Greentext

Absolutely. Cold culture vs warm culture. It's not just an American thing, but the "only america is this bad!" thought process on here is rampant. It's getting exhausting.

I ws defining most of Europe as "America light" here. People in Central America, the Middle East, and Africa all have a particular human way of interacting with each other that is absent in America and sort of muted in a lot of Western Europe. Then at a certain point my perspective flipped and I realized their way was normal, and it's us that have something unusual about us.

The world is a big place with a lot of variation, and I'm not trying to romanticize any particular place. Just saying that a lot of looking out for each other and being kind has been forgotten about in a lot of America.

I’m in Germany, which feels pretty unfriendly to me (and I’m from Connecticut), but there’s still a back current of something. I don’t know if it’s best described as a sense of community, solidarity, or shared humanity, but I work at a bakery (culturally comparable to a diner, imo, and I worked in the US at a few diners) and the clientele as a rule sees me as a person in a way that they didn’t always in the US.

It’s also the first place I’ve worked in a city that didn’t have an oppositional relationship with the local homeless population, because my boss treats them like people, and doesn’t allow anyone to do any differently.

Yeah, I have a European acquaintance who I've heard talk at length about how America is warm and friendly relative to Europe, and it's a notion I've heard backed up by online accounts as well.