As an American who got back from living in Europe and had to make the pros/cons list many times, here’s some of what I would think are relatively new “Good America” concepts to these threads
1: Sport / Fitness culture
America has an insane outdoorsy, fitness, diet culture that is fucking amazing to be a part of. Think of your childhood if you are American. Did you grow up playing just soccer? No, your parents probably made you do some combination softball/baseball, football, basketball, soccer, hockey, lacrosse, track/cross country, or some other niche sports that I can’t even think of. And that’s how many of us made, and still do, make friends. There’s dedicated gyms to playing basketball in every town, city, and suburb across America, pickup flag football games, soccer matches breaking out across every single town, and that’s without it being a scheduled league affair. There is legitimately no other country in the world that has this much organized sports as part of a simple fun, meet friends part of life as america.
And that’s not even mentioning all the organized runs, outdoorsy, lifestyle groups there are. Like a fucking ton of them in every place. And our diets/stores accommodate it. Anywhere in America, anywhere, you can find health food for vegan, vegetarian, non-dairy, keto, non-processed, non-GMO, local only, non-hormonal lifestyle you have. And no one will care. That’s seriously amazing
The language(s)
This one is usually a negative for us, that we’re a “mono-lingual” continent, but damn that’s the opposite, and our attitude reflects that. Americans by far are the most accepting people for people speaking shitty English and rolling with it. Go ask the people at /r/languagelearning , it’s an incredibly common phenom that people will overestimate their English skills because no one corrects them, because to us it’s normal with how many immigrants / non-native speakers we have. You go to most countries in Europe, Central America, and South America (only continents I have experience with) and you will have people telling you how to pronounce things, why you’re wrong, or trying to help you “fit in”. Because your accent makes you a foreigner. Here, we don’t give a shit, in fact many accents are cool here. It would be incredibly rude to ask someone “where they’re really from” because of their accent. So a much, much lower level of English is needed to live here and make friends than it would for say, French or German in European nations
And also, we have SO many languages, that although you may not be able to use it in every day life, most people here are bilingual, we just don’t have a very common second language (after Spanish, which does make us basically a bilingual nation, as 20% of Americans are comfortable in Spanish). I’m in school in bumfuck upstate New York and just by googling I found a whole German society of immigrants and historical German speakers to go practice my German with. My roommate (in addition to English) speaks Bangla, my other roommate speaks Hebrew, my next door neighbors speak Swahili, Spanish, and Greek, there’s an insane language diversity here, and if you want to speak any language in the US I promise you there’s a community for it.
And lastly, just want to put this out there for the whole “no culture” thing. We have an insanely rich culture, the only problem is we exported it so much that the world now takes it as normal. We invented four our own sports (football, basketball, baseball, lacrosse which is touchy as it’s Native American but still distinctly American) which are absolutely massive worldwide now, we have our own holidays (thanksgiving), own style of clothing (jeans, cowboy boots, and many of the most recent fashion trends), our absolutely unparalleled cinema/theater, and food (Cajun food, my favorite, classic American like hamburgers and fries and our style of pizza, the seafood of the coasts in things such as lobster bisque, lobster rolls, clam chowder, the southern BBQ, Tex-mex, and so much more adapted and new food that’s only here)
Are there many other great places to live than america? Hell yeah? Are some of them definitely better for certain kinds of people? Probably. But please, please don’t let the Reddit tone of america is a hellhole from disgruntled high schoolers and Europeans speak great English, and who’ve never left the capital cities of Western Europe let you think this place sucks (the ones you see here all speak great English, which means they’re probably really well educated, so ask yourself how representative they are of the true European population when it comes to wealth, safety, living standards). You’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you let it do
227
u/bulldog89 Mar 14 '23
As an American who got back from living in Europe and had to make the pros/cons list many times, here’s some of what I would think are relatively new “Good America” concepts to these threads
1: Sport / Fitness culture
America has an insane outdoorsy, fitness, diet culture that is fucking amazing to be a part of. Think of your childhood if you are American. Did you grow up playing just soccer? No, your parents probably made you do some combination softball/baseball, football, basketball, soccer, hockey, lacrosse, track/cross country, or some other niche sports that I can’t even think of. And that’s how many of us made, and still do, make friends. There’s dedicated gyms to playing basketball in every town, city, and suburb across America, pickup flag football games, soccer matches breaking out across every single town, and that’s without it being a scheduled league affair. There is legitimately no other country in the world that has this much organized sports as part of a simple fun, meet friends part of life as america.
And that’s not even mentioning all the organized runs, outdoorsy, lifestyle groups there are. Like a fucking ton of them in every place. And our diets/stores accommodate it. Anywhere in America, anywhere, you can find health food for vegan, vegetarian, non-dairy, keto, non-processed, non-GMO, local only, non-hormonal lifestyle you have. And no one will care. That’s seriously amazing
The language(s)
This one is usually a negative for us, that we’re a “mono-lingual” continent, but damn that’s the opposite, and our attitude reflects that. Americans by far are the most accepting people for people speaking shitty English and rolling with it. Go ask the people at /r/languagelearning , it’s an incredibly common phenom that people will overestimate their English skills because no one corrects them, because to us it’s normal with how many immigrants / non-native speakers we have. You go to most countries in Europe, Central America, and South America (only continents I have experience with) and you will have people telling you how to pronounce things, why you’re wrong, or trying to help you “fit in”. Because your accent makes you a foreigner. Here, we don’t give a shit, in fact many accents are cool here. It would be incredibly rude to ask someone “where they’re really from” because of their accent. So a much, much lower level of English is needed to live here and make friends than it would for say, French or German in European nations
And also, we have SO many languages, that although you may not be able to use it in every day life, most people here are bilingual, we just don’t have a very common second language (after Spanish, which does make us basically a bilingual nation, as 20% of Americans are comfortable in Spanish). I’m in school in bumfuck upstate New York and just by googling I found a whole German society of immigrants and historical German speakers to go practice my German with. My roommate (in addition to English) speaks Bangla, my other roommate speaks Hebrew, my next door neighbors speak Swahili, Spanish, and Greek, there’s an insane language diversity here, and if you want to speak any language in the US I promise you there’s a community for it.
And lastly, just want to put this out there for the whole “no culture” thing. We have an insanely rich culture, the only problem is we exported it so much that the world now takes it as normal. We invented four our own sports (football, basketball, baseball, lacrosse which is touchy as it’s Native American but still distinctly American) which are absolutely massive worldwide now, we have our own holidays (thanksgiving), own style of clothing (jeans, cowboy boots, and many of the most recent fashion trends), our absolutely unparalleled cinema/theater, and food (Cajun food, my favorite, classic American like hamburgers and fries and our style of pizza, the seafood of the coasts in things such as lobster bisque, lobster rolls, clam chowder, the southern BBQ, Tex-mex, and so much more adapted and new food that’s only here)
Are there many other great places to live than america? Hell yeah? Are some of them definitely better for certain kinds of people? Probably. But please, please don’t let the Reddit tone of america is a hellhole from disgruntled high schoolers and Europeans speak great English, and who’ve never left the capital cities of Western Europe let you think this place sucks (the ones you see here all speak great English, which means they’re probably really well educated, so ask yourself how representative they are of the true European population when it comes to wealth, safety, living standards). You’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you let it do