How I View the US After 13 Years Living in Europe

What’s changed more? The USA? Or me?
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Video Chapters
0:00 Hook & Intro
1:01 Why I Don’t Miss Guns
4:34 US Style Government vs European Style
7:07 Walkability and Public Transport
9:21 Food Quality and Price
10:36 Healthcare in the US vs Europe
12:04 Consumer Protections in the US vs Europe
12:52 Workers’ Rights in the US vs Europe
14:45 Don’t US Workers Earn More Money?
16:23 Do Americans Romanticise Europe Too Much?
21:54 SPON
23:06 Conclusion & Outro

If you’re new to my channel and videos, hi! I’m Evan Edinger, and I make weekly “comedy” videos every Sunday evening. As an American living in London I love noticing the funny differences between the cultures and one of my most popular video series is my British VS American one. I’m also known for making terrible puns so sorry in advance. Hope to see you around, and I’ll see you next Sunday! 🙂

If you want to know HOW I make my videos including gear, lighting, all the tiddly bits that connect it all together, (with cheaper alternatives and kit I used to use), I’ve listed each item, what it’s great at, and why I use it on the gear section of my website here:
https://www.evanedinger.com/blog/my-gear

Otherwise: here’s a quick list of some of my kit without descriptions from the above link:

Camera: Sony A7siii
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Main Light: Aputure 120d mkii
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Shotgun Microphone: Sennheiser MKH-416
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Really useful SSD: SanDisk Extreme Portable 2TB
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In the USA, this laptop here cost over $2,000. Yet, not only did I get it for free, but Apple paid me an additional $2,000 value on top of it. Why? Because I didn’t buy the last laptop that I’d bought that I was unhappy with in the US. I bought it in Europe, where as a consumer, I have so many more rights I never could have dreamed of having in the USA. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When I moved from the US to the UK over 13 years ago, it was not meant to be permanent. My goal was to get my degree and then go back to the US and get a job and start my career and jump start my life but with some international experience. I was thinking this was the only time in my life where I could reasonably live abroad for such a long period of time, a temporary adventure. But when I finished my degree, something unexpected happened. I didn’t want to go back. And that seems to be a pretty unanimous experience of Americans moving to Europe. The longer I stayed in London, the more I began to notice all of the assumptions that I’d grown up believing in America, the things I was brought up to believe were undeniably true and just the way the world worked. It turns out they weren’t true at all. And it goes so much further than the full story behind this laptop. My name is Evan Edinger, and these are the nine biggest realizations that I’ve had after moving abroad and the rights and freedoms that I gained from leaving the land of the free. Let’s jump in with the biggest stuff first. Uh bring out the big guns. I was raised in a very proun household. In my family home in America, we had a 12- gauge shotgun, a 10- gauge, a black powder rifle, and a 410 shotgun for the children. My dad would take us out some days to shoot empty cans of beer or play pigeons or sometimes go hunting for feeasants or deer. And this was in New Jersey, mind you, quite a blue state. I was raised around guns, and in school, I was taught that owning a gun is a fundamental freedom and is part of being an American, inseparable. In the Boy Scouts, this was driven home even more. But because gun ownership is viewed as a fundamental right, it wasn’t ever really a serious consideration to not have them. The idea that other countries do not allow guns is viewed more like these other countries are missing a fundamental right. This is why the conversation can get a bit weird for many Americans. In London, most of these standard police don’t have guns. And for most police work they do, they don’t need them. Owning a personal firearm here for the average person is almost impossible. And I’ve never once missed the ability to own one. Why? Well, what reason would I have to own a gun? The main reason the average American owns a gun these days isn’t really to join a well-formed militia to keep the government in check just in case of tyranny. That ship sailed, hasn’t it? It’s also not to hunt, and it’s also not for sport. It’s more of a fear-driven decision. You see, bad people have guns. So now I, as a good person, need a gun, too, to protect myself from the bad people with guns. So that way all of us have killing devices on us. It just makes sense, right? But as I’ve now lived in a country where the public don’t have access to firearms, I’d say, as you can probably tell, my opinion on them changed dramatically. Especially with the constant stream of horrendous shootings happening literally every day in the USA. There was six yesterday. In schools, there’s in mosques, there’s in churches. People are just getting shot up all over the place. And yet politicians are like, “What are we going to do? What are we going to do? We can’t try anything. We just have to deal with it. Can bad people still get guns in the UK?” Yeah, supposedly. But it’s much more difficult. And therefore, the crimes with guns are equally rare. Visiting Philadelphia when I was younger was always scary to me because I never knew who had a gun, who wanted to rob me. Visiting New Orleans a couple years ago, I was told by my hotel staff that a few days prior, a tourist was shot and died in the local Popeye’s Chicken because he caught a stray bullet of two people having an argument in the restaurant. So, that’s just something that people just have to deal with. This constant fear of I could just die being caught in a crossfire and there’s