OUT OF THE WAY, DE TOCQUEVILLE
Behold! I have had a thought.
Hello!
Hi! I should warn you now and say that this is, to the best of my knowledge, the longest newsletter I’ve published so far. It was never my plan to write such a gigantic long read but, as it turns out, I have so many thoughts about Americans. I wanted to get them all out in one place and out of my system now, in order to move on for good after that.
What follows, then, is what I am calling my Unified Theory Of The Yank, even though it’s not unified at all. Also, since there are a lot of new people here, mostly from Bluesky (hello!), I thought I would run a little discount over the weekend. Become a paying subscriber to this newsletter in the next 48 hours and you will pay fewer pounds a month than you usually would.
I try not to do too much self-promotion on here or elsewhere as I find it tacky and embarrassing but it must sometimes be said: I am writing this newsletter because “freelance journalist” isn’t the most stable of jobs but it is the only thing I know how to do. I also like doing it a lot. If you like my freelance journalism, why not help fund it? I think that would be nice.
Bye!
A column
I want to write about America but I just don’t know how to go about it. It feels too big and too daunting. It’s probably ironic because it’s also how I felt ten years ago when I went to New York for the first time. I was 22 and assumed the world was my oyster, and I really hadn’t lived that parochial a life until that point but still, New York proved to be too much for me to deal with.
I’d not really made any plans because I was in my early twenties and assumed that life would happen at me once I got there, and when it didn’t I had no idea what to do. I was far too proud to admit that I was overwhelmed, to others or even to myself. It took years to realise that I’d essentially picked a battle then lost. Back in those days I could backpack across South America alone for two months but, somehow, two weeks in NYC was just too much.
It took me nine years to lick my wounds then try again. I went to New York last September to see some friends and because my life was falling apart, and I had such a great time that it ended up feeling like a dream. I was there for a week but, 14 months later, it feels like the trip could have lasted just about any amount of time. I can’t even remember it properly; at most, I can just about catch glimpses of scenes, or fleeting moments.
One of them was in the library of MoMa’s PS1 museum in Queens, on my last day. I had a chat with a friend about the fact that I didn’t really want to leave, but that’s not really what stayed with me. Instead, what stuck was what I asked myself afterwards, namely: can I do it? Can I find a way to come back, this time for longer? Do I have it in me to try and conquer America?
It’s a nice memory now, because I know that the answer to all those questions was, in the end, “yes”. It took a lot of time spinning plates and a fair amount of luck but I spent two months in the US this year, working, travelling and having fun. I had a lovely time and I want to tell you about it, but all I can think about is this bed of elbows.
It’s what a friend once called the act of sleeping with someone for the first time and realising you have no physical chemistry. It is entirely possible that you like the person and that they like you but sometimes your bodies just won’t cooperate. Every kiss feels oddly strained and a bit gross and somehow you’ve become the clumsiest you’ve ever been. You’re overly aware of your limbs and of theirs and, no matter how hard you try, you can just tell that the whole thing was over before it’d even begun.
“Yeah, it’s like lying down in a bed of elbows”, is what my friend said, and it was such a perfect description that it’s stuck in my mind ever since. It’s also something I kept coming back to in the US, while I was out and nominally having fun. I met a lot of people and went to a lot of places and did a lot of things but the majority of them just felt slightly off. I don’t think it was anyone’s fault; I played nice and so did they. It’s just that, well, sometimes the mechanics of it don’t really work.
I’d like to try and understand why that is and I have no idea how it’s going to go. I’m going to throw some things in your direction and see what happens. Ideally I should have found a way to turn them all into one coherent narrative but I’m not sure I can do that yet, and I want to write these thoughts down before they leave my head. I’ve been back in London for just over 24 hours and already I can tell that America is beginning to feel distant and unreal again. All I can promise is that I’ll do my best.
They say that Americans are very friendly and I don’t think that’s entirely true. What they are is all or nothing: strangers can welcome you in with the warm smile of someone who has known you for half a lifetime, but they can also snap, seemingly out of nowhere, over the most minor infraction.
