A Sick People
householderkarl.com
householderkarl.com
I think it's possible that a lot of this is subjective personal bias, and people may tell me it's not actually that bad. But I also wonder if the people who have to live their lives in it long term are just used to it. And if they were to step outside of it for long enough like this blogger, they might detox from the stress.
I think what I do know for sure is that "it's like this everywhere" feels certainly wrong. Everywhere is different and I don't accept that every single form of different is equal. There are better and worse versions of different.
I think that is a cause: if you are gated off in a secure area, you care less about the safety of wider society. You will want to spend less on the police etc.
> That your kids' school is going to get shot up.
its really not that likely. A kid in the US is far more likely to die on the way to school than get shot at school, but the former is a fear people have adjusted to.
The medical insurance tied to your job is weird and scary.
> its really not that likely. A kid in the US is far more likely to die on the way to school than get shot at school, but the former is a fear people have adjusted to.
True, it's just _so much_ more likely compared to other countries, to the point of it's not really on the radar day-to-day.
Child/teen cause of death stats https://www.kff.org/mental-health/child-and-teen-firearm-mor... call out Canada as #2 for firearm mortality in general. We've had 29 school shootings (including universities, and including "a gun was discharged in a stairwell") since 2000, with 31 fatalities.
USA is 327 with 197 dead since 2020. And yes, that's with almost 9x the population, but per capita it's still a wild outlier of a stat.
Hellish.
[N] That you need gates on your communities.
[Y] That your kids' school is going to get shot up.
[Y] That cops might be the enemy.
[N] You'll be part of the wrong tribe.
[N] Medical event away from financial catastrophe.
[Y] Medical insurance, they're trying to screw you.
[Y] That healthcare is tied to employment.
[N] That your government really wants to !@#$ you.
Nearly everything you said is inaccurate for the vast majority of the US, and it's obvious you have projected a lot of vaguely accurate online news reports across the nation as a whole.
Admittedly I haven't been in a few years. Maybe things have been getting much better there!
Every time I visit a place I get the impression that people are happier, but it's just an impression based on something you notice and experience for a very short amount of time. You'll see happy and desperate people anywhere, I don't think it has to do with the place.
> Actually, I think I say that about everywhere I travel.
That's it.
But also, when I didn't speak Spanish very well, Spain felt magical and whimsical and all the people seemed so happy. A few years later I came back and spoke Spanish at a much higher level (pretty easy to improve when your initial level of capability was counting to 100 and ordering beer) and noticed that the situation was much more nuanced. I'd over hear the same sorts of conversations I'd hear at home.
But as an American who has spent decades living in Europe (across five different countries), I'm confident that this isn't just a mistaken impression.
I visit Japan, which social media seems to say is a terrible place to work and make friends, and it strikes me as much more friendly and outgoing. Same when I'm in the States, where I find it far easier to strike up a random conversation and enjoy the nods on the sidewalk.
Somehow I think the core differences is wherever you spend the most time, the gilding wears off and there's a core discontent underneath everything everywhere if you stay long enough.
When you are visiting a place, you see it with rosy eyes. You are not forced to deal with the day to day difficulties of life, the commute, the commitments, the finances, the outrage about politics and so on. So, comparing the harsh reality of 'back home' against an environment where you don't have to deal with those is going to obviously come out different. When you live in a country for a while, only then the so-called 'bitterness' catches up to you.
I always have to laugh at people who form an opinion on other countries based on their "2 week vacation" there.
The seed’s often more fertile in foreign fields,
and a neighbor’s herd always has richer milk.
I think this was where "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" comes from.
My perpetually-single friend is always complaining that there "aren't any good single women" in his area. When he visits other places, he inevitably reports on how much nicer and prettier the women are there.
I wonder if the author would feel different about a place he was visiting if he stayed there for a few years.
There's also the concept that "familiarity breeds contempt" and there seems to be some evidence to support this.
The article doesn’t mention moving to another country, working a local job and enjoying it.
America is absolutely great if you get lucky and want to make a ton of money. I messed up, I didn’t do well on my Amazon or Meta interviews. But say I did 6 or 7 years ago.
Assuming I survived long enough for the 4 year vesting period I’d already have enough to retire. The world is full of safer and cheaper places,
No other country really offers this opportunity. My own career, dropping out of college and coding Unity games until I magically had a 6 figure career , is largely an American dream.
On the flip side, in almost every other developed country people don’t choose between medicine and rent.
Let’s say you have a chronic , but manageable health condition and a great job. You get fired in May, your wife files for divorce in September and you can be homeless by Christmas.
Now you’re in a shelter without the basic medic treatment you need.
Somehow it’s your fault. Tariffs destroyed your employers business, your fault.
If a bank needs a bailout golly gosh no expense shall be spared. A peasant can’t make rent this month, should have worked harder.
Combined with the prosperity gospel and if you suffer on the streets it means you made God angry or something. An infinite all powerful being and he’s upset you ate meat on the wrong day.
