The Lies America Tells About The Rest Of The World
The United States systematically understates how good life can be elsewhere
Curitiba, Brazil.
We looked at it extensively when I studied urban planning and design between 2002 and 2008.
I hadn’t thought about the city for a while. Then, I saw a video about it on YouTube.
It was by VUELTAMUN, a channel by two Argentinians, who used to keep Valencia as their home base, but now travel the world as digital nomads. They’re good—so I embedded their video at the end of today’s newsletter story.
Seeing Curitiba again reminded me how much of what we consider "new" today was being done decades ago in Brazil—one of the last places that would come to mind for most people, especially Americans.
Most people have probably never even heard of Curitiba. Yet urban planners have been studying it for decades because it pioneered the modern urban planning movement—focused on pedestrianism and green space—that’s all over the news today.
Curitiba was ahead of its time.
For example, Curitiba focused on bus rapid transit (BRT) while American cities were doubling down on highways. This has less to do with transportation planning and more to do with political will and culture.
Simply put, BRT is just dedicated bus lanes, usually protected in a way so cars can’t access the lane and mess up the flow. You’ll see them piecemeal in some U.S. cities, such as San Francisco. For example, San Francisco uses BRT along a 2-mile stretch of busy Van Ness Avenue.
It’s set up just like a subway line, but it’s above ground. It makes sense given the cost, timelines, and logistics to build underground transportation. In fact, it might make more sense for quite a few cities than a traditional “metro” system. However, a big reason why you saw and still see subway projects is because BRT usually means you’ll have to take space away from the automobile. And, of course, subway trains do tend to move faster than BRT, even if it has a strong dedicated lane.
Bigger picture: Plenty of cities around the world solved problems Americans assume are unsolvable due to an ignorance that led to the current toxic sociopolitical culture.
From the moment you enter the world in the United States, you're taught—almost brainwashed into believing—that innovation flows outward from America and rarely inward.
In reality, the U.S. ignores lessons from everywhere.
Growing up in the U.S., we're conditioned to think—explicitly and implicitly—that everywhere else is some combination of poorer, less capable, less innovative, less safe, less convenient, and less desirable.
Then you experience life in Europe or catch a glimpse of it from people doing likewise in countries from Brazil to China and you realize that while there might be kernels of truth in what you learned, they didn’t tell you the whole story.
Not even close.
It’s not that most every other country doesn’t have its problems, but as an American you naturally think that all of Brazil consists of favelas, that China is a land of only oppression, and that the entirety of Spain is a bureaucratic mess where everybody makes minimum wage. This thinking extends to pretty much every other place in the world that large swaths of Americans—dare I say, the majority—reflexively consider poor, dirty, unsafe, and inferior.
The reality is this: You can’t measure quality of life by gross domestic product (GDP). Some countries don’t have the economic firepower—for one reason or another—to compete.
Some could, but don’t necessarily make competition around that number the priority.
Others realize their limitations and organize around a recognition of their people.
Often, it’s a mix of both.
The most shocking—and really sort of disheartening—thing you realize once you escape the grip of American indoctrination is that other countries aren't sitting around waiting for instructions from “us.”
For much of my life, I assumed—without ever consciously thinking about it—that the U.S. was the center of gravity. Solely because it was—other than Canada—my only reference point.
The United States was the place that innovated and led, and that everybody else watched and ultimately wanted to resemble.
Then you spend enough time outside the United States and realize how arrogant—and frankly inaccurate—that assumption is.
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Not only are other countries not trying to become America, many of them have spent decades intentionally avoiding the mistakes America made.
One of the strangest—and, really, pathetic—things about traveling abroad is seeing American brands everywhere. McDonald’s. Starbucks. KFC. It makes it feel as if the entire world is slowly becoming a giant American suburb.
As much as I’d love to see Europe detach itself from American brands, it’s mostly superficial.
Random people might drink Starbucks in Europe, yet they’re often doing so in cities with better public transportation, more public space, less car dependency, and a fundamentally different understanding of how daily life should work.
That’s where Americans get confused.
They see a McDonald’s and assume the world must really give a shit.
In reality, we’re often looking at a society that borrowed a few consumer products while rejecting much of the worldview that produced them.
That’s true at the local level, where cities like Curitiba prioritized public transportation while U.S. governments continued to nurture car dependency as if it were a right, while paying lip service and—in some cases—reacting with outright hostility to alternatives.
It’s true at the national level, where countries across Europe continued investing in public space, public transportation, and dense urban development while the U.S. doubled down on suburban expansion.
Many Europeans absolutely do aspire to certain versions of America—fashion, entertainment, consumer culture, whatever. That's always struck me as mind-boggling.
Give them a dose of the American version of quality of life and they might join their European counterparts who reject the United States on principle and in day-to-day action.
All of this is becoming increasingly clear at the geopolitical level.
One of the most interesting developments of the last few years is watching Europe slowly realize it cannot assume American leadership will always exist in the form it once did.
Whether that’s finance, defense, energy, technology, or trade, Europe increasingly appears to be organizing around a simple realization:
It needs to be capable of standing on its own. And it is, particularly as it strengthens its relationships with Mexico, Canada, China, and others.
Europeans are building new financial infrastructure, coordinating industrial policy, cutting meaningful trade deals that don’t involve the U.S., and asking questions about long-term strategic independence that Americans barely notice.
It’s a classic case of be careful what you wish. American isolationism is backfiring right before our eyes as Europe and much of the rest of the world wakes up and starts working together at the macro level at the same time as the indoctrination loses its grip at cracks in the micro level.
The irony is that many Americans still imagine Europe as dependent, stagnant, and somehow perpetually behind.
None of this means Europe is perfect.
It means the world is changing while many Americans are still operating from assumptions that stopped being true years ago.
None of this became unmistakably obvious until I moved.
Because once you live somewhere else, the mythology falls apart.
You stop evaluating entire countries through stereotypes, imagining that GDP explains everything, and assuming every place is either trying to become America or failing because it hasn’t.
That’s the lie.
Not only that other countries are bad or inferior. But that they’re secondary to a central theme determined, dictated, and owned by the United States. That everyone else is somehow little more than supporting characters in an American story.
Then you leave and discover they’re living their own stories.
Most of them couldn’t care less what the United States is doing.
Which is exactly why they're often doing so many things better.
If this essay resonated with you, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy the rest of How It Works.
I write about moving abroad, quality of life, urban living, work, money, aging, and what happens when you stop accepting the assumptions you grew up with.
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