That's a cancer that is ruining all developed or developing countries. America is just further along.

None of that negates what is still there in much of America that hasn't succumbed to these modern afflictions. I know plenty of folks that live and work near their parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters and see their family often. I know folks who care for their parents without sending them to a home.

> kids cannot walk alone by themselves anywhere without someone calling Cops This is a city problem. In rural and somewhat suburban places, kids still live like this. In cities in Latin America and Europe kids don't go out walking by themselves either. This isn't an American issue. This is a rural/suburban vs urban thing.

That said, this problem is worst in places with less social trust and social trust is lowest in places without common culture.

> everyone at home buying shit on amazon and watching netflix

So much of this is because of the erosion of disposable income as cost of living has increased and wages have not kept up. No country in the world has had as strong a hobby/extracurricular activity culture like America has. In my younger years in America I knew tons of folks with tons of hobbies that simply weren't even options in other countries. You had magazines for every imaginable hobby. You had specialist mail order catalogs for everything. When I go visit friends in Latin America, some of them with hobbies ask me for help buying and bringing stuff that they can't buy domestically.

There's tons of nature and outdoor culture in America. Much more than other countries. We have amazing national forests and national parks. You have hiking, hunting, camping, rafting, kayaking, powerboating, sailing, etc.

The only hobby I partake in where the locus of the hobby isn't America is sailing. For everything else, most of the communities and manufacturers that make anything decent are all American.

Take something like the X-Games. Pretty much every one of those sports is primarily American in origin.

Besides that, you have things like American barbecues, tailgating at sporting events, roadtripping, Thanksgiving feasts, Fourth of July celebrations, Memorial Day and Labor Day festivities.

There's so much really. It just isn't apparent if you've only ever experienced life in major cities.

I feel like I've had a front row seat witnessing the decline of something amazing, but had the good fortune of experiencing many of the things that make America a great place to live. November 8th this year was a referendum rejecting many of the forces contributing to that decline and an attempt to reverse it.

> psychiatrists everywhere cause everyone is lonely

This is largely a liberal problem. Seriously go look at graphs of mental health diagnoses over time by political affiliation. Amongst those that identify as conservative or very conservative, you don't see the same mental health issues. A lot of the mental health issues are very different by gender. It's mostly an issue for women and it largely started in the seventies. Why that decline in happiness occurred for women, I will leave as an exercise for you to speculate on.

> 50% of population obese Happening in every country. America is just in the lead. There's nothing particularly American about this problem. Both the other countries from which I am a citizen are well on there way to the same obesity problems. I have my thoughts on why this has happened here and is happening in other countries too, but it's off topic.

Culturally, America up until about 30 years ago was much higher trust when it was much more European culturally. Stuff that we didn't have nearly as much of when I first arrived were things like jeitinho (Brazil), combina/protekzia (Israel), wasta (Middle East), guanxi (China), viveza criolla (Hispanic Latin American countries), blat (former Soviet bloc), etc. With immigration without assimilation and the formation of co-ethnic enclaves both in geographic communities and within companies, the US now has far far more nepotism and much lower trust today when I first arrived 30 years ago.

Honestly, this isn't even the first time the US has experienced issues and reversed course if you know your US history. A lot of these issues would be familiar to someone familiar with US history in the late 1800s to early 1900s. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which put an end to the mass immigration happening at the time and that gave those immigrants that were in America already at the time to form a new American identity going into WWII and in the post-war period. It's basically a process of simulated annealing.

This was reversed when LBJ signed the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act into law.

Immigration is neither an unassailable good nor is it an irredeemable evil. There are good ways and bad ways to do it. New blood and vitality has been amazing for America, but too much change too quickly without time healthy mixing to happen comes with it its own problems. Right now we need to course correct and go back to forming a single American identity with high trust irrespective of ethnicity, national origin, race or religion, and all nepotism in all forms (again ethnic, national origin, race or religion) needs to be condemned and rooted out.