To be honest I dream of moving to a country where senseless stupid violence isn’t the norm. Maybe I’d have a kid and tell him that America is basically Disneyland if the rides occasionally derailed.
I wouldn't say they're meaningless, but there's a lot of studies suggesting they don't really change much over time, and my sense is they don't change in tandem with events that should change well-being, except in extremes like widespread genocidal war.
There's even researchers who have kind of taken them seriously to suggest that people have social cognitive biases about the past, and societal changes. I respect them and think what they're suggesting is reasonable (in the sense that they're taking the measures seriously) but the other way of looking at it is to flip it around and raise the possibility that the aggregation-level measurement isn't tracking what we want it to.
I admit I don't have an alternative, and don't think they're worthless per se, I just feel like (as someone who does vaguely related research) like they're tracking something more akin to perceptual sets or world schemas than psychosocial functioning.
I guess at some level I always have the "everything is fine" dog meme in the back of my mind when I see these kinds of well-being or mood analyses.
I recommend Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness". It very accessibly addresses almost every point you raised.
In particular, people have very bad intuitions about trauma and loss. Humans are shockingly adaptable and bounce back to full functioning and happiness almost all of the time. Provided you don't have a biased sample (such as people seeking care) this is equally apparent when talking to victims of trauma as when doing empirical research.
What I'm referring to are correlations between group-level variables at the level of nations or states.
There's a kind of disconnect in that on the one hand, you end up with these models of why disruptive political change happens — because people are deeply dissatisfied and having trouble making ends meet and so forth (cf the price of eggs etc) — but then on the other, end up concluding that well-being is inelastic to external events. So which is it?
Maybe it has nothing to do with aggregate level measurement? Even the trauma example is sort of telling: someone can end up being deeply impacted and their reported well-being remains the same (or even increases), but that story is very oversimplified at some level.
Sometimes I feel as if this line of reasoning leads to absurdities, like there's nothing wrong with traumatic harm or abuse because people are resilient and it doesn't matter to their well-being. I'm being provocative on purpose to make a point — I don't think anyone really thinks that — but at some point you have to wrestle with the implications of what is being said, and at that point it kind of starts to become internally inconsistent.
I know it's just a throwaway example, but this statement isn't internally inconsistent. Traumatic harm hurts people now, it doesn't need to permanently harm them to be considered immoral.
A very similar knee-jerk often occurs when people learn that parenting has very, very little effect on long-term psychological outcomes for children compared to genetics. But "parenting doesn't matter" is illogical for the same reason. "We may not hold their tomorrows in our hands but we surely hold their todays" - Judith Rich Harris
> correlations between group-level variables at the level of nations or states
Ecological mismatches in trauma harms is what I study, so I'll take the opportunity to shamelessly plug some of my and others' research, maybe you'll find it interesting.
[0] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-56641-002 (open at https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/9dpqu) [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c... [2] https://psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2022-20702-001.pdf [3] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstreams/e3528534-da4d-4402-a8b5-...
The fact the author was able to take a multiple day vacation to several top Mexican resorts is exceedingly ironic. The meals he ate and the resorts he stayed at are probably on accessible to 10% of the entire Mexican population. Those around him made around $750 USD per month. A night at any of those resorts probably runs around that amount.
If you visit a small town in the USA and stay in a nice bed and breakfast, you will find the country has the same quaint charm as several places abroad.
Seems more than a little rose-tinted. I live in the UK and I can certify that there is a lot of misery here. Overloaded NHS, lack of housing, the Byzantine benefits and tax structures, lack of good jobs, etc.
Personally, I like living in the UK, despite all, but I also liked working in the US last time I did in the 1990s. Things have (obviously, Trumpism etc.) changed there, I guess.
Well, you went to one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I wouldn't want to leave either.
On a more substantial comment, people seem much more happy in appearance and on specific moments than what they actually are. The grass is always greener on the other side, etc. The solution is and has always been to try to be satisfied (not happy) with what you have wherever you are.
>We don’t care for our children, our elderly, or our communities.
This is truly an issue and imo it has reached unprecedented lows.
This to me is the nub of it. Where is our humanity when people lie homeless and lifeless in stupor on the streets as Waymos glide by?
Some countries do better. Many don't. But we should always seek to model off those that put welfare of all people above welfare of one.
We've decided that those people have agency, and are not willing to force them into a facility against their will.
You can disagree with it, but that's the current choice the nation has made and it's not an invalid one.
Also, most people do care for their children, elderly, and communities. The US is not a failed state because not 100% of people or munipalities do.
> But we should always seek to model off those that put welfare of all people above welfare of one.
No thanks.
How come? Is that not a more compassionate way to live?
That's okay. :)
Must they "accelerate" and "keep up"? Do they truly suffer if they don't? If they're happy doing so now, will they be unhappy in the future if they continue down their chosen paths?
The author is comparing the locals to people in Baja California. Based on the above I'll predict that his locals are urban.
"People who live in small towns and rural areas are happier than everyone else, researchers say". -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/05/17/peopl...
