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Often when I tell people I am going to travel, people who probably do not know what they are talking about say things like, “Oh you will learn so much about yourself”, or “You will learn so much about the world”. And my favorite, “You will change and grow so much!” It is not that they are necessarily wrong. But at the time, it seems like traveling does not change me or catalyze personal growth in a significant way. I came back from my first big trip in 2005 from South America. Among other things, I recall being amazed at how much American culture encouraged unproductive multitasking. Coming off a sense of calm from my travels, I vowed to ditch my multitasking habit forever. I was thoroughly disappointed to discover that my laid back approach to life lasted all of three days, maybe four under the pressures of the American workplace. The thing about traveling is not that one comes back a changed woman. But that one can get to know herself in different contexts. When I am in the context of being home, I am the same as I was in that context before I traveled, except that now I have a better sense of how different (or the same) I can be in other contexts. 

Another benefit of traveling is that for a very brief window, I can view the context I was born into from the perspective of a semi-outsider. What follows are my first impressions of the United States of America after being in New Zealand for 5 months.

We are a land of immigrants.

Everything about this country is shaped by the fact that we are all immigrants. Sure, some of us are a few more generations along in the assimilation process than others. But at the end of the day, almost none of us are really native to this land. Immigrants are people who literally give up everything they have ever known, risking all that they know just to be here. Any time you have a place filled with people who really want to be there, it turns into a pretty special place. I have heard numerous stories from my successful professional friends who went to elite universities recounting things their parents and aunts and uncles did to get to this country. Including drinking their own urine on the boat to survive, escaping oppressive governments by getting onto an airplane in the middle of having a heart attack, and giving up professional jobs to live in poverty cleaning toilets on an immigrant “salary”. The rest of us probably have great grandparents with forgotten stories like this. We are bred from a self-selecting group of highly driven, courageous people with conviction and it shows.

We are driven to innovate and “good enough” is not good enough for us.

This view may be highly biased by the fact that I have most recently resided in San Francisco, California where Facebook, Google, Apple, HP, Oracle, Twitter, eBay, Intel, Pixar, LinkedIn, YouTube, and practically every other major tech company’s headquarters are within a 50 mile radius of the city. But it seems to me that Americans are driven to innovate. We have an almost carnal need to create something new, or be a part of something that has a large impact and in some way changes the way the world operates. Most of the people I know with successful careers who make good money and have endless opportunities seem to be unsatisfied. It is not good enough to just have a successful job and enough money to do the things you want to do. You have to do more. You have to build something. You have to create something that nobody has ever thought of before. Of course there are extremely innovative, driven people all over the world, but they seem to concentrate in the USA in a special way. 

While we are on this subject and because this post is beginning to take itself way too seriously, I give you the trailer to the new TV series "Silicon Valley", which is a show that is hilariously a little too close to home.

Back to the topic of innovation: it is an example of how immigration shapes our culture. According to Forbes Magazine, at least 40% of major US tech companies (including Google) were founded by immigrants or their children. For some reason, these entrepreneurial geniuses came to the USA before starting these companies. I think it is because we have a unique innovation culture in which enables impactful, world changing technologies. Moreover, the perception that we are innovators is a self-fulfilling prophecy because we attract immigrants with a propensity to innovate.

Yes, toilet seat covers!

No, that is it. I did not have anything else to say about toilet seat covers in public restrooms. I am just quite excited to be back in a place that has them.

We tip, service is better, and we are less happy with the service we get.

In fact, we are less happy with just about everything else, too. As a terrible side effect of our will to improve, succeed, and innovate is that by and large, we do not stop to be happy with what we have.

One of the first things I witnessed upon reentering the US was a woman cutting in line in front of me and the other 100 or so passengers waiting to check in for our delayed domestic flight. She yelled at the concierge, demanding that she be put on an earlier flight (though there was no such flight). She expressed outrage that she could have spent another 3 hours at home relaxing with her feet up and she rudely blamed the people behind the desk that the airline text alerts failed to inform her of the delay. It is not enough for her that we have devised a system to make large, pressurized metal tubes filled with human beings safely travel long distances in a complicated dance where thousands of flight paths are coordinated without incidence at once. Never mind that we have no control over the weather, and that each flight’s departure is contingent upon the successful completion of the flight before. Never mind that we have built mobile phone technology whereby automated mass text alerts are possible to keep passengers informed. None of this is good enough for this woman who is obviously more important than everyone else waiting patiently in line, many with fussy children. The more we have, the less satisfied we seem to be with what we get.  “Good enough” isn’t good enough for that lady. Nor was it good enough for the lady who loudly complained to the airport pizza guy that her pizza had too much sauce. She sent it back because “who in their right mind would put that much sauce on a pizza”.

The craziest thing is that I have spent a great deal of my life barely taking notice of this type of behavior, writing it off as normal and expected.

I cannot think of a single instance where I observed people openly complaining about service for the five months I was in New Zealand. It is not customary to tip in New Zealand, so service is kind of crappy in my opinion. There is no incentive to do more than the bare minimum as a server. But nobody seems to be too bothered about this poor service. The expectation is lower. I am not advocating that we should all lower our expectations and be satisfied with mediocrity. I am just pointing out that there seem to be some negative side effects of our compulsion to always do better. It drives innovation which impacts the entire world, and we are less happy because of it.