- yea america sucks but so does everyone else (false)

- yea america is obese but so is everyone else (false)

- being lonely is a function of your political affiliation (this was absolutely amazing to see - wow)

- things are great cause I have few friends who barbeque

- kids cannot walk alone because of urban vs. rural (wild wild wild stuff, one of the most urban places on the planet - Tokio Japan - has kids riding metro by themselves, you should look it up. this summer in belgrade I did not know where my 11-year old daughter was 80% of the day… this is america’s sickness, not rural vs urban

Geez …

I don't understand how you can get "America sucks" from from my comments. I love this place. All the stuff you said sucks are things that suck in lots of other countries too. Why am I going to get upset about phenomena that's happening everywhere? The things I like about America are those things that are unique to America.

> being lonely is a function of your political affiliation (this was absolutely amazing to see - wow)

I was pointing out correlation. I didn't imply causation. You're reading causation into what I wrote. Loneliness or just general unhappiness is far less prevalent amongst those that lean conservative and very conservative. It's probably something worth investigating to figure out why this correlation exists.

> Tokio Japan - has kids riding metro by themselves, you should look it up.

Glad you brought this up. It was something I was thinking about when I wrote my comment. Japan has exactly that which the US has lost a LOT of in the past 30+ years. It's a highly cohesive, high trust culture.

You should go and look up the research of Robert Putnam, who has done the largest, most comprehensive longitudinal studies of the decline of civic engagement.

If you're so unhappy in the US, why are you here? Why not move back to wherever you're happier that has culture when you think the US has no culture? Reading between the lines, it sounds like you haven't made an effort to assimilate into the culture and that has colored your experience and negative view of America.

I'm not going to disagree that America is sick, but it has the potential to get healthy again and that starts with changes that prioritize increasing the quality of life for those already here, whether they were born here or became naturalized citizens. And the prioritization of finding commonality between those that are Americans by birth or chose to become America because they believe in its potential as a nation.

my wife likes money. she said 2 more years and then we are out to retire. I have been begging my wife to move for the last 11 years since my kid has been born as I consider the worst thing I ever did as a father was to subject her childhood to this environment. she is old enough now and has traveled all over the world that now she is doing more begging than I am. america is perfect place to make a boatload of money if you put in hard hard work but all else is really bad and we make excuses because money is sooooo great

What was your favorite city out of all those and what was your least favorite?

Are you and your wife from the same country? Did you meet in the US or came here together?

I digress; there is no culture except maybe the idiotic focus on sports (watching that is; everyone still obese!), although that's no different in AUS and for a large extent the UK, so actually, nope.

Disclaimer; lived and worked in the US; left the first time trump got the presidency.

what things are you interested in that are cultural?

> as hard times coming

This wouldn't surprise me, but unless it happens in 2nd to 4th year of his presidency, it's almost certainly going to be the bipartisan drunken sailor spending of Congress since the pandemic our country likely had a hand in causing.

Between accelerating national debt and our disastrous Ukraine war banking policies and international asset seizures that have undermined dollar supremacy, I'm expecting hard times unless we get a Milei-style intervention to course correct.

> Disclaimer; lived and worked in the US; left the first time trump got the presidency.

Hope that's working out for you. It's working out here for me.

Well, that is all that matters. We both will be dead soon anyway, so picking where to sit it out is important.

Washington DC - by far. I have been everywhere in the US as well except for Alaska, for business and pleasure. Washington DC is the only place that has some form of a soul :)

Are you and your wife from the same country? Did you meet in the US or came here together?

I am from Serbia, my wife is from Croatia. We met in Washington DC. We came under different circumstances, I came to play basketball and my wife came as a refugee.

I've always been curious about Washington DC. I've visited twice. Seems like it attracts a lot of the best people from all over the globe but the worst people from within the United States.

One of my biggest wishes for the US is to decentralize pretty much all the functions that Washington DC does today. In its current form, it doesn't exist to further the best interests of the United States. It only functions to further the best interest of itself. Classic case of the Shirky Principle applied to a city.

Curious to hear more about the soul you're talking about? My guess is it has more to do with the foreign presence in that city than the domestic presence.

I think this is disingenuous. You also heavily implied that feminism is at the root of many women's issues. You can't then pull it back and say "Oh, I didn't mean that, you just assumed that". So what -did- you mean?

You also blatantly ignore that conservative and very conservative community have a stigma against mental health issues. While someone "investigates" this, they should probably also investigate whether it is actually the case or whether conservatives with mental health issues are more likely to leave them untreated or deny their existence.