WHY I LEFT AMERICA (and why you should too?) | American expat living abroad in the Czech Republic

i'm coming to you today from beautiful pula croatia or as the czechs would say and behind me you can see the pula amphitheater which is one of the six largest surviving roman amphitheaters in the world it was built somewhere around the year zero like between 27 bc and like 65 a.d i think it's actually one of the only roman amphitheaters in the world that has all four of its original side towers more or less intact you can see one over there and one behind me over there as well and i can tell you from having been to both the roman coliseum and this coliseum right here that this one is actually i think more beautiful and more impressive than the colosseum in rome it's certainly more intact and more well preserved so here we can get a good view down into the inside of the amphitheater from above and you can see they use it all the time as a venue for things like concerts and films events of all kinds so for some reason one thing that's also a common sight in hula croatia is these roving bands of like i would say like eight to fifteen uh single men just just like kind of walking around looking for something to do we were actually kind of wandering out loud as we as we walked at the lungo maori which is like the uh the boardwalk by the sea we were wondering like where are all the women in this town it just seems to be populated by these big groups of of men basically having pop-up parties on the street just drinking beers and having shirtless wrestling matches and taking group selfies so uh and here's another view with the sun setting behind over the ocean and you can see here that tourism is alive and well in croatia at the moment so here we have a group of uh looks like seven or eight one two three four five now that's yeah seven men seven single men all together but once again it just seems like the men in pula they roam in these uh massive packs searching for prey and i just have to wonder like are these guys hoping to run into like the perfect complimentary set of seven single women so that each one of them will have someone to uh link up with or have they just already resigned themselves to drinking alone with their bros on the boardwalk all night because it seems like that's where that is headed let's get into the main topic of the video which is another question that i'm asked all the time that i haven't really talked about that much which is why did i decide to leave america in the first place because as most of you know by now i'm american i grew up in the state of colorado and the usa is by all accounts still one of the most powerful prosperous richest countries in the world with one of the highest standards of living so the question is why would i want to leave a place like that in the first place didn't i have a great life there isn't that a place that everybody wants to to go to i mean whatever happened to the american dream whatever happened to the dream that brings so many immigrants to the united states why does the united states have such a strict immigration policy if people that were born in the united states and have all the privileges of being a citizen end up wanting to leave after 30 years of living there and these are all great questions and honestly i think it's important for me as an american citizen to talk about my experience of actually growing up there and my thoughts about why someone like me would decide to move away and try to build an entirely new life in a completely different place a completely different part of the world so the first thing i have to say is that i didn't leave america because i hate america that's far from the truth i mean america is a fascinating and crazy and beautiful and wonderful and diverse place with just about everything you could possibly want to have or experience and there's so many things that make america an amazing interesting place to live i mean in a country of 330 million people there's almost nothing that you can't find there if you look for it and as much as the usa has its problems like genuine deep-rooted political social cultural racial problems there still are so many good people in the usa there's so many good reasons to live there there's so many good reasons to to make your home there so i would never say that i hate the usa for many people it's the best place in the world to live depending on your economic situation and what you do for work and the values that you have there might not be any better place in the entire world for you to to set down routes and make your home but in other ways and for other people there are a lot of problems with living in the u.s that if you grow up there you're not necessarily trained to recognize those things as being problems with your location problems with the fact that you're actually still living in america which is the country you were born in when for what you value or for what you're trying to pursue or for what you want out of life there's so many other places in the world that will serve those values better and that actually give you more opportunity to grow and expand and succeed as a human being in the us we have this concept that is talked about quite frequently which is called american exceptionalism which is the idea that america is exceptional that there's actually something about the usa that puts it above and beyond all the other countries in the world it's easy to understand where this idea comes from i mean post-world war ii the united states and russia basically and to a lesser extent maybe uh england and the uk were some of the only countries in the world that were left with an intact economy and intact infrastructure and basically we're still functioning as like civilized societies the rest of the world was in ruins the rest of the world was in absolute chaos and so america had this huge head start over the rest of the world in terms of building maybe the first truly modern civilized society in the 21st century and so from the end of world war ii until you know the the end of the 20th century america just became more and more powerful and developed a higher and higher standard of living so i think when you combine this massive global economic advantage that america has had over the past 70 years with the fact that it's one of the most culturally isolated countries in the entire world in my opinion it's very easy to see why americans have been trained since childhood to believe that basically america is like the shining beacon on the hill some of my more patriotic friends back home in america have actually used this phrase the shining city on a hill which correct me if i'm wrong but i think it was coined during the reagan era ronald reagan in the 80s when this idea of american exceptionalism was really kind of brought to the forefront and made into an enduring part of american culture so the consequence the result of this cultural background is that many americans to this day still believe that america is really the only country in the entire world that enjoys a modern standard of living for example when i came to the czech republic i had people from back home in america asking me if they had toilet paper in their public bathrooms i had them asking me if the food supply was secure if you know if shipping routes were secure like the types of questions that someone would ask you if you were in some bombed out war zone right uh or some like not even third world country but like sub third world country and we're talking about the czech republic which at this point the czech republic is essentially a modernized highly developed western european country for