Is America as Soul-Sick as it Looks?
the view from Sweden
I study Swedish five hours a day. A social program for foreigners with higher education. Funded by the city. My classmates are Iranians, Afghans, Indians, Africans, and Eastern Europeans—lawyers, economists, epidemiologists. Everyone is nice, everyone is studious.
I’m not a language guy, but I put in the hours.
I struggle with why there is such a close similarity between the words släkt (extended family) and slakt (slaughter). And I wonder what it means that Skogen (the forest) sounds so much like Skuggor (the shadows.)
Sometimes it feels pointless and I wonder why I’m learning a small-country language, where everyone speaks perfect English. But I persist, for reasons unclear to myself. I try to just “do the next thing” now and not have grand, pie-in-the-sky dreams, every time I’ve had those they’ve fucked up my life—just put one foot in front of the other. “Doing the next best thing” means just plowing through the fog, not knowing where it’s leading.
I have lived in Sweden now for a good number of years. It is far from being a “perfect place” (hint: there is no such thing as a perfect place). Climate-wise, I think it might be as the Romans believed, a land beyond God.
But I always laugh when my right-leaning relatives send me things about Sweden’s great unraveling, the migrant-gang carnage, etc. These are the same folks who lauded Sweden when they went their own way during Covid. Yes, there are more random gang-related shootings in Stockholm than there were before and this is bad. But turn on the nightly news and more often than not, it's about a traffic accident or the debate over whether or not to tax plastic grocery bags. I think it's beautiful that accidents make the evening news—traffic accidents are probably so rare because getting a driver’s license is like passing the Bar exam. Boring is good. Boring means consistency, stability, normalcy.
During the pandemic, I split my time between Sweden and suburban North Carolina, commuting like a little rat through the shuttered Frankfurt and Amsterdam airports. Nowadays, I go back every 4 to 6 months.
Sometimes I feel like not being in America for the pandemic left me alienated from the Americans. It was like a gushing river appeared and separated people on two sides and people took different paths that led to completely different realities.
But I would say something happened to the Americans, not in the summer of 2020, it wasn’t then, but something happened in later 2021-22. I’m not sure what it was, but people got weird.
It's almost like the soul died. Or people lost all taste of sweetness.
I don't worry about Sweden, I worry about America. And “worry about America” is not code for “I’m worried about Donald Trump winning the election,” I mean I’m literally worried about America.
When I think about America, I think about how in 2021 I would go into the suburban grocery store and all the over-the-counter sleeping pills were sold out. And the rise of all the mattress startups—Tuft and Needle, Purple, Casper—with their promises of a revolutionized hybrid sleeping experience, how they gouged the price of a mattress up from $600 to $2000 in just a few years. But nothing seemed to help the Americans sleep better.
My mom’s North Carolina suburb was suddenly filled with millennial couples who had spent the last decade slumming it in California and Brooklyn, and then all of a sudden decided to decamp to a new life. I see more of them every time I go home, they’re like cockroaches. They pace up and down the sidewalk-less streets looking kind of shell-shocked, their brows all furrowed, buried in their thoughts or podcasts.
We all know why America is spirit-sick. No one enjoys anything, everyone's afraid of each other, everyone's paranoid, people RSVP to an event which means—theoretically—"I'm committed to going" and then like half of them show up, not feeling like it, socially afraid, etc, etc. People write about "their experience of two decades of life on the Internet" as if there was a there there, as if they'd been doing something that the rest of us haven’t been doing for twenty years, but in a critical-theory-ey kind of way.
Covid and Trump turned us into warring tribes that hate each other and disagree over everything. Lockdowns made us isolated, paranoid, and dependent on delivery food. PPP loans and helicopter money and crypto and Robinhood trading and zero-interest-rate mortgages and AirBnB LLCs made a lot of people secure, while leaving them also feeling like they were geniuses, not just children of their time.
A nation of increasingly insane people eating plastic-wrapped shit that advertises itself as organic and additive-free, addicted to adderall and weed and antidepressants and omeprazole, driving like absolute maniacs while looking at TikTok, staying up late into the night identifying themselves with random social-media tribes they find on the Internet.
