Nostalgia

It happens when you catch a song, or taste some food you haven’t had in a long while. And, of course we all get it when we look at old photographs.

The feeling of nostalgia.

For me, there is a note of loss, grief in knowing that I can’t hold on to those moments. That all I have is a memory. This is, of course, is balanced by the sweetness of the memory itself. Feeling the moment all over again; the sun, the wind, the sounds all come rushing back and take me to a place I once was.

Since I haven’t opened Facebook in a long while, I recently decided to download all of my photos from the site, as I didn’t have them in another file. This, of course, came with the aforementioned emotional experience.

Many of my memories from just over a decade ago were when I was living abroad and working in Germany. As I was hit with a recollective rush of nostalgia, I realized something rather striking. I looked downright calm and peaceful. If I compared photos of myself from the prior year when I was still in the US, to when I was in Germany, they were night and day. Which led to another realization:

Americans live with a super high baseline of stress.

Many average Europeans simply don’t have the level of emotional stress that we do in America. Of course, there are differences between individual countries, but on the whole, people are simply more relaxed. They aren’t as rushed. They seem able to take time to enjoy life.

And those snapshots showed just how much I enjoyed going with the European flow.

After downloading my files, I found a bunch of older family photos my mom had posted. The crazy thing? Pictures of my relatives from the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s have a similar chill vibe. They look more carefree, less stressed, like people who work to live instead of people who live to work.

It seems that, after World War II, European nations and the US began to sharply diverge. Almost as if the existence of communism resulted in two distinct reactions. One was the American capitalist push back, proving our rightness with productivity. And the second was the European way, choosing to rebuild people over GDP.

The divergence resulted in great financial and military might for the US with the downsides of stress and increasing inequality (and related medical and social ills). Many European countries, on the other hand, considered first how people typically like to live, fitting productivity into an existing cultural framework. They chose to provide coverage for necessities like higher education, healthcare, and childcare.

Europeans, though they have a high tax rate, know that their basic needs are covered. Childcare is covered. Retirement income is covered. Catastrophic health events and more common medical needs like labor and delivery are covered.

I think this frees up mental bandwidth. People are relaxed because of it. They can just live their lives.

In contrast, Americans have to take matters into their own hands. College requires massive loans, rich parents, or scholarships. Healthcare, even when you have good insurance, is still costly. Retirement is a patchwork of employee plans that you must opt-in to or simply DIY like many FIRE adherents. (I mean, will social security still be there? Who knows?) The safety nets, if you need them, are very close to the ground.

Coming up with the money for these basics can be all-consuming. Each individual left to fend for themselves, there will inevitably be those who simply cannot afford them.

When the discussion comes up about, let’s say, Universal Health Care, everyone points to the increase in taxes. That’s  definitely true. But, if you use healthcare services, which all of us do at some point, the high cost to do so might as well be a tax (The same goes for college, childcare, and retirement).  Only in the American system, more people experience financial destitution from medical bills than any other country in the world.

The American dream is also a highly individual one, shunning the collective as if communism might be lurking beneath the surface. In many European nations, they recognize the need to take care of the whole…which I would argue is more in line with creating community, not communism.

When I worked as a contractor in Germany, my hours were similar to the locals and my health insurance covered almost 100% of everything. So, I got a taste of what it was like to live like a European. I spent more time outside of work socializing and enjoying life. I remember loving it, and my old photos back that up.

In the US, even in the more laid-back Midwest, the tension is back up a few notches. Even though I am early retired, and am fairly peaceful, I still feel the vibe of American hustle. The soupcon of stress in the air.

That vibe? I think it’s the normal reaction of humans who can’t predict the future and don’t know how to prepare. It is the normal response of anyone who feels that they are left alone to figure out life, individually making their way through a difficult and increasingly expensive system. People who have no choice but to live to work.

My old pictures gave me a lot to think about. How culture shapes policy and the other way around. How people really prefer to live. The role of the community in helping its constituents.

I don’t know if we can improve our system here. More to the point, I’m uncertain we are up to the task in the US without a major flip in our perspective. And maybe nostalgia is clouding my eyes, but I can’t help but think that we need that new perspective. A way of doing things that benefits the individual and the community. A drop in baseline of stress.

(After I wrote this post, I had a vague sense that I had watched something with a similar theme before. It is called Where to Invade Next, a film by Michael Moore. It’s a tongue-in-cheek look at the differences between US and other cultures, but a humorous primer on various benefits specifically Europeans enjoy. I gave it another watch just for fun.)