> You don’t realize how nice it is to live and work in air conditioned spaces until visiting a part of Europe where AC is viewed with disdain for reasons I still don’t understand.

Most of Europe is poor. AC is expensive. It's actually that simple.

There's AC in Switzerland.

> There's AC in Switzerland.

Not at all, it has one of the lowest rate in Europe along with the UK. It's very hard to get the building permit required to install one. Portable AC has had a boom those past few years though (because it doesn't require a permit).

I have lived and worked in Switzerland. My office (shared with 2 other people) was the only space in the entire floor with AC due to some obscure archaic reason.

That air conditioning worked great for years, but a few months before I left that position, the facilities management people suddenly came in and ripped it out. No justification given.

Thank God TPTB didn't notice I had AC for all those years; it really would have been miserable without it. But despite the misery I noted all around me, there was an extremely strong disdain for air conditioning that permeated the culture. When I talked to friends and colleagues about the AC situation I was regularly ribbed for being a gluttonous American wasting electricity on such a triviality. They were legitimately proud to suffer. Baffling.

I've come to the conclusion that most Western and Central Europeans--yes, including Swiss--have a masochistic superiority complex around AC. They see suffering without AC as core to the European identity and sweating it out in unproductive misery (or taking a whole month off of work) as virtuous. They willingly kill over a hundred thousand people and leave hundreds of millions in misery every year simply to feel superior and European.

I’m not from Europe but those sentiments I think are changing with the recent intensity and frequency of heat waves.