I'm not sure I follow here. Which rural parts of the US are home to stadiums, let alone big enough to host the World Cup? A cursory search shows we hosted in Seattle, SF, Boston, NYC, LA, Miami, Dallas, etc., which are our biggest and most prosperous cities.
There are plenty of friendly, happy people in American cities.
Because of that, most people see what they feel internally.
There are plenty of kind, generous, happy people in the US. Wasn't there a gazillion memes about it during the World Cup?
This reads like twitter-level rage bait seriously.
> We don’t care for our children, our elderly, or our communities. It’s all me me me. How do I get mine and fuck the other guy.
Capitalism, I'm looking at you.
I like accelerator pedals on cars, I do, but I also like the brake pedal.
Also, many homeless people are content, along with those in jails and small children (whether they are well cared for or not in many cases unfortunately). It's not a remotely good metric for anything other than how agreeable a person is and how low their expectations are.
At the end of the day, a lot of Americans say they are one person while their actions prove otherwise. This creates a lot of shame, self hatred, confusion, anxiety, etc. The way Americans self describe vs who their actions say they are is vastly different. Then we blame the rich, the poor, the immigrants, the deep state, foreigners, etc.
"I love the environment" as we vote for a oil baron. "I love animals" as we shove more beef and dairy into our mouths and buy a 3rd chihuahua that poos/pees on pee pads cuz someone can't be bothered to let it out. I'd be confused about who I am if I said one thing and did another.
In modern America the individual can do no wrong. It is always someone elses fault. There is always a scapegoat to let us off the hook. DID YOU KNOW OIL COMPANIES MADE MO MONEY? Keep driving that SUV and buying beef watered in the desert.
You can count on Americans to do the right thing, after we've tried everything else and run out of excuses.
Americans are, according to our own logic, the most beautifully gifted society to ever exist while simultaneously being the biggest victims ever.
The sad part? We all know it and refuse to acknowledge or do anything about it. Its just easier to blame someone else, such as datacenters, or be a victim at the mercy of billionaires, while I get my $7 starbucks mocha. I'm sad, I'll get 2 mochas.
A good example is how people do things in really weird/inefficient ways, such as hand washing dishes or time drying their laundry, despite there being a dishwasher and moisture settings. If this is pointed out, the reaction is often emotional offense followed by "Don't tell me what to do!" Denial. Americans use their uniqueness to justify their excess. We get offended to avoid taking personal responsibility for our actions. Brb I'm ordering the latest funco doll cuz I neeeeeeeeed it.
Americans live simultaneously under Manifest Destiny and being slaves. It's wild. We are the greatest and the most victimized people to ever exist, in our words.
Sebastian Major from the podcast Our Fake History recently said that Americans are masters at branding. That's another way of saying we're masters at lying. To ourselves and others.
*obviously these are generalizations and most people will disagree with me. I'm not wrong. Start to look for it, especially in yourself. You'll see it on both sides of the political spectrum in various forms. It's entitlement all around. Look for it when liberals say "give em a break, life is hard" (excess disguised as compassion) as a person consumes 3x more than is reasonable. Look for it when conservatives say "God blessed this country and the Muslims are invading" as they open up pristine wilderness to resource extraction. They're not much different.
American culture was, quite literally, built on these ideals. This isn't a question of "Do I do this?" If you grew up in the USA you do this to some degree. If you disagree, congrats you're doing it. The question is how much responsibility are you going to take? What excuses are you going to employ? How honest are you going to be?
Powell reservoir (Lake Powell) is about to dry up. How many more burgers and steak are we gonna shove down our faces so we can feel that pride of a steak dinner? How much butter are we gonna slab on our plate as the western US grasslands burn unnaturally thanks to cattle grazing? Nevermind, it's the billionaires fault. Sorry I offended. I'm gonna go like some social media posts that are anti-AI cuz it'll make me feel like I accomplished something without actually sacrificing my excess. I could go without beef or I could complain about AI..... Eh I'll complain about AI, it's easier. I'm also on the carnivore diet cuz self-care trumps the environment and I need 230g of protein a day. (Excess disguised as self care/health.).
100% wrong. Didn’t even bother reading after that
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index
The US rank 9th in terms of tertiary education in the world, so no, not "average'. And even average wouldn't translate to "uneducated".
Dude, don't play the "moving the goal posts" game please, this is not X/Twitter. The guy is creaming his pants over Mexico and he calls Americans fat.
It's capitalism to an extent, sure, but it's also the culture of a country.
Which I guess is to say yes, it is the culture of a country, and the culture of the US strikes me as money above all else.
It's the American emphasis on individual freedom that results in a lack of government mandates for healthcare. Nearly everyone has healthcare, adding the small percentage who don't to the existing government-run system would not be a major financial burden, and cases like the one you cited are effectively (but not literally) zero.
Historically, there's been a tug of war between people who feel like you should be able to take the chance of financial ruin over an unlikely event and those who think the state should be protecting those people from themselves, leading to the disaster of a system we have currently. That's pretty much the explanation.