nothing I can really do about it because freedom. I’ve pretty much never felt that level of fear in London at all. And that alone was enough to sway my opinion on guns. Sometimes in online spaces, I see a really popular bad faith argument used that, well, London simply replaced guns with knives. It’s the same thing. Actually, I do hate that we live in an age where I have to spell out that a machine that can kill tens of people every minute from a distance that main purpose is killing is a different thing to an item primarily used for cooking or as a tool in the garden, which can also be used to hurt people one at a time close up. I’m someone that’s happy to change his opinion on something with new information. I cannot imagine having to stand by my beliefs that I had 15 years ago, which is why I also think it’s a bit backwards to force yourself to stand by beliefs people came up with over 200 years ago for their society as opposed to updating them like we update our opinions. It’s not necessarily for lack of trying. It’s just as most Americans are aware, the government doesn’t really work as you’d expect or the way that we were taught it’s supposed to work in school. It seems like it’s always in a perpetual state of dysfunction. Which leads me to the second big realization I had while in England. One thing that’s really drilled into you pretty much every year of American school is that American democracy is the end- all beall of government and that it is the beacon of freedom other countries look to emulate. Then once you become an adult and you see how dysfunctional the US government is, you search for anything to feel better about it and usually settle on, well, at least it’s not a third world dictatorship. Low bar, but yeah, I guess that is worse. But it’s this weird false dichotomy where it’s either American democracy the way it currently is or communism. So, living in the UK, I’m also used to having a rather government. We had a prime minister who couldn’t outlast a lettuce, and now we have one with the personality of an office stapler. The interesting thing that I find about the parliamentary system that the UK and many other countries in Europe have is that even if it’s a bit a lot of times it is by design so much more functional at getting things done. In the US, you have this incredible idea of checks and balances to avoid consolidation of power. In theory, what mostly ends up happening is long periods where the two sides of the inevitable two-party system will never agree. So nothing gets passed and Americans in need of better infrastructure or anything really get nothing. And then when one party does get control, they spend their entire time destructively trying to undo everything the previous party did until the next election when it just repeats. Things rarely move forward in America. They just stagnate or decline. The parliamentary system is not perfect. In fact, first pass the post, which is the style we have here, similar to the US’s, is incredibly outdated compared to the ranked system of voting. And in my opinion, the House of Lords is a relic of the past. But if a party or coalition of parties does not get a majority in parliament, they pretty much cannot form a government. From my lived experience, in this case, a re-election is called to try again. Otherwise, nothing would ever get passed and the government would be ineffective. Remind you of anywhere? Like right now, how the US government hasn’t found a way to fund itself in the parliament model? That would literally mean a re-election. So politicians are encouraged to find middle ground, otherwise they lose their jobs. By design, this form of government allows for the government to actually move society forward, especially as it’s for 5-year periods, which is usually a lot more stable. Sure, I might disagree with whatever tosser currently finds himself in number 10 Downing Street, but he is passing laws, and then when power shifts to another party, as it did recently, it feels like the new party mostly sticks to the status quo, but trying to push society forward in the direction that they think is best in less of a destructive style than American democracy. basically just a little bit more stable. It’s messy, yes, but after 13 years away, I’ve come to the belief that no system of government is perfect, but most systems in Western Europe are far more effective than what I grew up believing was the quote best in the world. And this doesn’t even touch on how badly money and corporations influence US politics more than the citizens do. Growing up, the idea of freedom to me as an American was owning a car and being able to drive wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. This is intensely ingrained in American culture. In the 13 years I’ve lived in London, not once have I ever needed or wanted a car. That’s a huge shift, pun intended. Figuring out how to use the trains and how to use the buses did take some genuine time to get used to, but I cannot begin to explain how mentally freeing it is to want to go somewhere and just go without needing a car. I could commute to and from work, head to the pub for drinks with a friend, take a day trip to Wales or Oxford, and it’s all as easy as walking. In the US, if I wanted to go to the grocery store, I would need to drive there. pharmacy. Got to drive there. Go to the bar. Going to get drunk and then I guess I have to drive back. No other way of getting home, is there? Well, that’s due to the awful zoning laws in the US, separating areas people live from areas with things that people want to see or do. That’s just how it’s designed. Within a 10-minute walk of my flat here, I can buy groceries, pop by, see a friend, go to the pub. I could go see a film, or I could just see some neighbors on the street just cuz I can. You could say that’s cuz you’re in a big city. Well, it’s not just London that I’ve had this experience in, but Liverpool, Berlin, Munich, pretty much every town in England that I’ve ever visited