I was in Penn Station the other week and trying to find my train to Philly; I thought I’d got to the end of the queue and tried to join it but was yelled at - yelled at! - by a nearby Amtrak agent, who treated me like I was mentally deficient or possibly an axe murderer. The queue, it turned out, continued further down the hall. I would argue that mine had blatantly been an honest mistake but there was no amount of grovelling I could do to make him treat me better. He hated me and whoever brought me into this world and any progeny I may carry at some point in my future.
You could argue that maybe it was a one-off and he was having a bad day but that would only work if he’d been an exception, and he hadn’t. I got swiftly and brutally put in my place by a succession of people, and their anger always felt entirely disproportionate. They looked like they’d just encountered the stupidest person in the entire world and maybe I just didn’t deserve to be alive.
It made me long for Europe and for the fact that we’re never quite as friendly as they are but also rarely as rude. I longed for the in-between and it became a bit of a common refrain. “Give me more love or more disdain / The torrid or the frozen zone / Bring equal ease unto my pain”, wrote Thomas Carew, but I disagree. I wanted both less love and less disdain.
On this note, I just don’t trust the American base of niceness, is the problem. It may seem pleasant at first but it means that people are often impossible to read. I talked about it with a friend who’s lived in New York for some years and she told me she finds it very hard to tell if someone is flirting with her. Men are just so nice in general that her radar no longer works, and there is no way for her to ascertain whether a man is trying to get into her pants or not.
Similarly, I met a lot of people over my two months in the US and struggled to figure out who I clicked with and who I didn’t, because I just found their enthusiasm quite overwhelming. I had limited time in the country and they’re all busy people so there would have been no point in us seeing each other again if we had little friendship chemistry, but how to tell?
One thing I found out about myself a long time ago is that I’m a bit of a Marmite person, or at least an acquired taste, and that is fine by me but it does mean that I often have to make my peace with people not being especially interested in buying what I’m selling. It’s alright; it’s life. Americans, however, keep their cards so close to their chests that it left me without any social cues to decipher.
Another adjacent point is that Americans love flaking. They loooooove making plans and then cancelling those plans on the day or even the evening itself. Most Americans, in my experience, wish they could kiss flaking on the mouth. It is, in my own personal and therefore objective opinion, one of the worst traits a person can have. Still, nearly all of them are at it.
They message to sort out drinks and they seem to be the most excited it’s possible for a person to be and then a few hours before you’re meant to meet up they’ll invent what is obviously a bullshit excuse and they’ll bail. Sometimes, if the occasion involves a group of people, they simply won’t turn up without even messaging anyone about it.
I took it incredibly personally during my first month there, back in the spring, because I assumed that all those people just didn’t like me. As mentioned above, I find Americans very hard to read so I just parsed those cancellations as “hahaha! we’ve all hated you the entire time!”. Luckily, I eventually brought it up with friends who live in the US but aren’t from there and they rose as one to tell me: it’s them, not you.
People flake on their friends and their friends flake on them and because it’s assumed that everyone will flake on everyone else if given half a chance, no-one gets too offended when it happens. It drove me entirely insane. It also drove me to several conclusions, which I will attempt to outline below.
Conclusion numero uno: Americans fundamentally like being at home. I feel like there’s a bit of a chicken and egg scenario here, as I can’t quite tell if they have bigger houses because they love being at home so much or they love being at home so much because they have bigger houses, but that doesn’t change the fundamentals.
I spent a lot of time walking around, mostly in New York but also in other places, and I was often pretty spooked by the sheer number of delivery trucks and delivery bikes out on the roads and knocking on doors. They’re absolutely everywhere. American city roads, as far as I can tell, are mostly used for Doordash and Amazon Prime purposes. Oh, and Ubers to and from everywhere, obviously, because if you’re going to leave the house then you wouldn’t want to have to be inconvenienced in any way, or have to deal with other people.
It’s why I struggled to trust the general aura of pleasantness surrounding most people in the US: deep down, I knew that most of them probably just wanted to be at home anyway. They’ve got this nice veneer of constant delight over their face but do they really like people, if all they want is to be in the house or in the car? I just don’t think they do! That’s not the behaviour of people who like other people!
Conclusion numero dos: there’s this selfishness to Americans that you just can’t really wrap your head around if you’ve never spent any meaningful time there. It’s not inherently malevolent! I don’t believe it makes them bad people! But it does absolutely shape the way they live their lives in a very fundamental way.