all practical purposes but unfortunately i really think that this idea that america is a shining city on the hill and the rest of the world is a third world backwater that doesn't even have toilet paper it is so ingrained in american culture it's something that is so just unquestioned it's part of what you're taught in school it's part of it it permeates popular culture in tv and movies it's a central theme in the speeches that are made by the president of the united states and the candidates for public office and so basically american people grow up with this idea that it would be absolute nonsense to even consider living anywhere else in the world except for the usa to be honest with you i was one of those people for a very long time more night views of pula so for me personally for example i didn't even consider the possibility of living abroad as a realistic option and not just traveling not just like going away for a while and wandering around some foreign country with no roots and then coming back home but actually living abroad actually going somewhere and trying to make a new life in a foreign country that idea didn't even occur to me until the year 2019 when i went to visit my sister in asia so at the time she was living in china my sister is an amazing person and she came around to this idea about a decade earlier than i did and she was always kind of like trying to nudge me in this direction saying like hey have you considered teaching english abroad have you considered maybe moving abroad for a while trying that and for so many reasons personal reasons and psychological reasons and everything else that i can't get into here i would always just say like yeah yeah maybe i'll consider that like later maybe when i have more money or maybe when i'm a bit more established here which makes no sense of course but i just had so many excuses for not seriously exploring that possibility until now but while my sister was living in china she had invited me to come visit her like dozens of times probably once again i had always found some kind of excuse to turn her down or just to put it off for another few months or another year or whatever so finally in the fall of 2019 i sort of ran out of excuses i had some money saved up from having worked really really hard over the past couple of years and some investments that had done well because the stock market was just going up and up and up and up which it still is and i was sort of at this transitional point in my life where i wasn't sure what i was going to do next i think it was actually my mom that mentioned like well it seems like a pretty good idea to actually like spend a little bit of money take some trips and go visit some people in different parts of the world see how they live you know go visit your cousin go visit your sister just have some experiences to do some research and figure out what kind of life appeals to you what is it how is it that you actually want to live so i finally bought a plane ticket to go meet her in hong kong and we spent uh five days in hong kong and five days in tokyo something in my brain that had just been missing some missing link that i hadn't been able to figure out for years just clicked into place and it was suddenly so obvious to me that what i had been missing for all of that time was this contact with other cultures this contact with the world outside of the u.s which is really like people in america don't realize this but the us is like a really weird isolated hermetically sealed little bubble of culture and people and ideas and attitudes even though it's such a huge country geographically huge and with a huge population it still is like it's almost like its own tiny little village because it's so culturally isolated from the west from the rest of the world so just the simple experience of walking around a new city that looked different from anywhere i had ever been before in my life and hearing languages that i'd never heard before and seeing people that didn't look like anyone i had ever met before and didn't live like anyone i'd ever ever met before and talking to people that had a completely different experience of life than i did it was such a powerful experience it was like it was a life-changing experience uh just those 10 days in hong kong and tokyo because i have this idea that's been rattling around in my head for a very long time and it's kind of like the the underpinning of all of my philosophy about life and everything that informs the decisions that i make and that idea is basically that the more contact we can have with reality and the more involvement we can have with the world the better people we will become and the more of our unique human potential our unique potential as individuals we will be able to unfold into the world because i think it's it's only through contact with reality it's only through deep involvement with uh as much of reality as possible as as rich and detailed and complex an experience of reality as possible it's only through that experience and that involvement that engagement that we are actually able to work out the the problematic nature of ourselves that we're actually able to work out like how to be ourselves how to be human how to how to deal with the deep inherent flaws that we have as individuals and as human creatures what i realized when i was in hong kong in tokyo i was taking only tiny little nibbles out of life i wasn't really jumping in i wasn't diving into the deep end and taking a massive gulp of life and just drinking the cup of life down to the drex which i think is what you have to do and i always believed that but i wasn't living that way you know i always believed that i would always pay lip service to that idea but but i didn't actually manifest that idea in the way that i lived i was living very timidly and cautiously and taking little tiny nibbles out of life and just living inside of my tiny little bubble and my little box of what was comfortable and attainable and easy so when i was in hong kong in tokyo for those 10 days i sort of realized it just hit me right in the face like the time to drink deep of life the time to live is now now while you're alive while you can like you can't waste a single second more and i realized that if i didn't start now if i didn't do it as soon as possible then it might never happen and i might just continue to kind of slide into middle age or slide into mediocrity slide into just the comfortable sort of path of least resistance and just keep allowing my reality to become narrower and narrower and more and more comfortable and more and more easy which i think is exactly the opposite of what we need to be doing as human beings the thing about being american is that it's a double-edged sword it's both a blessing and a curse it's a curse in the sense that americans are extremely culturally isolated americans live in the american bubble they don't really have a lot of contact with the rest of the world at least not any contact that is actually you know productive or instructive or in or engaging in any way when you live in europe for example you're sort of clustered around on all sides by completely different cultures countries with a totally different language a totally different history uh a totally different way of being in some cases i mean and yes i mean europe in general has a sort of group identity you might say that's debatable i suppose but in general you know if you live in the czech republic by default you're just more aware that you know there's germany there there's poland there's hungary over there in the east we got ukraine and all these other places it sort of forces you to be