who are never allowed to step out of line, or they might get left for a more performant and compliant model.
Stepping out of line is human. We all make mistakes, we all have health problems, and we all have financial difficulties that sometimes don’t allow us to be on our top performance. It’s only natural.
Lack of lenience for small mistakes is abnormal and unhealthy. Everybody needs time, space, and support to breathe. It doesn’t seem like Americans get any.
People don’t have free time in America
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You know that time that allows you to have a breather after work while mindlessly staring into the sunset, letting go of all your worries?
A lot of people in the US don’t have it. And it seems to me if they did, they wouldn’t even know what to do with it. Because they’re so used to working and grinding and hustling, the idea of rest became foreign. And that takes a huge toll on people’s health and well-being.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, some Europeans are so focused on leisure, that Spain, Italy, and Greece instituted siesta: three hours in the middle of the day to drink some wine, eat a tasty lunch, gossip with coworkers, and maybe even have an afternoon nap.
Not where I live, and I probably wouldn’t even like it, because the jaws of life couldn’t drag me back to work after I had a chilled glass of Chardonnay coupled with a brick of steamy cheesy saucy lasagna.
But even with all that alcohol, carbs, and calories, I’m sure it’s much healthier than working yourself to death for the benefit of a boss who couldn’t care less if you survived your last double shift.
My American friends, Pam and Ed, never have time for themselves. They’re both working unbelievably long hours, that most Europeans wouldn’t even touch with a 10-foot pole.
Pam works in an assisted living facility. She wakes up at 3 AM every morning and drives to work for one hour. Pam is the epitome of a good, loving, and caring person. All the old people at the facility love her and call her Miss Pammy.
The facility is usually understaffed, so Pam has to do a lot of work that her 60-year-old back, knees, and heart can no longer do: lifting people, carrying them to the bathroom, putting up with insults from those too old to know any better.
One day an old lady got out from the mental health part of the facility, scratched her across the face, spit on her, and ran away laughing hysterically.
Pam had to do one more shift after that awful episode because one of her colleagues quit unexpectedly. She has double shifts twice a week and she sleeps in the facility because she’s too tired to drive one more hour back home on an overcrowded 4-lane freeway.
Her husband has a small drywall company, made of himself, and one more guy has vitiligo and is drinking himself to death. Beer and cigarettes are his breakfast of choice and he says hello to you in the sweetest way possible: ‘Well, hello there, little lady.’
The kids are all grown up, so Pam and Ed have the house to themselves. If only they had the time to use it. The few free hours that they have in the evening are spent smoking weed, the only thing keeping them functional in a very harsh environment.
Despite all that, and despite their constant complaints that it’s incredibly hard to make ends meet even with all the work, not once have I heard them say that this lifestyle doesn’t seem normal to them.
How could they? They have no idea it’s not normal. It’s all they know. They’ve never lived anywhere else. They’ve never even traveled outside the US to see how other people live.
I was their first encounter with Europe and they were my first encounter with the US. Needless to say, we spent a lot of nights chatting, marveling at how different life is on the other side of the pond.
In all honestly, I don’t find the grass to be greener in Europe, but then again, I have a soft spot for hardcore people with a heart of gold, which many Americans I met were to me.
No matter how wonderful I find American people, I don’t think I could survive a month in that cruel environment, where only the strong survive. I just don’t have it in me — America is not for the faint of heart.
Mona Lazar is a writer and unconventional relationship coach with words published in Better Humans, Medium, Illumination, The Soulciety, Newsbreak, The Startup, Hello, Love, The Good Men Project, Curious, and others.