had the same thing. Small towns, Epsom, Marlo, Maiden Head, these are not giant cities, and yet they all have the same focus on walkable neighborhoods, which is so incredibly good for physical, mental health, everything. These days though, I pretty much cycle on my ebike everywhere because that is another option available to me here in London. London is full of safe and protected cycle paths that make commuting by bike not only viable but faster than taking public transport and more fun. I have made an entire video about how cycling in London completely transformed my physical and mental health. I’ll link that above. Can you cycle in the US? Oh yeah, just a lot more dangerous. Can you walk in the US? You could try, but again significantly more dangerous. As I outlined in my video on why Americans don’t walk to school anymore. Seems like a lot of things it’s like, oh, you could do that in the US. You just have to, you know, risk your life a few times. Can you go to a restaurant in the US? Yeah, you just got to risk your life. Can you have your kid go to school? Oh, just just yeah, just risk his life. It’s fine. After having spent some time living in walkable neighborhoods, I would never ever choose to live in a card place ever again. It is truly one of the most life-changing parts of living over here. And because I’m always walking everywhere, because I’m always cycling everywhere, it’s so much easier to be healthy and physically fit without even trying. And this goes doubly for the food over here. The US already allows food manufacturers to pump so many unhealthy and unnecessary chemicals into foods in the name of profit. Groceries I buy in the UK and that I’ve bought in Germany are fresher, healthier, and contain fewer unnecessary ingredients as is legally mandated, and yet they’re still significantly cheaper than what you can get in the US. It always blows my mind every time I visit a grocery store in the States from just how expensive all the basics are. As I’ve said before, Europe’s food agency focuses on possibilities and the US’s focuses on probabilities. Is it possible an unnecessary additive could be harmful? Europe prohibits it just to be safe. The US agency, the FDA, they only step in if the probability of it being harmful is high. So, that risk is passed on to the average American consumer, which will be a running theme in this video. I suppose in reality, the ability to quickly pop down to a local shop that’s quite small with fewer options and that just takes me 5 minutes to walk there, pick up some ingredients for the day or maybe for the week is something I prefer doing so much more than having to do a weekly shop where I stock up on all these things and throw them in the back of my car. And it’s one of those things where once you experience both, there is no contest. No contest. So, it’s much easier to be healthy in Europe than in America. But if my health does have issues, I am glad it’s not something that would ever bankrupt me or cause me to ever think about how much it would have to cost me just to be sick. I’ve been to a hospital in London before, made a whole video about it. I was in some incredibly intense pain, so I called the free NHS helpline. They gave me advice and told me to go to the GP, so I did. He gave me some meds, cost me 9 quid. And when the pain got worse, I went to the hospital and waited to be seen until I got to see a proper doctor. Embarrassingly, turns out it was just some uh intense gas pain. But thankfully, I was okay. And none of my hospital visit cost me anything at all. I didn’t have to call up an insurance company asking permission to be sick. I didn’t have to spend 700 bucks a month only to discover I still haven’t paid enough. I got to pay more just to get my proper health care. Just showed up, got the help I needed, and then I went home. That’s quality of life. A country without a health care system like that is not an advanced nation. There are only two types of people that are against the freeing social safety net that is universal healthcare. people that have never experienced socialized healthcare and people that profit from the broken system. That’s it. There’s a reason why whenever anyone from any of the more advanced nations in the world wants to visit the states, they have to get the most expensive travel insurance package. Because the US is dangerous and 2/3 of Americans actually want universal healthcare. But 2/3 isn’t enough in America’s current form of democracy because that’s only 66% of the people, but not 66% of the money. And that’s actually how you’re going to move things. On money, we’re back onto the topic of my MacBook. If you buy a tech product in Europe, you have a reasonable expectation that it should last you at least two years free of defects. And if it’s not up to your expectations or breaks down before then, you can demand a return or replacement. This law protects consumers from shady business practices. My 2019 Intel MacBook Pro was awful. It was constantly having issues, kernel panics, overheating, forced restarts. It was an awful, awful device, and I didn’t pay for Apple Care because I knew I didn’t need to. I even made a whole vlog on the day I was returning it because I was so surprised that this consumer rights law would literally get me back the £4,000 I had spent on it. To date, that is still the only time I’ve ever needed to enact that right. Companies that sell products over here have to have higher quality control or they risk losing a lot of money on returns to people like me that understand that that law is there to protect us. But it’s laws like this where you really begin to notice a pattern that life in Europe is one that gives more rights to the everyday person over giant corporations and shared benefit over private. Everyone can enjoy public transit. Everyone can benefit from free healthcare and safer food. And the biggest one of all is workers rights. I’ve already made an entire video breaking down the workers’s rights I gained moving