Europeans can be offensively comfortable and self-satisfied and smug, its true. They sometimes conveniently forget that their countries can't really defend themselves and they're living on the edge of the abyss. At the same time, they didn’t become as coddled and weird as the Americans during Covid. At least in relative terms, their wealth has not grown so much, but neither has their inflation.
Sometimes I worry about the Swedes. The Swedes know they are an American colony but can't get away. The Americans are coming. With NATO accession, the military bases are being opened up to the Americans. As a friend of mine put it, it’s like their brains have been colonized by America. A friend of mine recently met up with a guy whose son told him: “I feel more like an American than a Swede.”
This is a Swedish guy, and his Swedish son!
In a ten block radius around my apartment, all the billboards are for Whatever the American prestige TV show of the moment is (Succession for a while), HBO Max (subscribe to the Swedish version), Amazon Prime (pushing hard but not yet achieved any notable market penetration here due to labor regulations), and the Deadpool vs. Wolverine movie.
Even the left-wing 30 and 40-somethings sometimes look kind of befuddled, vaguely worried, and muttering sometimes wondering if Swedish will even be spoken in Sweden in 20 years.
They're right to worry. On every corner, omnipresent, there is the creep of American cultural imperialism, maybe a year or two delayed from the trends in America. Everyday, I see people in Stockholm wearing Carhartt and carrying New Yorker tote bags—if some trend or style or podcast or food is big in New York, if its Brooklyn, the Swedes are on it like flies on shit.
This barely scratches the surface of the depth and spread of American culture and fashions and American-isms and phrases which have been copy-pasted into Swedish language conversation. But recently, it seems it has been reaching a height of absurdity. At my local pub, where I sit and rot and Ricky Martin and Kenny Rogers and Bruce Springsteen are always playing in the background, I overheard two Swedish guys in the booth behind me gushing—in English—about "Chicago" and "the best chicken and waffles."
We visited my girlfriend’s parents this weekend and the US election was 90% of the news—and it wasn’t that distant, flat European public-broadcaster style of American election coverage either, it was American-style politics-as-entertainment, with county-by-county breakdowns on a touchscreen with a Swedish Steve Kornacki explaining the electoral map—the millennial SVT correspondents were giddily running around in the battleground states, breaking down the black and hispanic vote, eating street tacos.
Right after the nightly US election coverage ends, the insanely popular reality show All for Sweden comes on. The premise—and you’re not going to believe this—is that Americans with Swedish roots, their grandmother or great-grandmother or something, are taken on a trip back to the old country to discover Sweden—they gush about how beautiful and interesting the country is, how much they feel at home. This warms the Swedish heart, makes them feel loved and important.
Even as it continues to die a little inside, America is deeply popular and contagious. It annoys and unsettles the older generations from the half-Soviet Swedish past, and they say, “why so much American coverage, why so much English in the streets, what about Sweden?” but the younger people are onboard.
Of course, it’s because of NATO, they’re deeply invested and affected by American policy, but it’s more pervasive than that.
"There has to be a backlash to this coming some time, right?" I ask friends. "Some kind of protect-Swedish-culture thing?" They say yeah, or they shrug coyly. To suggest such a thing, being proud of Swedish culture, is right-wing-coded, and the cordon sanitaire against the rapidly growing populist-right party (who every urbane Swede will remind you over and over again—emerged from actual skinhead, neo-nazi parties of the 80s) requires never doing or saying anything that could be misconstrued as right-wing.
I love America, I love American ideals, and I love Americans. But when I’m back home, I feel myself becoming more and more Swedish, and recognizing in horror, fuck, I’m Swedish!
I’m quickly frustrated and annoyed by the dysfunction of the DMV office when I go there to renew my drivers license. It’s a fucking mess, insane printed out signs all over the walls and QR codes that don’t work, the senior citizens are all shouting, “Can someone help me, why don’t things just work?” And I agree with them. And when I go to DC and New York, I’m annoyed by the wafting smell of marijuana pouring out of every building and car. You know what, I think it’s good that marijuana is still very-illegal in Sweden.
