I spent some time in the US recently – three months in DC and three months in Chicago. A few observations on daily life, coming from Europe:

Public Facilities
US libraries, playgrounds and community centers are excellent. Notably better than in Ireland. A bit of a narrative violation, capitalist US is actually pretty good at this.

US parks lack coffee. Or food of any kind. In Ireland most public parks will have a cafe, or at least a horsebox serving coffee. This seems to be absent in the US. Even at a big destination botanical garden, with a sizable visitor center and a gift shop, there was no food or drink on offer. Very strange and quite a loss. Maybe some kind of misplaced puritanism about private businesses in public spaces?

People
People were friendly and generous. Even though we were renting short term, we got to know our neighbours quite well. People gave us things to help get set up. We went to block parties. It was honestly great. This happened in both Chicago and DC.

Everyone wants to talk about politics. Everyone. Even people we met briefly and casually would bring up politics.

Everything is more extreme. People are fatter, fitter, richer, poorer.

Officialdom
The DMV and the Social Security Administration are as bad as everyone says. I’ve never seen officials being actively aggressive with customers before. We had truly Kafkaesque experiences with Social Security. Nothing in Ireland compares. The US passport office on the other hand was excellent.

Supply Chains
US supply chains are weird. The on-demand economy is next level, but ordinary retail seems to have issues.

Order from Amazon in the evening, and it’s on your doorstep by the time you wake up. If that’s not fast enough, you can get most things within 30 minutes via Doordash or Instacart. The convenience is transformative, especially with a newborn in the house.

But grocery supply chains seem to struggle with latency. It’s easier to buy freshly squeezed orange juice in Ireland, a country famously inhospitable to citrus fruit, than it is in the US, with Florida in driving distance. Most of the fresh produce is worse. This is true everywhere except for a few extremely high end organic supermarkets.

Fresh food in general is much less available outside of supermarkets. I was in a vast Walgreens, it must have been half an acre, and there was zero fresh food. Nothing. Not so much as a banana. Endless aisles of long-life snacks. The closest thing I could find to real food was some UHT milk and string cheese. In Ireland this is unthinkable, even service stations will have some fresh food.

I don’t know what’s going on here. Maybe everything goes through a hub-and-spoke distribution system that adds a lot of latency to US supply chains? If there’s demand you’d think markets would have solved this long ago. Maybe there is some economic constraint I’m not seeing. A bit of a puzzle to me.

Food
Speaking of which – and this will surprise nobody – US food overall is bad. It’s not impossible to eat a healthy diet in the US, but it’s much harder. The defaults are worse. Lack of fresh food, more dubious ingredients, larger portion sizes, a US palate skewed towards junk.

Restaurants are also not impressive. Fancy US restaurants are OK, but good Irish restaurants are generally better (albeit with less variety of cuisine). I’d read Tyler Cowen wax lyrical about the DC restaurant scene, so I was surprised to find the experience quite flat. On the plus side, I did enjoy exploring Ethiopian food for the first time.

Medical Care
US pharmacies close for lunch. In the capital of capitalism, this surprised me.

The US medical system is actually great for minor discretionary issues. Dealing with these in Ireland is a gigantic maze of gate keepers, referral letters, opacity and waiting. In the US you just show up and pay cash. Something that would take me nine months in Ireland I can do in a day.

Navigating US health insurance, however, is every bit as bad as they say. If you’re trying to pay cash, you need to navigate hard. I needed a specialist eye drop, I rang the pharmacy, they said the cash price was $4,350. My jaw dropped. I asked if there was any kind of discount program. The pharmacy guy fiddled about in his system for a while, applied some kind of coupon, and then it was $30.

Prices
Services in general are expensive. Childcare was approx 2x the cost of Ireland. Nappies in one case were 10x the price we pay at home. We got a house clean once a week, that was more like 3-4x the price. Some of that is the fact US houses are much larger.

There is extreme hidden fee proliferation. The list price for services is often ~70% of what you actually pay, once you add in tips and everything else. At one cafe, I was charged a $1.49 ‘platform fee’ by the restaurant POS system, separate from what the restaurant itself charged me. WHAT?!

Land
So! Much! Land! Huge houses on huge plots. Huge car parks for huge shops. Go even a little bit outside of the downtowns, and land is deployed casually. This is a pretty fundamental shock for an Irishman, a country with a history book titled “Land is All That Matters”. 

The upside of this is generously sized housing. We had a home gym in our rental, which was amazing. Our neighbours were working professionals, but their houses were more in line with the very rich in Ireland. The houses of the local rich were more like French châteaus.

On paper this might sound appealing, but in practice these larger houses are a mixed blessing. The downside, as widely reported, is that it’s hard to walk anywhere. Walking is normally my primary mode of transport. I tried to keep this up in the US suburbs, but it’s basically quixotic. The DC suburb we lived in didn’t even have sidewalks. Everything is car based. Personally, this was a big quality of life hit.

Vibes
There is a deep pro-freedom, pro-success orientation in the US. There is more personal freedom, more economic freedom, more free speech protection. This is true both legally and culturally. It is a great place to be weird, to be non-conforming. It is a much easier place to start a great company. It is a much easier place to start a family as a gay man, which is the reason I was there. I am very glad the US holds true to these things, even as Europe stifles many of them.

Combined with this, there is an underlying desperation in American society, which you just don’t have in Europe.

Ireland

Coming home after time away, you see some things more clearly for the contrast. Here are some of my impressions returning home:

Media
The Irish media is incredibly narrow. The radio may as well be playing patriotic songs.

Food
We don’t appreciate how good our food is. Irish food is superb. Air quality is great too.

Politics
Irish politics is pretty boring. Not much happens. The country is awash in money, and the government mostly just sloshes it around. There are no big ideas, no real fights. Not much of anything.

The Irish blob is firmly left of center. On the face of it this is a bit surprising, given we have had nominally center right government for a hundred years.

Vibes
Paul Graham has an essay Cities and Ambition, about what’s in the air in a place. New York says “You should be richer”, LA says “You should be more beautiful”. Ireland says “Ah sure it’s grand”.

The good side of that is enjoying life as it is, warts and all. The bad side is not rocking the boat, no matter how broken things are, like a national version of the “this is fine” meme.

Eco-nagging
The very first thing that happened after I got home was that I spilled the milk. The EU bottle cap attachment law makes European bottles more awkward and fiddly, and I had got used to normal ones again while away. I couldn’t help wondering how much an increase in spills would offset whatever environmental benefits the law was supposed to achieve.

The next day, I got an email from my bin company. It contained a photograph of my recently collected rubbish, highlighting an item we had put into the general waste that was a “missed opportunity for recycling”. There was no penalty for this, it was just (slightly Orwellian) nagging.

I am robustly in favour of good environmental legislation. But a lot of this feels like the environmental equivalent of the EU cookie law. Persistent irritation and cognitive load sprinkled into everyone’s daily lives, for very marginal (or possibly negative) benefits.

Walking
I walk everywhere in Ireland. When I don’t walk, I often get public transport. We have a nice environment for walking, I can easily walk to a cafe, a gym, take the tram into the city for work, get a bike share around town for meetings. Our bike lanes could be better but they’re improving. Even with Irish weather, this is overall pretty pleasant.

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My Irish list skews negative, but the factors aren’t weighed equally. Quality of life is mostly about the texture of an ordinary day, and a walkable city changes that entirely for me. Ireland has many pathologies, I am glad I can fly to the US to navigate around some of them. I am grateful for the psychic balance America brings to the world. But Ireland is home and a good place to live.