I live at home and am gonna get a job. Despite our President here, life so far is OK for me. However, I do wanna see the world and at least travel to Japan, Norway, Sweden, or the Netherlands
I live at home and am gonna get a job. Despite our President here, life so far is OK for me. However, I do wanna see the world and at least travel to Japan, Norway, Sweden, or the Netherlands
America is great if you are rich, but even our rich people are very unhappy.
Every country is great if you are rich, though. Also, I’m very poor, live in the US, and I’m pretty darn happy.
That’s interesting to me, as I’d always assumed that if you were poor in the US you were kinda screwed. I’m in Scotland where it’s basically impossible to be homeless unless you choose it, and if you’re sick you’ll get treated by the NHS. It still sucks to be poor here.
The US is huge in a way most people outside don’t fully grasp.
Lemmy pushes a lot of negativity, but let’s put the numbers in perspective. Lemmy has about 1.366 million registered users worldwide (with monthly active users way lower, around 48,000–50,000). That’s less than 0.0004% of the US population of roughly 343 million. And the portion actually from and living in the US is even smaller. On big instances like lemmy.world, only about 36% of traffic comes from the United States, with the rest scattered across Europe, the UK, and elsewhere.
So the voices you see are a tiny, often city-heavy or niche slice that doesn’t reflect most Americans at all.
The country covers about 3.8 million square miles (nearly 9.8 million square kilometers). With 343 million people spread across that, most of the land is quiet, rural, and empty. News almost always comes from 10–15 big cities where drama happens and gets amplified.
You rarely hear about the rest because… there’s nothing dramatic to report.
I didn’t see a homeless person in real life until I was 27 and moved to a big California city. I hated California and moved to different state just 3 years later.
Just last week I drove 16 hours through Kansas; 12 of those hours were straight fields of grass and corn, with a solid 5-hour stretch seeing zero people or cars.
I stopped in a town of about 500 people: doors unlocked, bikes left on porches, everyone friendly, and the big topic was the weather. That’s normal in huge swaths of the US. But you won’t hear that because it’s boring and “boring” doesn’t get clicks.
Social sites like Lemmy and Reddit are full of urban posters. How often do you see someone post, “I live in a town of 200 people, went fishing, then came back and watched the high school football game, shared homemade food with everyone, had a great time, then came back to the house with my wife and watched NCIS on Netflix!”?
Guess what? That’s my reality. And the reality of about 70 million people in the US. Not very interesting news though.
The quiet, safe majority just isn’t loud online or in the news.
That’s quite a refreshing perspective to be honest, thanks for sharing.
The culture in America certainly seems very, very focused on money.
But all a person really needs to be happy is somewhere nice to live, money for food and good friends.
Some people need to get cancer to understand what is important in life.
That’s because having tons of money is the only proven way to not have a crappy life in the USA. All the public services and citizen protections are undergoing rapid disassembly, without which one wrong move can put you on the street.
I don’t have any money and I have a great life. And I live in the US. All my neighbors seem pretty happy too.
I don’t have tons of money and I grew up with even less and my life is great dude.
You don’t need tons of money. What you need is to be smart with your money and way too many people aren’t. You don’t need a Lexus to be happy, but way too many Americans think if you don’t have a stupidly expensive car, you must be miserable.
Same! The doomscrollers on Lemmy seem to enjoy being unhappy and have no clue how life is for most people. lol
You don’t need tons of money, until you get an Expensive Disease and all of a sudden you need a LOT of money.
The number one cause of bankruptcy in the USA is medical debt. Unless you have insurance, in which case the number one cause among THOSE people is … actually still medical debt.
If you’re the kind of person who worries, the idea of not ever being able to get ahead far enough to guarantee anything really, really sucks.
You have no control over that.
If you want to sit around being worried that you might get cancer one day and get bankrupted… go right ahead. But it won’t make a difference.
Even if you have all the money, you can also still die.
It truly is a curse
America: If you’re not rich, then you can go fuck yourself.