happy birthday america.
the greatest place ever invented.
i’ll spare the cliche immigrant story or whatever but one thing i think about a lot is when i moved to london ppl would basically always tell me to tone it down (cuz i used words like awesome all the time) or ppl told me i was too optimistic or that would always be enthusiastic about something working. i had hard time doing this cuz i never learned any of this behavior, it was sorta just built into me. i found that to be strange & it took me a long time to realize they they were correcting all of my priors instead of simply correcting my vocab.
that’s kinda the thing that is hard to explain until you leave. what makes this place so damn unique is ppl here are unusually willing to have an absurd dream & then attempt to make it real. it’s the greatest concentration of individuals on the planet who actually try to make stuff *real*. that instinct feels almost pre programmed into americans. “why not me?” is prolly the macro that separates this country from anywhere else.
ppl love comparing here to other places using metrics like healthcare, trains, safety, etc. those things matter. but they are the outputs not inputs. the inputs matter way more. kinda like sports leagues trying to create the next generation of stars by investing in little league. the macro inputs of america are the belief that the future is not something that happens to you, but something you are allowed to build or change.
& here, far more than anywhere else on earth requires almost zero permission to attempt it all.. without asking for any sort of cultural consent. that’s why all of the shit you see around the world is basically invented in america.
what an astonishingly ridiculous beautiful country.
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