We're both educated and open towards a liberal, future oriented society. Same goes for paying taxes, since the "overall standards" in Germany are still very high. Nevertheless, the last 10 years spit society, family and friends. Hardly any healthy discussion culture, you're either on the one or the other side, no matter which topic - immigration, taxation, climate effects and wheather change ... you name it. We travel a lot and realized, these topics are discussed in many other countries too, but in Germany it recently came to a point, where government, news and media and even people and parties you trusted your whole life made more and more just short-sighted and dangerous decisions. You can ignore all of those for a long time, sell your TV set, don't read newspapers, stop using Twitter and Facebook. But the moment you witness, that your hard earned and very high taxes are spent on everything but meaningful things, it's hard to stand it no more. We both look for peace of mind and quality of living - which to us especially means escaping crazy black/white discussions, which completely omit all tones of gray. Don't know, whether this makes any sense. But thank you for your thoughts.
But the decision to leave instead of trying to engage and improve things is pretty black and white mentality in itself, isn't it?
You've got a point here. Yes, it's giving up. And to be honest, we both gave up. But since we're responsible for our little one, we still try to make the best of it, hence want to restart somewhere else. But I get your point. It's just that we both spent all of our energy over the last 25 years to improve things in all sorts of different dimensions and simply ran out of "mana".
I am just thinking, because I grew up in Southern Europe, I have the opposite opinion to you regarding this. I think Germany is much more open to "skepticism" than you believe. Where I grew up people differentiating from the mainstream view are labeled as idiots and are in a very tiny minority, whereas in Germany, they go parading in the streets every other month and make up 25% of the population...
Out of experience, it's only about the people you meet, however foreigners will be the ones giving you the less politically correct opinions: they'll just share their opinion. But again, it depends on who you meet and in which context you speak about things.
For me this has unfortunately to do with the fact that there is not a healthy debate about things, there is always this fear of being a Nazi or whatever shit they did in the past, which frankly I don't care about.
The people we look up to because they are typically painted as the agents of social change tend to be the ones who were there at the right moment: they were catalysts rather than major forces and their relatively small contribution caused a much larger force to become unlocked. But for that to happen that force already has to be there, for each and every one of those there are thousands (millions?) who tried the same thing at a different point in time and failed.
Thank you.
Somehow, in the era with universal access to raw data discussions seem to never have been so polarised. But I'm afraid that's the same anywhere :-(
I still there's a few places better than Germany to live, even more if you've started a family.
I wish, I could afford your optimism. :) IMHO Germany is getting deconstructed rapidly, and if one of the leading European countries suffers the breakdown I expect, I see nothing but dark clouds on the European sky. Europe and especially Germany as part of the free, western world need to be leaders trying to solve the ecological and economical challenges ahead of us. But when you want to solve such a huge number of problems, it's not wise to burn down your whole country beforehand.
If you think, that nonsensical conspiracy theories should be regarded as an equal opinion to facts, then you won't be happy in many countries. Well, maybe in Russia.
Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is also in the site guidelines.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Unfortunately this depiction of Germany triggered me ;)
I think it will be hard to recommend depending on your exact positions on these.
I think it will be difficult to recommend a place with low taxes and robust safety net. Generally the taxes are what Pay for a safety net.
On that note, the US could be an option (southern states) for you since the taxes tend to be lower than other developed nations. The safety net is fairly robust, but only applicable in many cases if you're destitute. The caveat is that politics suck here, but they suck basically everywhere.