The Saddest Thing About The United States Is That It Doesn't Have To Be This Way

Some of the smartest people in the country have spent decades explaining how to improve quality of life—they've been largely ignored.

One of the sadder things about being an American who moved abroad is watching a loud handful of Americans desperately… even frantically search for evidence that the United States is still winning—and has been all along.

Right now, that evidence comes in the flavor of European soccer fans posting videos about how big everything is in the United States and how nice the people are.

Every few years, Americans rediscover that some foreigners think some things about America are pretty cool—or, at least, that they stand out—and proceed to act as if they’ve disproven the last hundred years of public policy, urban planning, healthcare research, and quality-of-life data and lived experience.

We’re in one of those moments again.

A handful of European fútbol fans have descended on the United States for the World Cup and, right on cue, social media has filled with videos of people marveling at things Europeans have been marveling at in America for generations:

• Americans are friendly.

• The portions are huge.

• The stores are enormous.

• The roads are wide.

• The houses are big.

• Everything feels bigger.

There's also an obvious self-selection effect at work here that nobody seems interested in acknowledging. The Europeans flying to the United States for the World Cup aren't a representative sample of Europe. They're a self-selected group of affluent sports fans who chose to spend thousands of euros and days, maybe even weeks of their lives traveling to America to watch soccer. A German guy who spends €6,000 to fly to Texas and post TikToks about giant supermarkets isn't exactly a random sample of European public opinion.

Anyway—

None of this is new.

Some Europeans have been saying some version of these things for decades. One of the biggest European stereotypes of Americans is that we’re excessively nice. You pass by a person on the street and they say hello. Americans can be overly nice in hospitality and other customer service settings. Much of this is performative, some of it is genuine. But it’s not something Europeans just discovered during the World Cup.

Likewise, Europeans have always been fascinated by the scale of the United States. It’s not merely the scale itself—it’s that so much is out-of-scale. See Las Vegas or your prototypical suburban environment for examples. Just because buildings and roads and such are big—and out-of-scale—in the US doesn’t mean the country does things bigger (it doesn’t) and gets high scores on quality of life.

What’s wild isn’t that European tourists are impressed by aspects of the United States.

It’s that so many Americans have interpreted these observations as a decisive rebuttal to anyone who questions America’s quality of life.

I recently received several comments on one of my Medium articles that perfectly captures this mindset.

Here’s a representative example:

“Just listen to what European soccer fans are saying about America.... They are fascinated about our quality of life. As a young man I joined the Navy and saw many different parts of the world, mostly Europe. I can tell you from my experience that America—despite its faults—is the best country on the planet. Bar none. Even Bill Mahr agrees. Again—listen to what World Cup fans are saying.... I’ll wait.”

I’ll wait while you pick up your mic.

Videos of Europeans at the World Cup aren’t evidence that the United States has won a quality-of-life argument. In fact, the American reaction to these videos—and the political right’s predictable tendency to amplify them—is further proof that Americans have zero idea what quality of life is to begin with.

The air conditioning discourse unfolding alongside the World Cup might be the perfect example of what I’m talking about. Europe is engaged in a legitimate debate—that alone makes it distinct from the United States—about climate adaptation, urban design, energy use, public health, and how societies should respond to increasingly extreme heat. And many Americans have reduced the conversation to: “Gotcha! Europeans finally admit America was right because air conditioning is good.”

Of course, air conditioning can be good. We have an AC unit in our apartment in Valencia. We’ve never turned it on. Same with the four heaters strategically located throughout our place.

Granted, we live near the sea, benefit from the frequent breeze it delivers, aren’t part of an at-risk population, and have adapted to slight summer discomfort that many Americans have been conditioned to view as unacceptable.

For the record, in my 30-plus year career of living away from my parents, I can count on one hand both the number of times I’ve had air conditioning and the number of times I’ve used it when available. So this isn’t some behavioral shift Europe deserves credit for.

