Spring 2025
Going on three years in the Czech Republic and more than ten years traveling in Europe, I’ve gotten to know the continent and its people a little better than the average American. I don’t take that for granted, and I have been immensely blessed by those opportunities and experiences. Much like standing at a distance from the Eiffel Tower, the distance away from the U.S. has allowed me to see it more clearly.
What I miss most about the U.S. is the proximity to friends and family, living in a home without shared walls, and lastly, my American salary. I’ve recently realized that if it were not for my loved ones, I would not be as interested in moving back home. I prefer living in a walkable, safe city with higher food quality, a more relaxed culture, and good public transportation. Generally all of the states in the European Union are healthier, happier, and have more beautiful cities and villages, more time off, and more of a skepticism towards consumer capitalism. This is only considering Europe, but we could also find examples in other parts of the world.
The U.S. should really be considered more as a place like West Texas—an oil field where wealth can be extracted, but a place that won’t offer much of a social safety net and will have poor infrastructure. We can consider this with our inherited frontier mindset that is at the core of our American individualism, which often makes us act more like a company than a country.
I’ve truly come to believe, after the last ten years of our politics, our handling of the pandemic, and our continued lack of investment in a welfare state, that “every man for himself” is now more of our traditional motto than “E pluribus unum.” This is why the average American can rightfully see themself becoming “financially independent” over the possibility that the country ever develops a robust social healthcare system. When we use this metaphor and accept this fact, not only is it a more sober view of who we are as a country, but it also offers partial solutions to living creatively and meaningfully in Big Oil Country.
Ironically, this lowering of expectations allows for more cultural scripts for creating meaningful community. We just must be conscious of the aim of amassing wealth. The accumulation of wealth is to create lives we find valuable, interesting, and beautiful, not one that is obsessed with the mere pursuit or the performance. For now, the U.S. is still the best place in the world to make money, as many immigrants will tell you. And our individualism, which has many weaknesses, has also been our strength when we think about our American traditions of art, music, and gastronomy.
Fundamentally, I’m advocating for the type of creative localism that you can find in a place like Marfa, Texas, the small little art village that attracts artists and bohemians in West Texas. Like Marfa, the aim is to use our wealth and individualism to create a worthwhile space in a seemingly uninteresting place. However, this idea is not for the mainstream. Many Americans would be turned off by the eclectic nature of the idea and would prefer this oil metaphor be more akin to a Dubai-style Lamborghini materialism than my Marfa one.
Still, whether it be in Texas, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, or Oregon, we all live in Big Oil Country where everyone is out to “get mine” and corporate greed controls basically every lever of our society. This is who we are, and it’s best to accept that fact, navigate it as ethically as possible, find our inner circles, think creatively about building and using wealth, and ultimately create our own little Marfa in our homes and our communities—our own little oasis in the sea of oil fields.