It’s something we discussed with a friend back in April while queuing for a little but strikingly popular sample sale down in Red Hook. The shop was roughly the size of a handkerchief and there were about fifty of us queuing outside. The queue moved at an agonisingly, maddeningly slow pace; each woman would walk into this miniscule store and just spend a full half hour there.
It made me lose my mind and my friend, a fellow foreigner but much more advanced American Knower, told me that I shouldn’t be surprised. Of course, in Western Europe, customers would have the sense to keep it short - look through whatever was on offer sharpish then leave again. Hell, at least they would have a member of staff politely reminding those inside that the queue was not getting any shorter.
Instead, because this was America, every person walking through the door felt that they deserved to look at every single piece of clothing on offer at whatever pace they wanted. It was Their Turn, and they could do as they wished. The queue, she told me, was actually good for me because it allowed me to experience the sheer extent to which Americans often forget that there is a real world out there, and it doesn’t revolve around them personally.
Conclusion numero tres (that’s right, I can count in Spanish) is probably the most important one but also the one I can’t fully theorise yet. In essence: I worry that there’s a fundamental lack of passion at the heart of the American soul.
I will explain this through the medium of one college football game I watched, which will both feel very anecdotal and a bit mean towards people whose company I otherwise enjoyed, but it strikes me as the perfect example. So: I was down south and some friends of friends organised some big watchalong for the Georgia - Texas game in their garden. Several of them came from Georgia, and a number of others had gone to university there.
Everyone was very excited before the game and as the game began. I didn’t know the first thing about college football at first but they were very nice and explained the rules to me and so I eventually got heavily into it. What I can’t explain, though, is that a lot of people just…left, a quarter of the way through, halfway through, or with an hour to go. They’d been watching intently but at some point clearly decided they’d had their fill of sport and so they bounced.
By the end of the game - which Georgia was winning, by the way - there were few of us left. Because it was clear that the outcome of the game wasn’t going to change in the last ten minutes, the hosts decided to just change the channel and go about their evening. I was gobsmacked and, due to being lightly drunk, threw a very small tantrum. As a result, someone had to get the game up on their smartphone then hand me the phone so I could watch the rest of play in a corner, like a toddler.
You may well think, at this point, that I’m the person not coming out of this particularly well but I would say that really, I was the only normal sports watcher there. It was a great game! There was a very controversial reffing decision which got very controversially overturned! Texas and Georgia are two very good teams! I just didn’t understand how you could start an evening by passionately watching something then be so disinterested by the end that you could just walk away at a random point.
Of course, what I’m describing is only one evening with one specific group of people, but this lack of passion is something I noticed about a thousand times in a thousand smaller ways. The flaking is definitely a part of it, because it assumes that people just aren’t that bothered about seeing their friends either way. It’d be nice to hang out but hey, it’s a bit windy, and work today was tiring, and wouldn’t it be nice to just sit on the couch and order takeout instead?
Work is also fascinating in this respect. It nearly merits a specific entry but fits into this broader context too, because Americans work much longer hours than we do and do seem to prioritise work in a way that only the most career-focused do in Europe, but they don’t seem to love any of it. You can ask Americans about what they do in general or what they did that day but they don’t seem to really want to discuss it. Work is a thing that happens at work and that’s that.
Again, it’s a paradox I found fascinating because I can’t imagine wanting to spend endless hours in the office or at the very least at a desk at home and not even being especially fascinated by what you do, or willing to discuss it with enthusiastic strangers. I actually enjoy hearing about what people do for a living! My job isn’t a real job so I love it when actual grown-ups tell me what happens in all those office buildings. I have no idea what goes on in there, but they didn’t seem keen on telling me.
It’s that whole “no talk of work, politics or religion” dinner party thing except that I’m just not sure what else they really, truly, passionately care about. I also wonder if that’s maybe part of the reason why so many Americans have gone Mad From Online, because they finally found something they could get really, really intense about. I don’t believe that an entire nation can be born feeling neither here nor there about absolutely everything, and so when people are finally given something to hold onto they’ll really go for it.
Why is American culture set up that way, though? I’ve no idea. That’s above my paygrade. Ask someone who’s spent two years there, not two months.
