America Teaches You a Lie. You Find Out If You Believe It Abroad.

Why some Americans adapt—and others never stop fighting reality

One of the most frustrating parts about studying urban planning was the lame public discourse around why the United States couldn’t implement or improve mass transit and create walkable, human-scaled environments.

Among the most common objections to building cities, suburbs, and towns more like—for example—Europe:

• Americans love their cars!

• You could fit all of Europe inside Texas. America is TOO big for all that stuff.

• European cities are old and built for that type of thing.

All total nonsense.

Even though I could go—and, at times over the last 25 years, have gone—on all day about why those and other bullet points are nonsense, that’s not what today’s story is about.

Today’s story isn’t really about mass transit or walkable cities.

It’s about the power of American indoctrination—the lifelong instruction that your country already figured everything out, and that any alternative is either naïve, impossible, or dangerous.

Once you see how that belief takes root, it becomes a lot harder to separate “urban planning debates” from what’s happening in Washington, on the streets, and at the border right now.

Not because these things are the same, but because they grow from the same story.

American individualism.

American individualism didn’t just shape culture—it justified bad systems.

American individualism has created a delusion so strong among enough people to pave the way for what’s happening today in that country.

And it ties directly to the seemingly smaller issues I often focus on when I discuss part of the rationale behind why my wife and I decided to move to Spain.

• Car dependency (“freedom”)

• Sprawl (“choice”)

• Weak public programs and amenities (“personal responsibility”)

This delusion prevents people from seeing systems. It views anything collective as a threat to the individual. And has come to the point where the legitimacy of any system that treats individuals as part of a civil society—one where we all depend on one another to a significant extent—is questioned to the point where it’s evil and must be discredited and defeated.

This makes it easy to baselessly blame immigrants, fear cities, accept surveillance, policing, and ICE crackdowns. Because the story already taught the indoctrinated who the problem is. To make matters worse, large numbers of indoctrinated Americans have little to no experience with the people, places, and things they so strongly despise—public transit, density, social democracy, universal healthcare, Europe.

What the swath of American society that puts people like the current regime into power calls “intelligence” is often just recall. They’re not looking to develop or take genuine pride in people with intelligence and intellectual ability. Individuals who see themselves as part of something bigger and use their intelligence for abstract thought, analysis, and academic or creative endeavors.

A little personal experience to color this that you might be able to relate to.

I think a lot of parents from the boomer generation associate intelligence—going to college—with recall. With becoming the best person in the room at Trivial Pursuit or Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

But anyone can memorize the years of a war. Anyone can repeat a slogan about freedom or efficiency.

That’s not what education is supposed to do.

Education is supposed to change how you see. And—to be clear—it doesn’t have to be formal education.

People from my parent’s generation—and others on the outskirts—value so-called street smarts or the school of hard knocks where work ethic and unswallowable pride reign. But that’s not informal education—or only a small part of it.

Life experience in settings and around people you’re not familiar with. Reading. Working in areas where you have to figure things out, think ahead, navigate other people’s personalities, and intellectualize at least a little. That’s where informal education happens.

Education and valuable informal education teaches you to recognize systems. To notice patterns. To ask why certain outcomes keep repeating—and who benefits when they do.

And an important point on that last part: street smarts and the school of hard knocks style education tend to focus on the rich and powerful always being the ones who benefit. Of course, there’s more than a shred of truth in this. However, when you latch onto this way of thinking and seeing the world—absent meaningful education—you’re (oddly) ripe to fall for the Fox News/populist rhetoric that threatens to wholly and completely destroy America.

So what results from real education—real human growth and development—is exactly the kind of knowledge and individual progress American culture has always been suspicious of. It’s okay to be an individual so long as you think like everybody else who thinks like us.

I was reminded of this watching an old episode of The Sopranos the other night. Carmela is furious at Meadow for “acting better” than her family because she’s at Columbia. The implication is clear: learning to think structurally and intellectually is treated as a kind of moral offense. As if insight itself is a betrayal.

I heard versions of that same argument growing up. Many of us did.

Not what are you learning, but who do you think you are for learning it?

They want you to go to college because they view it as glorified high school.

That attitude isn’t accidental. It’s baked into the foundation of society. A society that fell hook, line, and sinker for what’s transpiring today as innocent people get shot in the streets by federal agents and the American president sleepily babbles incoherently on a world stage, packed with people who finally took a stand and left him rambling about “a deal” on Greenland.

This is who many Americans look up to. That guy. It’s the well-educated who are the problem.

Go figure.

A population trained to think in isolated, cause-and-effect, black-and-white fragments is far easier to sell simple stories to.

