I feel like this article should be retitled, “What every American should know about life in America.”
(Saying this as an American)
(Saying this as an American)
Articles like these are great for giving you a taste of what things are like in other countries, and making you see that your way isn't the only way things can be. Travel does that too, and in a much more hands-on manner.
One of the things that made an impression on me on a work trip to the US was that I was talking to a colleague and she said something about her not being well in her mental health the previous year, and then immediately apologized to me for "burdening me with her problems".
I was speechless at (and still don't fully understand) the cultural factors that lead people to apologize for mentioning a detail of their personal life to a coworker, but it seems to me that life must be much more lonely like that.
Is the author exaggerating, or is this actually a thing in other countries? I'd expect my immediate family and close friends to know I was going in for a scan and to care about the outcome, maybe even wait by the phone for results if they have the time. But to take off work and physically show up in the waiting room just for moral support? What planet is that? I mean sure even Americans can do that for major surgeries/births/etc, at least for those there's some amount of physical care required during the recovery that people can help with. But moral support for an MRI?
I actually would feel bad being the center of that much attention. I guess Americans moralize "being useful" more than other countries, or just have a different conception of what "useful" means. Just because I might have cancer doesn't mean anyone else's time is less valuable than it was yesterday, or that I'm some charity case (Is being a "charity case" an Americanism I'm unaware of?). Immediate family and very close friends have some obligation of moral support, but beyond that it's like how a cat grooming another cat is the dominant cat. It's generally seen as less genuine, and even if it is genuine it's seen as putting unnecessary burdens on people who don't have a pre-existing social obligation to said burdens.
It's like the US was devised in a way completely contrary to the way in which we evolved.
In the US, if you don't figure it out on your own and get rich, people just view you as scum and don't care whatsoever. This is why we have psychopaths shooting up concerts, a receding youthful male population, increased suicide rates in general, and people just tuning out of society. There is no defined purpose. You just have to make it. Which is incredibly hard in an economy devised full of choices, every which way preys upon your financial naivety.
The US is a system of the lucky being raised right.
Infact, even in USA, my Indian friends showed up to the hospital when I dislocated my pinky finger.
None of this is true in the highly-paid and highly-privileged world of elite tech workers in America, where the better employers emphasise flexibility, well-being, and taking care of your loved ones.
In the US, social and institutional priorities are such that nobody can time off for that kind of thing anyway, and everybody’s too spread out to be much within the blast radius or overall locus of an event like that. It’s just different in an intangible way that’s hard to describe—I tried my best in the article.
I've lived abroad, and then I have a large number of friends from abroad, so I understand most of these things to some degree. But reading your article just made me realize, these are the very things that I am so frustrated by in my own country, and yet when I talk to my family and friends they mostly just look at me like I'm weird and shrug me off.
I think it's because (as another reply pointed out), they have never seen anything different and can't imagine that it doesn't have to be this way.
There are many great and wonderful things about America and Americans, but I think our biggest single downfall is that our national pride has somehow mutated into what I would call a national narcissism. So many Americans deeply believe that we are the absolute best at everything. I've listened to family members crushed by medical bills say, "Well, at least we're in America where doctors can treat things like this, we're so fortunate here." I point out that people in other countries pay a fraction what we do for the same care, and they just... space out and cannot process what I'm saying.
So, anyway, it was just a really cathartic read for me. You expressed these ideas so cogently and concisely, I wish I could have done the same.
Last thing, one the note of the built environment, if you're interested in that sort of thing, I help run an organization called Strong Towns (strongtowns.org) which is largely aimed at helping Americans understand the flaws in the suburban model (namely that over the long-term it is an unproductive money pit that is eroding our national wealth). You might find you fit in well with the Strong Towns movement :)
Thanks for writing and sharing this piece!
I have lived in Indiana, Texas and Georgia (three different cities and towns in GA), and have visited a lot of other places in the country, of course, some of them extensively.