My last morning in Italy was in a distant suburb of Milan, my plans for a low-stress travel day upended by a rail strike. Determined to get food before the long maze of international travel began, I headed to the plaza at six a.m., the one with the six-hundred-year-old Renaissance sanctuary, not the one with the five-hundred-year-old Baroque basilica, to try and find something, anything really, to eat.

I passed two cafes closed for Tuesday, but the third was open and although it was nothing special, not for Italy at least, it was outstanding to me as an American, with a full display of fresh pastries, croissants, and other treats, and for the less decadent, an array of fruits, eggs, and sandwiches. Since it was my last day, I splurged and let the waitress-owner choose the sugary raisin pastry for me, and then for an hour, sipped my cappuccinos, watched the regulars come, go, come again (this time with better gossip), all playing out on a stage of weighty tables and well-decorated walls, next to a medieval cobblestone plaza.

It would be another fifty hours before I had my next sit-down meal, thanks to the vagaries of flight magnified by Delta Airlines’ incompetence. This meal, four eggs on two paper plates, with plastic silverware, and a bunch of condiment packages, and gas station coffee, was five times as expensive, and while the eggs (only thing I found on a menu of overpriced pre-packaged glop) were not that bad (thanks Jose!1), the surroundings I ate them in couldn't have been more different.

I was in the bland lobby of a chain hotel with the ubiquitous corporate design — the one built to minimize cost while offending nobody, which consequently pleases only those with a fetish for the sterile — situated on an indistinct service road over a mile from anything other than other brand hotels, four miles from the Atlanta Airport, being served by Partha, a very nice young man whose English was just passable, but who was inexpensive to this particular hotel management because this was his residency for a Hotel Management degree from some university in Calcutta. A lot of the hotel staff were like Partha, young foreigners on a one-year internship, which made it feel like the UN of eager low-wage employees.

It was this meal or nothing, since the closest other option was a closed Ruby Tuesday over a mile walk away.

A crude accounting of cost and calories doesn’t show much difference between these two meals, but that's why such simple measures are so flawed. My meal in Italy was uplifting, the one in Atlanta depressing, and while the aesthetics of a breakfast might seem trivial, it isn’t, because it’s indicative of deeper, more profound differences.

In Italy the staff cared because they were either the owners or employees who had been there for decades, and this was their life, and they saw it as a craft more than a job, and because Italians see breakfast as something more than a momentary transaction meant to get you in and out as efficiently as possible, before you run off to do your next thing. That includes proper place settings because they respect the customer and want to elevate the meal, which is important because life is more than getting as much stuff as you can, it's also about living each moment well, and so you should try and make all of your life as fulfilling as possible, even when you're grabbing a pastry before work.

In Atlanta the staff was temporary (imported for minimal cost), the plates paper, and the utensils plastic, because why go through the luxury of silverware and china which means additional cost infrastructures (another supply chain, more employees, loss from theft and breakage), and so plastic forks it is, and in the very small chance (an occurrence that corporate risk assessment has surely quantified) you accidentally swallow a snapped-off plastic tine, then they have the fine print at the bottom of the legal-department-cleared hotel check-in form you signed, and so you sit and wallow in the corporate-mandated purgatory of beige banality that surrounds you, slicing your microwaved heated frozen links with a flimsy knife, your state of satisfaction hovering just high enough above the contentment level that the probability you'll leave an angry three star or lower Yelp review is low enough for the algorithm that the hotel group management team up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota not to flash red. The management-consultant-approved efficiency spreadsheet that's cleared all of this, not you, is really who needs to be satisfied.

Those two meals fifty hours apart capture a contrast between the US and Europe2 I’ve seen in years traveling both3, with the US undeniably wealthier in easily quantified material terms, but lagging in harder to measure, more subjective qualities, such as aesthetics, fulfillment, and contentment.

Fighting over if the US or European lifestyle is superior has become an ongoing debate, which I’ve taken part in many times. I’ve played both sides of it4, not out of duplicity, and only occasionally to be a troll, but because there isn’t a simple answer.