Heavily related but probably controversial topic: Americans just aren’t horny. You may read this and think “pah, she lives in Britain, doesn’t she look dashing in her grand glass mansion”, and I would tell you that it’s not what we’re here to discuss but I can still briefly address it. In short: I have lived in Britain for 15 years and believe that British people may well be as horny as, say, their French counterparts. It’s just that their lust is always hidden underneath several thick layers of neuroses.
Go for a drink with a handsome Frenchman and he will suggest finding somewhere more private after two glasses of wine. Go for a drink with a handsome Englishman and he will struggle to make eye contact with you then, after five pints, push you against a wall and stick his tongue down your throat, in a way that will make you realise that he’s been thinking about doing it since pint one.
The handsome American man, on the other hand, will solemnly explain to you that he doesn’t have sex on the first date, as happened to a female friend recently. Hell, he may not tell you anything at all, as Americans so love going on daytime coffee dates, even though everyone knows that nothing thrilling has ever come out of a coffee date.
They really do love dating though, as a pastime. It’s not something I can talk about from first hand experience as I loathe dating apps, but many friends living in the US seem to spend their entire time going to coffee shops and galleries and brunch with people they’ve exchanged a few messages with, and nothing ever happens with any of those people.
One acquaintance told me that she had “three guys on rotation” as we spoke, then explained that she had, so far, only kissed one of them. I wish I could describe the face I made at that point, but do not think words could ever do it justice.
Anyway, my point is: American men, at least, do not seem to want to fuck. That’s what I got from many conversations with many women, a lot of whom grew up elsewhere. They’re all hot and interesting and in their thirties and, in some cases, in no hurry to meet anyone serious but still they are struggling to get laid. It’s a real mystery and not one I’ve quite managed to solve, so I’m just presenting my results as is.
The streets are full of these big, beefy, milk-fed American boys who go to the gym a lot but none of them seem to be in any rush to show off that body to willing women. I think you can shove that under the “lacking any passions” umbrella, is the only thing I can offer. I still can’t quite tell where that came from in the first place, but you really can see it everywhere you look.
Briefly, on that note: fuck my life, they love going to the gym. Again - crucially! - they don’t necessarily want to talk about going to the gym, but as far as I can tell that’s all they do, aside from going to work. They eat protein-everything and they work out.
Well, either that or they’ve very fat, which I’m not making a moral judgement on, but would have struggled not to notice. It’s that all-or-nothing thing again. People are either jacked or obese; eating food made entirely out of different kinds of sugars, syrups and additives or checking every ingredient list like it’s Moby Dick.
I’m exaggerating a bit, obviously, and do have some friends who fall in the grey area, but would argue that nearly all my friends in Europe live in that grey area, so there’s definitely an “extremes” problem here, again.
I could go on for a while but guess I should probably stop here. I’ve already had so many thoughts about Americans. The only thing I have left to add is that I had a really terrific time in the US, even though it may not be obvious from this list. New York got really deep under my skin and I worry that I’ll never quite manage to get it out again.
Still, I would struggle to move there, for all the reasons outlined above. Two months isn’t quite enough time to truly understand a people but you can still manage to get a decent sense of their texture and their flavour. I lived in Venice for two months a few years ago and what I found was that I was deeply xenophobic about Italians, but in a very warm, fraternal way. Americans, on the other hand, are people I am fond of but in the way a curious astronaut in a sci-fi movie may interact with deep-space aliens.
This is why I could never quite leave Europe. In order to live across the pond, I would have to either change who I am in quite a fundamental way or become more comfortable with always feeling aggressively different from everyone else. Neither of those options feels particularly appealing.
The only thing I have left to do, then, is to follow in de Tocqueville’s footsteps and write about the weird fuckers from afar. I’ll definitely go back at some point though - and yes, that is a threat.
Ooooh thank you for putting into words feelings I have felt from many, many, many business trips and holidays and interactions with American acquaintances.
Also thank you for explaining why a friend, who we had agreed to meet in downtown Manhattan *right at the office block where she worked* on our single day in NY called me 30 minutes before we were due to meet to say she was too tired and going straight home :/ she continued our friendship afterwards as if nothing had happened but I could never quite trust her again.
I have had a fair amount of American co-workers in my time and this article has been living in my head for days. So I just came back to read it again and say how bloomin’ wonderful it is and thanks for making me laugh out loud several times. It was also the article that switched me to a paying subscriber.