We think that our work is so important that we only need two weeks per year vacation to attend to everything outside work including family and enjoying the fruits of our labors with recreation or travel. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the developed world enjoys at least 30 paid vacation days per year. On top of that, there are 178 countries in the world which provide guaranteed paid maternity leave and the US is not one of them. (Fortunately, there are many private US companies who have realized the benefits of offering paid maternity leave and do so voluntarily). But I think these statistics make a very big statement about our priorities and our regard for pleasure verses accomlishment relative to the rest of the world.

We are a rule-bound people choking ourselves with litigation and regulation.

“I’ve lived part-time in America for the past decade, but I would never dream of starting a business in America”, said the millionaire Kiwi business man who started one of the most successful bungee companies in New Zealand. “There is too much liability and too much regulation”.  Americans do a lot of inefficient and expensive things to avoid a lawsuit. So much of the wealth we create gets tied up into insurance litigation, malpractice suits, and complicated procedures to avoid expensive law suits. In New Zealand, it is illegal to drive drunk, but it is technically not illegal to drink while driving, provided the driver never exceeds the legal limit. (This means that passengers can enjoy a beer in the car, by the way). I am not advocating that we scale down alcohol driving laws, but I am citing this as an example of how other places in the world accomplish safety and orderly conduct without imposing laws that are technically unnecessary to the goal of maintaining a safe orderly society. There are pros and cons to a society that more strictly or more loosely following rules. But it seems to me that many of our rules are arbitrary and stifling. Had I been in the USA instead of New Zealand, I do not think I could have just showed up at a farm (transported there in a mail truck), worked for accommodation, driven a tractor, pulled off the highway to independently hike through a wet cave, or ridden in a water taxi where the captain decided to drop a fishing line along the way while transporting passengers just for the hell of it. I think we are at risk of deteriorating our culture of innovation and personal responsibility if we continue to escalate the degree to which we finger-point and litigate.

The USA is a world power, but not in the way it was during my parent’s and grandparent’s generations.

I have a friend from Paraguay who grew up with no telephone. To make a call, she walked a small distance to her neighbor’s house where she paid them to use their land line. Now she has an iPhone. I use Facebook to keep up with my friends who live in the middle of the Amazon. They are prolific posters. “Google” is a verb on remote New Zealand islands. I did a work exchange at an online ad agency in Chile for two weeks. Their tactics, case studies, strategies, and best practices were simply recycled and re-framed, slightly outdated variations on US online advertising.

Photo credit to Funny Tweek

For most of American history, we have been a world power largely due to our strong military and partially due to our strong currency and relatively high GDP (which many would argue grew to be strong due to all the wars we have fought). It would be ignorant and inaccurate to say that we are not still a strong military force or that we have evolved past traditional military force. But I would argue that our greatest modern influence in the world is through the technologies of our innovative immigrants and citizens outside the scope of our military might. Besides the anecdotes I have shared of how technology developed in the US has reached just about every corner of the world, the Arab Spring is a perfect example of how privately developed US technologies have enabled and influenced major changes in the world.

There aren’t a bunch of Europeans rudely telling me how much they dislike my country.

Numerous times, I have been floored by how comfortable many Europeans and Australians (but not New Zealanders) seem to be telling me negative things about my country to my face. They do this with no prompting and no context. The only trigger some of them need seems to be, "Oh, you are American? Let me tell you everything that is wrong with America…By the way, nice to meet you." Sometimes, they try to slip in inferences that their negative view on America somehow doesn't apply to me since I'm "different" as a traveler from San Francisco. I find this inference ignorant and offensive. Newsflash: San Francisco is part of America.

I would be considered ignorant, rude, and an example of everything that is wrong with America if I, an American met a new German friend and started telling them their culture is flawed given that their people enabled Hitler to come to power, pushing his horrific ethnic cleansing agenda. Similarly, I would not be well-received if I met someone from the UK and said, "Wow, you guys sure killed off a lot of indigenous people with all that colonization you did back in the day." Well these are essentially the sorts of comments other travelers feel comfortable making to me about the USA upon meeting me for the first time and learning that I am American.

Photo credit to Alternet

In any case, I'm not necessarily disputing all the complaints Europeans lodge against me on behalf of my entire nation (as if I am somehow representative of a diverse 300 million people).
In case you are curious, their complaints can generally be summed up as:

1) We are military bullies.
2) We drive in our cars too much and don’t do enough to protect the environment given the resources we have at hand.
3) We are on average more ignorant about the rest of the world than they are and we have an attitude which is obnoxious and perpetuates ignorance in that we appear to believe we are superior to the rest of the world, therefore, we don’t think we need to know about the rest of the world.

Again, I am disputing the general assumption that it is not impolite to America-bash to an American you just met when there is nothing about the previous conversation or situation that should stimulate such a discussion. Just to be clear, I also met some wonderful, educated, polite Europeans who did not try to put me on the defensive.

We have freedom of speech.

For example, I have the freedom to write this editorial about my own country. Others have the right to comment and disagree with me. I am expecting some hate comments. Bring it.