Stories about cars as freedom. Sprawl as choice. Weak public social systems as personal responsibility.

Once you internalize that framework, anything collective starts to feel suspicious. Anything that requires shared investment feels like a threat. And any place that contradicts the story—dense cities, public transit, social democracies, Europe—must be dismissed as fake, flawed, or fundamentally incompatible with “who we are.”

This is how you end up with people who have never lived in a city fearing cities. People who have never taken public transit insisting it can’t work. People who have never interacted meaningfully or lived among (non-European) immigrants convinced they are the source of decline.

The indoctrination does the work before the politics arrive.

This is where moving abroad stops being a political escape and becomes something more uncomfortable.

I should be clear about something before going further. I didn’t move because I suddenly “woke up” or discovered something new about America. I’ve been skeptical of the United States for more than two decades—politically, culturally, and especially in how it organizes daily life.

That skepticism didn’t begin in Spain. Spain just confirmed it—again.

I don’t hate America. I’m ashamed of it—have been for a long time.

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I understand why so many people struggle when they leave it—because the country doesn’t just shape your options, it shapes how you think.

It gives you a world view that has very little to do with the world.

What I’ve noticed—repeatedly—is that even Americans who are disenchanted with the United States, even those who feel embarrassed by it, still arrive carrying the same assumptions they swear they’ve outgrown.

They say they “hate Trump.” They genuinely know the U.S. is broken. There’s an honest assessment that Europe does so much better. But there’s still that American exceptionalism in them that they can’t seem to shake. Little things come together to form a restrictive sum greater than its parts.

These Americans speak fluently about what America gets wrong. They “get it.” They’ll say they’re open.

But when they start encountering small, ordinary differences—not injustices, not real hardships—just ways of doing things that aren’t what they’re used to, they get weird.

Dinner starts too late. Not sure I could live without a dryer. It’s weird that banks close so early and so many shops close at midday. They can’t get used to “slow” service or service staff that doesn’t act like they’re happy to see you. They have trouble not being catered to in every interaction.

That recoil is the tip-off.

Americans are trained to view even the slightest perception of friction as a system failure. If the bank is closed at 2:00 PM, the system is “broken.” We confuse the absence of instant gratification with a lack of competence. We’ve been indoctrinated to believe that a society’s health is measured by how quickly a stranger can bring us a sandwich.

What Americans are really saying when they say “I don’t know if I could do that” is:

I don’t know if I can live somewhere that doesn’t do things the way I’m used to doing them.

That’s the indoctrination at work.

These little things contradict the story they were brought up on and came to believe—at the soul of their being. So many Americans have been so deeply indoctrinated that they understand—conceptually—why and where Europe is better, but couldn’t live the reality on a daily basis.

And that’s what really matters. Because the accumulation of the things that are part of your daily life dictate:

• How and where you’ll place into a new society and culture.

• How you’ll view language learning.

• How often you’ll complain and about what.

• How you’ll choose to handle challenges—whether you’ll externalize them to the typical scapegoats or treat them as another intellectual obstacle to grow through.

So, yeah, at this juncture, people split.

They occupy part of this large American middle ground—too indoctrinated to handle real cultural change, but disengaged enough to quietly tolerate what the country is doing at home and abroad.

If they do make the move, they resist. They complain. They mock. They search for ways to recreate the American setup—just with better weather and healthcare. They spend their time in the Facebook groups and having coffee with “expats” explaining why this part of the culture is “weird,” or inefficient, or backwards.

Others have a more productive reaction.

They realize—sometimes with relief, sometimes with grief—that much of what they were taught about efficiency, freedom, intelligence, and normalcy was wrong. Or at least deeply incomplete.

Moving abroad doesn’t make you smarter. But it does exercise an intellectual muscle you absolutely need to make the move—particularly if you’re coming from the United States.

Moving abroad doesn’t make you better.

But it does force a choice.

You can either keep measuring the world against the story you were sold—and spend your time fighting reality—or you can let that story die a long overdue death and start paying attention to how things actually work.

That’s the real test.

Not whether you can navigate paperwork.

Not whether you can find an apartment.

Not whether you speak the language perfectly.

But whether you can tolerate the discomfort of realizing that the country you came from wasn’t the default setting for a functional society.

And whether you’re willing to let that realization change you—instead of defending yourself against it.

That’s what moving abroad exposes.

Not your politics.

Your judgment.

If this resonated — if you’re thinking seriously about moving abroad, or already living with the friction of it — paid subscribers get the deeper work. Not logistics. Judgment. Pattern recognition. The stuff that actually determines whether this kind of move strengthens you or slowly grinds you down.

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