Re:U.S. workers are among the most stressed in the world, ne...
by ethbr0 on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @06:39PM
(#27522511)
Thorough and accurate! I'd hazard the sharper edges of American culture stem from less constrained (and better funded) capitalism than other parts of the world.
If someone can make a buck on it, it exists.
Your roads are scarily broad while your sidewalks are narrow and sometimes just stop suddenly; everyone seems to have a car even if they shouldn’t; the rules of the road seem to be treated as suggestions (at least for cars — jaywalking is verboten), while also being a source of arbitrary revenue precisely because everyone treats them as suggestions; “family” is a much stronger trope in America than in the U.K. or Germany, yet “I love you daddy” is a real Valentines’ day card I’ve actually seen, in a supermarket with many others like it in different variations of phrase and relative; guns feel like a trivial hobby or possession barely worth mentioning, and suggesting even the slightest of limits to the right to bear arms is one of the quickest ways to be compared to a 20th century dictator and some of the critics insisting “a well armed society is a polite society”; your billboards are covered in adverts for loans to cover bail costs, yet sex is hidden away; you’re as loud about Christianity as a minaret is about Islam, far more so than the churches and cathedrals I’ve seen around Europe; there is a constant bombardment of adverts for insurance and health products I don’t see elsewhere (everything from magic drugs to teeth so straight and white they could be a metaphor); there are regional things like the Californian everything-causes-cancer warnings matched only by one British tabloid newspaper; and yes, race related issues are so much louder and in-your-face that even I couldn’t miss them.
(I know the U.K. seems weird to visiting Americans, because they’ve explicitly told me. But the U.K.’s weirdness is different to yours, just as the cultural pain-points are).