aware of the fact that you are that your regional cultural natural identity is just one piece in the greater puzzle of human identity and human culture on this planet and in america as i said earlier you are basically allowed to sustain this delusion that america is number one so on the one hand being an american you actually get exposed to a very small little sliver of reality of the reality of what it means to be a human on this earth by living almost anywhere else in the world you you take a bigger bite out of life just because you have to just by default in order to navigate your environment you have to drink a little bit more deeply from that cup of life but the blessing of being an american is that if you become aware of this if you're aware that your experience of life is kind of limited if you're aware that there's an entire spectrum of reality that you know nothing about because you were born in america you also are in the best possible position in the world in addition to maybe people from the uk or australia and some other places but you're in one of the best positions in the world to actually be able to change that which is a beautiful thing your native language is english and so you can go to any location in the world almost you can go to any country in the world and people will speak to you in your language which i think is just a mind-blowing fact that nobody appreciates enough people in america don't appreciate enough that you can you can fly to the other side of the world and you can walk up to someone and say hello can you help me and they'll probably understand you and they'll help you and they'll speak to you in english almost no one else in the world has this privilege i'm already falling in love with pula who knows maybe i won't go back to the czech republic i'll just stay here get a little shack on the beach and live out my days the answer to the question of why i left the united states really comes down to the fact that i have this deep belief that you need in order to be the best human you can be you need to live as much as you can you need to take as big as possible a bite out of life as you can as an american i just felt that living in america i wasn't able to do that to my satisfaction i felt like there was more opportunity for me to live more deeply and more richly somewhere else in the world and the luxury of being born in america the silver lining of being an american is that having made that decision i was able to act on it but the other thing about america that i kind of hinted at at the beginning of video and then i got off track talking about all this other stuff america has some really big problems and there's some things about living there that to be honest just really suck and the first thing on that list i would say is that it's just incredibly expensive and getting more and more expensive by the year what goes along with this ostensibly high standard of living is also that everything that you do costs an unbelievable amount of money and i think partly as a result of this and partly as a result of just other cultural factors the work culture the attitude towards work in america is just extremely toxic in my opinion it's like in america people live to work there's this like hustle culture in america that's like you should be sleeping three hours a night wake up at four o'clock in the morning and just hustle just grind every single day and it's gonna take 20 years of grinding and then you might be successful but you might not even if you are successful you shouldn't stop grinding like just keep and i think in this american attitude towards work what is lost is just like any effort of enjoying life the art of enjoying life enjoying your time on this planet working enough to support yourself and finding a way to to not starve and to be able to pay for the things that you need and support yourself but in the meantime to actually find some way to enjoy being a human being this is something that is uh it's a lost art in america and something that people don't they don't talk about it they don't think about it you know it's not something that's part of the culture the first question most people ask you in america is what do you do and when they ask you what you do what they're really thinking more than anything is they're thinking how much money do you make so there's this compulsive over focus on money and work that makes it uh really terrible to live there it's just a super stressful place to live without even realizing it you just start comparing yourself to other people solely on the basis of of these material benchmarks of success and then there's the fact that we have in america a government and a political environment that is so insanely divided and so dysfunctional that they never really get anything done basic needs of people that are addressed in most other civilized societies are not addressed in the u.s the reasons for that are very complicated suffice to say that those things are very serious problems with living in the usa and just on a personal level maybe as a result of all of these things that i've just talked about i just felt really out of step with the culture in the u.s i felt really disconnected from the people around me disconnected from the culture at large i felt like i was basically swimming upstream you know swimming against the current trying to be a type of person and trying to to have to build a type of life that the culture just did not really support and you know there and there were very few people around me that were trying to build the same sort of life very very few people around me that shared the same values and shared the same ambitions as me and you know to be clear i wasn't particularly struggling socially in the us you know i had friends i was pretty well liked i had a job i had girlfriends i was you know i was actually like by most standards i was doing pretty well most people living my life my sort of life in the usa that's a good american life you know that's a good solid looking american life and the really sad thing to me is that what i've learned since living abroad there's just so much more out there there was so much more out there in the world for me and i think there's so much more out there in the world for lots of american people that are kind of stuck in that same stagnant situation that i was in where you know they've gone as far as life is going to take them in america so to be clear i'm not saying that anybody needs to make the same choices that i made but i am saying that i personally needed to get out of the usa and i didn't realize it for a long time in my opinion i did it too late it would have been better if i had gone earlier but it's always better late than never so we've come full circle now i'm standing here in front of the roman amphitheater where we began the video and if you are american or any other nationality for that matter and you're thinking about living abroad i would just say if that thought has even entered your head as something you might be interested in do it just give it a shot try to make it work if nothing else you're gonna learn so much in the process of trying to build that life in another place you're gonna you're gonna learn so much in the process of living abroad that you will never regret the decision to at least have tried it signing off here from pula croatia for my czech viewers uh once again thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one ciao

Channel: Skeleton Keys Prague

Views: 12,046

Rating: 4.9309492 out of 5

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Id: 2q2Z0nV4GK4

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021