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Apologetics for America
I'm a big fan of the United States. It's a big country. It's a safe country. The people are wealthy, kind, industrious, and have done more than their fair share of upholding the Pax Americana under which the majority of the world prospers, including those who would tear it down.
I would go so far as to say that I'd be significantly happier if I had been so lucky as to have been born in a counterfactual universe where my parents had emigrated there, even keeping all my myriad flaws like ADHD and depression.
It's a country that holds multitudes, and has had such a good track record of making good on its promise of embodying:
And then achieving the minor miracle of making the vast majority of them upstanding proud Americans regardless of caste and creed.
(To such an extent that it has lost the memetic immune system needed to assimilate some of the people who meet that criteria but are resilient to anything but force)
It is gorgeous. Even after the visiting the UK, a nation that even in its sclerosed and ailing state is significantly better than India, I found myself grossly disappointed at how small and dull the place was, compared to what I've seen of the States.
I count myself lucky to still have the memories of when I visited as a toddler, some of my earliest, a period I enjoyed so much that I came back home speaking English with an American accent when I hadn't even been conversant in the language when I left.
I stare at the reels and pictures posted on Insta by my friends studying there with ill-concealed envy. It looks so huge, so clean, so vibrant, so picturesque and unspoiled. Still a land where someone with innate talent, having landed with but a penny to his name, can ennoble himself through hard work, or at the very least his descendants.
If it were not for the fact that I'm currently ineligible to give the USMLE today, for no fault of my own, I'd bid adieu to my current aspirations for practising and settling in the UK. The latter is still better than India, but do you really need me to tell you how low a bar that is to beat?
I'm about as pro-American as it gets without driving a pickup truck with the stars-and-stripes hanging off it!
The people eat great food. They live in huge houses that appear outright intimidating to the rest of us. They can afford to waste gigaliters of water on a modestly appealing perennial grass and mostly not begrudge the expense.
They can travel visa free to most of the world, and act the fool there (can, not necessarily do, the worst I can say about most American tourists I've met is that they were rather underinformed about where they'd ended up), content in the knowledge that none but utter pariah states would dare raise a hand at them out of fear of Uncle Sam.
They earn salaries that make us all look like paupers. The median wage for a doctor in the US is $250k, fresh out of residency, whereas a senior consultant in the UK might be content to make half that. Indian doctors can only weep, especially lowly ones like me. Even my father, so talented in his surgical field that he'd be nationally famous if he was more fluent in English (instead just being regionally famous), makes only $50k PA at the very peak of his career, after a life of suffering and hustling so his sons would have to suffer and hustle just a bit less.
Even that seemingly colossal sum of money does not achieve the QOL a naive purchasing power calculation would suggest. Even billionaires here must be content to have their money only buy quick trips with their windows rolled up from only upper class enclave to the next.
The world, somewhat more multipolar than it once was, still wobbles unsteadily if you try and make it rotate around an axis not centered on America.
I'd give a lot to be there. I really would.
That is why it so severely vexes me that my girlfriend, a smart, intelligent and hard working woman who makes for an enviable partner to have at my side, holds a view of it so jaundiced you don't know whether to cry or laugh.
Like many Americans, she has had her perception of the States clouded by sheer propaganda that is more interested in cherrypicking out all of America's real problems, and when even all the real ones no longer suffice, concoct ones out of half-truths and whole-cloth to terrorize a broken primate brain that only notices the bad and becomes inured to the good, such that it no longer bears a resemblance to how fucking good they have it.
She stares at me like I'm mad when I tell her I've always wanted to live there, and the few warts on the face of the nation can't hide its timeless beauty.
She believes that abortion has been banned. When I protest otherwise and say that it's only a few states putting restrictions on it, and even then, just a few, she shakes in existential terror at the idea that there's a seething crowd coming for the rights of women, eager to snatch them all away. She thinks racism is a serious concern for hardworking and talented immigrants who speak fluent English, whereas you could put me in a room with a Confederate flag and I'd find a way to end up drinking beers and shooting AR-15s before dawn.
Did I mention she's terrified of gun violence, even if she could live a dozen lives in parallel and not get shot?
She categorically refuses to follow me if I wistfully make plans to find some route to make it there, be it fighting tooth and nail with my med school and the ECFMG to give me the right to at least try my luck, so that I can show them I meet even their high standards.
I'm at the point that I am seriously debating abandoning clinical medicine as a career, to upskill myself in medical ML, so that I have an easier route to the States that isn't gated behind a professional licensing exam I'm not allowed to give. I am still young. I am allowed to dream.
She's rather be middle class in the UK, unable to afford air-conditioning, living in a tiny house, watching our salaries erode into nothingness, and then, if Sunak successfully makes doctors into a thin wrapper for GPT-5, potentially resign ourselves to a life of mediocrity, or worse, come back to India with our tails between our legs where we'd have to settle for working shit jobs with longer hours and worse pay.
She's scared of paying the medical bills, when the kind of comprehensive coverage that two professionals making 500k together buys care beyond the dreams of the NHS. Perhaps not value for money, but value.
I criticize America all the time, but only because I love it. I want to gorge myself on cheeseburgers with ridiculous portion sizes, because even if I die fat, I die happy.