None of this means air conditioning is bad or unnecessary. It means that people and societies make tradeoffs and sometimes choose to employ artificial tools to prevent death among the vulnerable, not to ensure that you’re “comfortable.”

Air conditioning also comes with costs: visual blight, energy consumption, and a meaningful contribution to the very climate conditions that make it appear—at least to one of the world’s largest contributors to climate change—increasingly necessary.

The American impulse to interpret every difference as proof of American exceptionalism is precisely the sort of thinking that prevents the country from ever seriously examining its own shortcomings. Continuing to protect and project the myth of American exceptionalism might be the clearest sign that the nation is in more trouble than ever.

I see a subset of a country so invested in the idea of its own superiority that it mistakes curiosity for envy, comfort for quality of life, and tourism for validation.

And that’s where the real tragedy begins.

This is a problem you run into a lot when trying to discuss quality of life and—breaking it down to an area where I like to land—urban planning. As with political discussions, many Americans enter the conversation without even a basic understanding of the issues.

So the tragedy isn’t so much that some Americans think European soccer fans are proving America is the greatest country on Earth. It’s that this reaction reveals how many Americans don't even understand what question is being asked.

Nobody—especially in Europe—has ever argued that the United States doesn’t have nice people, large houses, giant stores, spectacular landscapes, economic opportunity, and global cultural influence.

What makes all of this especially frustrating—and honestly heartbreaking—is that for every person ill-equipped to even have the conversation to begin with, the United States has just as many, if not more, intelligent people who have been coming with innovative ideas or workable solutions to the country’s quality-of-life problem.

The US has produced, just to name a few:

• Jane Jacobs

• Lewis Mumford

• William H. Whyte

• Mike Davis

• Donald Shoup

• Bruce fucking Springsteen!

• Smart Cities movement

• Vision Zero advocates

• urban planners

• public health researchers

• housing scholars

• public space advocates

For generations.

These people have spent decades explaining:

• why car dependency damages quality of life

• why public space matters

• why mixed-use neighborhoods work

• why walkability matters

• why public transportation matters

• why social isolation matters

• why excessive consumption doesn’t create happiness

• why healthcare insecurity destroys well-being

The ideas, the evidence, and the examples exist to create the conditions for a high quality of life that isn't measured primarily by individual status. It’s just that many—and, let’s face it on this point, a majority of—Americans often reject solutions because accepting them would require admitting that the current system isn't optimal.

It’s not as if the established Democratic left in the United States has ever rejected suburbia and the idea of the American dream—they’ve only helped to proliferate the lunacy of both. They’ve given the Republican right and the far right a clear pathway to take righteous policy efforts and inaccurately categorize them as threats to a largely clueless American public.

• Walkable cities become “socialism.”

• Public transit becomes “anti-car.”

• Universal healthcare becomes “communism.”

• Urban density becomes “anti-family.”

• Cycling infrastructure becomes “war on cars.”

• Public investment becomes government overreach.

For decades, much of the United States—from top to bottom—has chosen to preserve a mythical vision of itself rather than seriously reconsider whether that vision still serves the people living inside it.

It’s the only trickle-down scheme in America that has actually worked—the top-down refusal to acknowledge that the system is broken.

George H. W. Bush declared during the Gulf War that “the American way of life is not negotiable”—a statement that captured something much deeper about the country. The assumption that US systems, its built environment, its priorities, and its understanding of what constitutes a good life are fundamentally correct and therefore beyond meaningful critique.

Today, millions of Americans watch European tourists marvel at giant stores and friendly strangers and interpret these observations as validation of that assumption.

That’s what makes me sad as an American.

The United States has never lacked the people, the ideas, the evidence, or the imagination necessary to build a society with a much higher quality of life.

It simply chose, over and over again, not to.

This is precisely why so many Americans who leave eventually discover something that feels almost shocking:

That many of the problems they spent decades accepting as normal were never inevitable in the first place.

Happy Fourth of July.

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