That isn’t how it plays out online though, where people want a clear winner, because they believe there should be one, since Europe and the US are so similar, with a shared history, moral framework (Christianity), and political philosophy (Constitutional Democracy), and so the debate becomes a real world example they use to promote this or that set of laws, regulations, and mandates. See, we only need to pass X because Europe sucks compared to US, or see, we don’t need to repeal Y because the US sucks compared to Europe.

The battle flared up again while I was walking across Lombardy, with the launch of another “The American mind cannot comprehend this” meme, that did what it was built to do, which was to go viral. As it was dying down, the power-outage across Spain and Portugal gave the American side a great chance to revive it, by dunking on the backward Europeans.

There's a lot more truth in this meme than most, because there is a genuine comprehension gap between the US and Europe. There really are two different minds with two different understandings of what it means to be a human, and that manifests in different rules, regulations, and priorities, since policy is a result of a society's cultural preferences.

As Plato long ago noted, you cannot understand what it means to be human without reference to the communal. We are social animals, incapable of living alone, and so our concept of Telos, or fulfillment, or how we envision our purpose in this world, is reflected in how we organize. What we consider the ideal Polis.

While the US and Europe share a broad commitment to classical Liberalism, and Democracy, we have very different definitions of the Public Good, which means different views of what we want out of life, and what we consider fulfilling. In broad and simplistic terms, the US emphasizes material wealth, opportunity, and individual liberty while Europe values community health, a shared common good, and a sense of place.

From the European perspective the US has a cult of the individual, and that's why it has too many guns, obscenely large cars, can't build a public transportation system, and has dysfunctional public spaces. From the US perspective Europeans are unmotivated unproductive slackers who would rather sip coffee all day than work, and their idea of a shared common good means stealing from the successful to give to the losers.

This difference isn't simply about things such as tax policy, health care, and worker rights (although those matter), but about how we understand the good life, and how our built environment reflects that.

If the priority is everyone is the master of their own small fiefdom, as it is in the US, then the public sphere can largely be ignored, because it is after all only a temporary part of anyone's life. A place you have to pass through on your way from your home, which is large enough to also serve as a place to socialize with others, to your job. The result is public spaces in the US are given short shrift, and there is little understanding of why you would splurge on them to worry about aesthetics.

The result, as I’ve noted before, is despite our immense natural beauty and our material wealth, large chunks of the US are ugly, soulless, and dehumanizing, a landscape of bland tract housing, pre-fab strip malls, copy and paste franchises that look as if they were airlifted in and plopped down in plots of land bulldozed flat, with zero shade or attempt to integrate them into the surrounding nature.

That isn't to say Europe doesn't also have its suburban sprawl, its dehumanizing architecture. It does (especially you, Netherlands), but even in those neighborhoods there’s still a lingering awareness of aesthetics and the need for spaces to socialize, and if they’re not provided by the state, then there are small family-run businesses that serve the same function, because the citizens demand that.

The US also has beautiful neighborhoods, and cafes and restaurants that almost reach a European-level appreciation of aesthetics, but those are the exception, and are primarily limited to the wealthy and educated elites.

Yet, if you are stuck, as I've been, in some random town in France, Germany, Italy, or the Netherlands, you will almost always find an uplifting cafe, restaurant, park, plaza, where you can rest, have a decent meal, sit, and relax, without being immersed in banality. That simply isn't the case in the US.

Beyond being depressing — a slowly dehumanizing experience that accumulates over a lifetime — this homogeneity means much of the US feels indistinguishable from place to place. While I was in a hotel in Atlanta, that was clear. I could have been anywhere in the US. Europe, in contrast, has yet to fully succumb to this deadening leveling. There is still a genius loci5, or a spirit of the place, which is true across the continent, including outside of the historical neighborhoods that are the focus of this debate.

You don’t need to be in a picturesque Lombardy village with a six-hundred-year-old church to find a genius loci (although that does help), rather what you need is Europe’s culture of respect for the collective good, and an understanding of the value in unquantifiable non-material wealth6.

Obviously material wealth is a primary contribution to human happiness and fulfillment. Outright destitution and poverty trumps all else, but above a certain level of riches there comes a point of diminishing returns7, that asymptotes towards a flat line above which little is gained. One dollar of additional GDP no longer brings the same benefits as it does further down the development ladder, and in some cases, it can actually be destructive, as all other contributions to happiness are pushed aside to acquire it.

