The Most Dangerous Disease Americans Suffer From Is This

An Insider's Outsider Perspective

“Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music.” ~ George Carlin

Three years I’ve been away from the United States. It was that pesky virus, of course. Sure didn’t have “global pandemic killing millions of people” on my Bingo card.

Between pandemic-related travel restrictions that prevented me from moving freely between countries to pandemic-related lack of funds, it was pretty touch-and-go there for a while. The absence from my kids gnawed at me like a slow-growing cancer. I talked to my twenty-five-year-old son and twenty-one-year-old daughter—sometimes for hours every night—but phone calls are a shabby substitute for being able to hug someone that you love more than your own life.

My son’s a cuddler. We snuggle on the couch, watch Ozark, and hold hands. My daughter, who at age three informed me to “sit on the bed and adore her,” dispenses fewer cuddles. I, her willing supplicant, take what I can get.

The city I lovingly call Hellston.

They say that without a full armory of heat panels, space rockets would burn to cinders upon reentry to Earth’s atmosphere. I’m like that when I reenter the United States, except that my heat panels consistently fail me. I think I’m ready, but I’m not. First comes the oppression, then the dismay, then the horror. Being in Texas amplifies these emotions tenfold. How do we Americans maintain this breakneck pace? How do we survive? How did we make a virtue out of being overworked, over-leveraged, and overwhelmed?

Before moving to Europe, I certainly lived this way. It was normal. I could summon no alternatives. But the minute I discovered the humane, less-traumatizing pace of Italy, I was ruined forever. Knowing people lived like this—afternoon coffee chatting with friends and acquaintances under a green Campari umbrella, dinners on terraces that overlook a 12th century church, breakfast cornetti baked fresh instead of being nuked inside a plastic bag at The Waffle House—made it impossible for me to be happy waiting in a long line of cars at a Starbucks’ drive-thru and motoring forty minutes to go to an overpriced, mediocre restaurant.

Much of the U.S., Houston especially, is so unnecessarily ugly. We sacrifice everything—our history, our culture, the things we see everyday whose hideousness affects us whether we realize it or not—to the gods of consumerism and convenience. Major cities seem to be in a heated competition to shed previous iterations of themselves in a never-ending cycle of build and destroy, build and destroy. Think Pennsylvania Station in New York, or an 19th century brownstone that’s knocked down to make way for a yoghurt shop. America whores itself out to the highest bidder. Always. Everyone’s in a hurry to get somewhere, one person per car, faces tight, eyes peering anxiously ahead. How strange it is to be isolated in a car and simultaneously stuck in traffic. Toll roads get more expensive with every visit. I’ve wisely learned to avoid them.

But there are jobs in America. So many jobs. Pay seems to be in inverse proportion to the amount of physical labor required. Hard jobs like cleaning houses, construction, mowing lawns. These pay the least while demanding the most effort. In Houston, nail salons are almost always owned and operated by Vietnamese immigrants (Italy has few nail salons—that sort of artifice is not part of the culture, plus there are not many Italian women who are going to clean your house, watch your kids, or do your nails.) These first-generation Vietnamese will work themselves into an early grave to provide world-class educations for their children; those children grow up to become neurosurgeons and physicists; then they have children of their own, many of whom are too Americanized to exert themselves any longer. In this way, the American dream becomes a law of diminishing returns. The longer you stay, the worse it gets.

Texas makes it relatively easy to open a business, which is why there are so many of them. Italy does not. The entrepreneurial spirit here is crushed underfoot by ruinous taxes, daunting regulations, absurd rules, and a work force that actually has rights. Waiting tables, for instance. Tipping is completely optional in Italy. Why? Restaurant owners have to pay living wages to their employees. None of this $2.10 an hour schmegegge (the same rate I was paid a million years ago when I waited tables), plus tips. The burden to support food servers is not placed on the customer in Europe. Here, it’s considered an honorable profession, one worthy of fair compensation.

But now in the true spirit of capitalism, American restaurants have found a way to screw their employees out of even those meager wages. Behold the table iPad, installed at most restaurants across the country. Instead of interacting with a food server, you place your order, and pay, on an iPad. Yet another human interaction is thusly eliminated.

Supermarkets, too. This last visit, I rarely saw a cashier at the checkout. Instead, I was confronted by daunting pieces of technology called the “Self-Checkout,” an interesting turn of phrase for a country that has numbed itself on opioids. No one smiles anymore—and to be fair, some of that probably has to do with the furtive worry we all share about engaging with someone whose actual breathing might kill us.

So, let’s follow this train of thought all the way to its conclusion. Most Americans wake up, drive to work alone in cars, put on a brave, false front at their place of employment (perhaps the most isolating thing of all), and then drive back alone. If they have kids, those kids are likely addicted to their smartphones. In 2021, people checked their smartphones 58 times per day. Eighty-eight percent of Americans are now “zombie eaters,” who stare at some kind of screen while eating. We’ve become a nation afflicted by digital autism. No one interacts anymore—not meaningfully, at least. We swipe right on Tinder and Bumble, we order off screens, we consume porn on screens, we shop on screens, and we rarely bother going to malls anymore. I can’t tell you how many people I saw, especially young people, wandering blindly and aimlessly with a screen in front of their faces. What’s real anymore? What’s virtual?

In one way or another, we are desperately trying to escape the menace of American life. We’re lonely and searching, well-versed in the ways of technology, perhaps, but unable to interact face to face. Here in Europe, you sit at cafés and chat with passersby, people you see every day. Folks know you at the supermarket. They say hi to you on the street. These micro-interactions are important, even to hardcore curmudgeonly misanthropes like Yours Truly. Like it or not, we are social fish. Existential it may be, but if no one says hello to you, how do you know you’re even alive?

That isolation and loneliness and the frantic, insane pace were like a scream I heard everywhere I went in the U.S. God, it’s lonely there, even if you have friends and family. Isolation is a uniquely American disease. We’ve innovated and “convenienced” ourselves into our own little hermit kingdoms, first with cars, then with air conditioning, and now with our individual online realities. We turn over every virtual rock, looking for our acres of diamonds, without realizing they were beneath our feet the whole time. The curated lives we create for ourselves on social media are fake. That, too, contributes to our feeling of isolation; not only from others, but more importantly from our own authentic selves.

It’s not going to end well, this screen dependence and the isolation, Balkanization, and depression it breeds. Let’s face it: we’re addicted. A nation of addicts doesn’t just drift apart; its flies apart. And that’s exactly what’s happening. Isolation is sustainable only for so long. Before you know it, life is nothing but a raw Darwinian struggle, a fight for survival. No one has the bandwidth for compassion anymore. Not when butter is five dollars a box, drinking water is tainted with Chromium-5 and radioactive isotopes, and in 481 major cities across the U.S., the average cost of buying a house is over one million dollars.

French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville said back in the 1800s, “Americans owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus democracy throws [a man] back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

As wise as he was, I doubt even de Tocqueville saw the 21st century coming. I know I didn’t. Frankly, I don’t see any way out of this, do you?

I would love to get your thoughts on the subject of America’s isolation problem. Please leave your comments below.