All that said, it’s hard for me, even after all these years, to describe what I love and what I hate about Sweden. It is something about the quality of the people, the landscape, the lostness of it all. And how so things just work, the government and bureaucracies function.
And how de-commodified their lives are, still, at least compared to American life.
It makes me tear up when it’s a sunny summer day, the temperature barely cracking 65 degrees and the park is jam-packed with big families and friend groups BBQing and eating nice food on picnic blankets. (I know that this is still a thing in New York—but you don’t see it as often in the American suburbs.)
It makes me tear up how when on long car trips, families don’t stop at the goddamn Chick-Fil-A, they pull over at some mossy green space and share a Thermos of coffee with four cups (real cups not paper cups) and eat some Saran-wrapped sandwiches.
Didn’t America used to be like this, kind of wholesome and sweet and middle-class—the literal American dream—before for whatever reason, our souls died?
One experience sticks out to me in particular: I had to find a sublet in Stockholm. I had become accustomed to America’s psychotic, acquisitive behavior about property, sublets, AirBnBs, the husband-and-wife-realtor-couple hustle-and-grind-mentality of “I own this, so you should pay me an extra $1000 premium on top of what I pay to sublet”—so when Swedish people offered me places to rent at the monthly cost they paid, ie. the cost to cover their mortgage and taxes and fees I was so deeply moved. I couldn’t believe it. It also made me sad that it moved me. Like a beaten dog.
The Swedes have been kind to me at some bad times where I needed some simple kindness. The Americans just stared at me with their steely blue eyes and humorless smiles, always weighing everything and quietly saying to themselves what's in it for me?—time is money—always evaluating social or economic utility. The Swedes like Americans, but they struggle to understand Americans. We're so nice, so funny, so entertaining, so good at small talk. But we're also kind of fundamentally unreadable: "you never know what Americans are really thinking” they say.
And they’re right: I love my country, I will never betray my country, but I’ve started to see Americans as fundamentally treacherous.
I remember a decade ago AirBnB was just people renting their place out when they were away for a weekend or a couple of months, or a couch or room. It's still like that in Europe—essentially a little side-hustle.
Now all the AirBnBs you see in America now are not homes people actually live in—they are house-hacks, a FIRE scheme for some bearded dad and his blonde wife and their two stupid kids, with the cleaner coming and the cameras and the electronic locks. It’s understandable that people want to safeguard and protect their investments with as little cost, work and stress as possible. But it still makes me see red.
I've had the experience of identifying with a host-nation (Canada, Ireland) more than my native country. Surely, most 'Murkans now have an anecdote about when soul-rot set in. Strangely, the thing that came to me was something from twenty-five years ago that I identified more with the modern south than the nation. It was about new marketing in thrift stores. In the late '80s, around the time that large cities got 'vintage clothing' stores, southern thrift stores began to house 'boutique' sections where things were housed in glass showcases behind a register. Often these items weren't particularly special. They just looked little used, 'in excellent condition'. The rationale of old thrift stores was that poor folks as well as middle-class people could get cast-offs at rock-bottom charity prices. Suddenly, it seemed like anything more-or-less unused was sold at retail-minus-10%. Ask the commercial Puritan behind the boutique register whether this [ordinary can-opener/ KMart work shirt/ spare tire] was correctly priced, and they'd give you a poisonous, narrow-eyed look of affronted avarice---"'You looking for some kinda handout? This [donated thing] is every bit good as new. Why shouldn't you pay what it's worth?"
It is illegal to charge more than 10% (IIRC) above your costs when subletting. A guy in Göteborg recently got jail time for profiteering on airbnb.
As another American living in Stockholm for many years, I definitely agree that covid made me very alienated from the us.
One thing that I love that Swedish people almost never do that Americans do way to much is talk about mental health. Its like some crazy game of showing how important you are. Also the us is a really stressful place to live so its not totally a status thing, but it feels like it sometimes.