That, at its heart, is the European claim in this debate. That both they and the US are economically wealthy enough that GDP alone is no longer the singular determinant of well-being, and the US seems to have forgotten that, having become mono-maniacally focused on such a narrow definition of the Good that they missed the fuller picture, and in their quest for higher stock markets, have ignored that human needs include physical community, aesthetic elevation, and belonging.

Belonging does include a physical sense of place, but it's far more than that. It means being a valued part of something larger than yourself, and in Europe's case that also means being part of a cultural heritage that extends into ancient times.

The US has less access to that, given our relative youth and diversity, but that's a lesser reason than our cultural adulation of wealth and the self, especially the latter, that has made us into a nation of hundreds of millions of communities of one, bound together less by a shared identity and sense of belonging, and more by a utilitarian economic and legal pact to maximize efficiency, and with a promise to not erect roadblocks as you zoom your way towards success.

We are an island of misfit toys, ejected (often violently) and cast aside by other countries, or having left them on our own, either to escape hardships, or because all of that "belonging, community, and aesthetic appreciation" was holding them back.

I am sure there are readers who have been mumbling, "You're giving such a positive spin to Europe, because while you might have walked across many of its countries, you are still seeing only the best side of it, as a tourist."

That's partly true, but the stronger point for the pro-American side is that I probably couldn't have had my life, where I changed careers three times, and now travel for a living, allowing me to compare different cultures around the world, outside of the US. I am a product of American individuality, cultural flexibility, and economic might and I’m not here to simply bite the hand that fed me.

Rather than claiming Europe is clearly better than the US, I’m saying it is simply different, and the vast majority of people born and raised in Europe will prefer it there, and the same is true with the US, because that is what it means to come from a culture. We are all "groomed" to have the values we grow up around, and for ninety-eight or so percent of citizens, that means you are more comfortable living in the culture that raised you.

It is primarily we intellectuals and elites who culture shop, picking and choosing what works best for us. That's true in Europe and the US, where each group of elites is inoculated from the least admirable qualities. Well-to-do Americans can escape the banal landscapes, either through travel or by living in the exclusive US neighborhoods that share European qualities, and find belonging in communities formed from their careers that cross national and cultural boundaries. Highly motivated Europeans can move to America, or work in a large corporation and escape European provincialism, while not giving up the aesthetic and communal benefits it offers.

It is the 'normies,' working-class, back-row, or whatever you want to call them, who make up the vast majority of citizens, that are tethered to live within their culture. That isn’t who is engaged in this debate, but it is who it should be about, not us cultural chameleons.

While this debate often descends into pointless memes, the principal issue being addressed is deeply serious. After all, 'What constitutes a fulfilling life?' remains one of the most important questions anyone can ask, and since a society and its culture is built from the top down, policy makers getting that question right has literally life-long ramifications for hundreds of millions of people.

To the degree there's a winner so far in this debate, the energy and hubris is on the pro-US side, which isn't surprising given that it leads in easily quantifiable categories (GDP, innovation, etc.) and because the US model works 'better' for the elites doing the debating. Like it has for me. It provides them with the maximum freedom they want, without burdening and taxing them to build a Public Good that their status allows them to fly-over, or otherwise bypass by selective ignorance.

That's unfortunate, because while I'll first do the wishy-washy "both sides can learn something here" thing, the US elites in particular would benefit from some humility, gleaned not from visiting the quaint parts of Europe, but from spending time in the less successful parts of the continent, then doing the same in the large swaths of their own country they largely ignore.

That is where the contrast is the strongest, and where hopefully they will get a glimpse of the value of non-economic forms of meaning, and recognize that building spaces, an economy, and a culture that respects human dignity and people's need for more than the economic isn't merely a theoretical question for us intellectuals to debate online, but the central challenge of our time that shapes how hundreds of millions experience their brief time on earth.

I will be briefly in Montreal from this Thursday to Sunday, then I will be spending two week in Hokkaido starting the 24th. My plan is to explore Sapporo, then try and hike/train (depending on my back) to Muroran. As usual, if you are in the region, and would like to walk, or grab a drink, please reach out to me. Until next week!