I cherish what the Founding Fathers built, a shining city built on a hill of negentropy and abundance, rising out of a swamp wherein dwell the majority of us, only a generation or two removed from near-Malthusian conditions. I would die to keep the barbarians away from the gates, if only because I want to cross them myself, as an esteemed guest if nothing else, hopefully to be one of their own.
I set out to write a post somewhat glorifying (fairly) America, and to invite others to submit arguments that would let my girlfriend see reason. It would seem I've inadvertently done all the heavy lifting, if not for the fact that I've marshaled all these arguments before her and still found them wanting.
I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the two of us are moral mutants who can never reconcile our preferences. I prefer to think that she's wrong about her fears, or weighs the wrong facts too heavily and the right ones not at all.
Help me convince her. I will find it hard to live with myself if I fail.
Oh, and Happy Fourth of July to you all, ye sons and daughters living several decades in the future, hailing from the nation from whose physical and mental toil most of the good things in the world come.
Wait, is it a bit late for that? Um, I blame timezones, pernicious and insidious things that they are.
Don't think I don't see the cracks in the pristine facade, the erosion of the meritocracy that made your country glorious. I simply think that if America wakes up and patches a few holes, it can earn the right to slumber again in peace for centuries hence.
There is a lot of paper wealth in the US but if you want to buy back a comparable quality of life to a middle class European (i.e., live in a safe, walkable, clean city with good public transit and little crime or disorderly behavior) a lot of it evaporates pretty fast, so the differential ends up being less than it looks on paper. I could be wrong but my sense is that there's just about one city in the US that meets those specifications and it's Boston (very expensive).
If you can compromise on one or more of those factors (safe, walkable, clean), then yeah you can make and save some money here at the cost of potentially living the "American lifestyle" (commuting and driving everywhere with all the cost, time-sinks, and social alienation that entails), which may or may not be a problem for you. NYC is I guess decently safe in a statistical sense and walkable, but not clean. A lot of others are safe and clean but not walkable, and there are cities that are walkable but not particularly safe.
I'm seriously considering leaving the US for London for this reason.
If you define quality of life as dense walkable urban living then I live a wretched life indeed. If you define quality of life similarly, but also forgive a 20 minute commute to work and 3 to 5ish minute drive to shops, then I live a great life. My American suburbanite cup overflows.
I went kayaking last weekend. I put my kayak on the roof rack of my big SUV. I built a new AR recently and I'll go shooting when I get some time. The guns and stuff will go in the back of my big SUV. I built a long set of retaining walls on big side yard. I made a stepped double retaining wall with a waist high middle section that is a very long garden. Too many strawberries are coming in recently. I'm a few minutes walk from a very large and clean park. I walk there or somewhere else in my neighborhood every day with my kid. Good thing I don't live in a dense urban core and instead can have high quality of life in so many ways in my big suburban house, really nice clean neighborhood and car.
Just for fun: let's define high "quality of life" for men as including satisfying sex with women. Then point out that gay guys lack high "quality of life". No matter how good their sex lives are they don't include women in this arbitrary and narrow definition.
Note that the only other human you have mentioned in your description of your quality of life is your child. The rest of it is all stuff. SUVs, guns, fences. If that’s what you care about, American suburbs have a lot to offer you. For people who want to experience natural and spontaneous human connection (that you don’t have to fight against the environment of huge yards and parking lots to obtain), they don’t, and most of the cities don’t either.
This says a lot more about your social poverty than about suburbs.
I have plenty of human connection. I live with my wife and kids. My parents are an hour away, my grandparents were two hours away from new house. I spend time with my friends, and once I finish moving, I'll spend time with old friends from high school again. My kids have birthdays and play dates and lessons. My life is full of my family, my friends, and my family's friends.
Yes, we visit most of them by car, and we drive by a lot of yards and parking lots to do so.
You might be so lonely that having an addict grunt a "fuck you" at you while you step around him counts as the social highlight of your life. You might survive on the thin gruel of the incidental pleasantries and perfunctory forced interactions caused by congestion. My social calendar is full enough, thank you.
I’m not sure what you’re objecting to in the statement you quoted. There’s nothing spontaneous about having to drive for an hour to see people, so it sounds like you’re agreeing rather than disagreeing, you just don’t mind it. If you’re okay with that, that’s fine. I’m not. But I’m not agitating for some sort of political change that would require you to live differently. I’m trying to figure out what I can do to live the kind of life I want to live.
My parents are an hour away. My grandparents are two hours away. My sister, on the other hand, is about ten minutes by onewheel, and a high school friend of mine is even closer, depending on how the light is timed today. My kids go to a local school, so the eldest can go see some of his friends under his own steam. We attend church only for Christmas and Easter, and only sparingly in those cases, but were we to do so more often, we would known even more people in our current neighborhood of three car garages.
You're the one with crushing isolation and boredom. I'm the one in the suburbs with the rich social fabric.
Maybe the problem isn't the cars and the yards and the strip malls. Maybe it's you.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, I’m pretty easy to get along with. I just don’t like driving or long travel times so I tend to choose to avoid it, and don’t have many opportunities to meet people that don’t require that.
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