from the US to the UK, but a quick summary would be 28 days minimum paid holiday, one year paid maternity leave, 2 weeks paid paternity leave, sick leave, even the right against unlawful termination. When working part-time at Urban Outfitters in London, even though I worked less than 20 hours a week, I still got two days paid holiday per month. That’s insane, right? No, that’s just life over here. Meanwhile, I worked 5 years at a Pizza Hut in New Jersey for over 30 hours per week. Never got a single day of paid vacation in my life. That and they only paid me $2.13 an hour, which was insane at the time, is insane now cuz they still haven’t increased it and it hasn’t been increased since the ‘7s because saves the corporations more money. Yet again, corporations versus the people. If one day I got a new boss in America and even though I’d been working at the same company for 4 years, he didn’t like me, he could fire me on the spot and I’d be out of a job and in an awful situation. In the UK, it’s so much harder for an employer to fire you because the law requires dismissals to be fair in both reason and in procedure. In practice, that usually means your employer has to give you warnings and a chance to improve before they can even think about letting you go, unless it’s something super serious like gross misconduct or something. Everything in Europe gives you, the individual, more rights over those with more money and power. Growing up, this is how I was taught the US was. I was taught the US is for the individual, is for the individual’s freedoms. But in practice, that is really just not the case. And once I experienced just a year abroad, it was very apparent all of that was just propaganda. Or maybe maybe it’s the way it was supposed to be and things just went a bit wrong. And finally, the conversation around money. The US has a much higher cost of living regardless of your state. There are cheaper states, there are more expensive states, but the basics are still so expensive. Groceries are more expensive. Data plans so much more expensive. cable, health care, the costs associated with driving, all of these things add up. But hey, it’s also true salaries for most office jobs are significantly higher in the US than what you can find in most countries in Europe. So if you earn a lot of money and money is your sole defining metric of success, then you can feel a lot more successful in the US. But because the culture in Europe is work to live and not live to work, you might find that the stress and cost tradeoffs and quality of life erode the value of that higher salary quite quickly. I don’t care about GDP. I couldn’t give two shits about companies. What I care about is quality of my life, the things that make me happy. I I I don’t really care about this whole like, oh well, our country has a big GDP and my my state has the GDP of Norway. Who cares? Is that is that that isn’t affecting you in the slightest? What is affecting you is not having free healthcare, not being able to get around without forcing yourself to have to use a car, being able to have your kids go to school without getting shot. I don’t know. I just find that is such a bizarre sort of stance to have is like my quality of life is dictated by the money that the richest in society make. It’s I think the main thing though out of everything that I miss about the US that I can’t really get here is not rights, not freedoms, not anything that’s big on quality of life improvements. It’s just Mexican food and good ice cream. But the quality of Indian food in London more than makes up for both of those, for me at least. So, now I’d like to ask a question I’ve seen quite a bit online recently. Do Americans romanticize life in Europe too much? This might make sense. You see a lot of influencers online sharing things about Europe and you see these posts of Americans going to Europe and being like, “Oh my god, it’s so pretty.” And then they come back and they’re like, “Oh, I miss my iced coffee.” Or something like that. But I just want to pause for a moment here because something I find really interesting about this whole conversation is just how much the shoe is on the other foot from where it was 20 years ago. Based on what they’d seen from Hollywood films and TV shows, Europeans used to ask the same thing about America. They were wondering if they were romanticizing life in America too much. That was, of course, when their main source of information about America was idealized interpretations in the cinema. Whereas now with the proliferation of YouTube and people sharing both sides of every situation, it seems like the pendulum has swung in the complete opposite direction. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I’d say Americans don’t romanticize life in Europe at all, but rather they long for America to have some of the basic freedoms experienced by Europeans. They wish they had the option to experience some of the freedoms that Europeans have, but within the US. Every country has its problems. Every country likes to think their country has a uniquely bad government and inefficient bureaucracy. But that is one thing that’s pretty consistent no matter where you move to. A common gotcha when having this conversation online is countries in Europe have racism or countries in Europe also have a homeless problem or housing crisis or cost of living so on and so forth. That’s not really something I don’t think anyone’s really debating. No American is looking to life in Europe as if it has no problems at all and that the existence of these similar problems makes moving there pointless. I think most Americans who are eyeing up Europe are doing so because of the things that America is lacking. Nearly two in three Americans want universal healthcare. Well, America doesn’t offer that. Again, two in three Americans want European style vacation policies. America doesn’t offer that. And 53% of Americans would prefer to live in a walkable neighborhood, but sorry, America doesn’t offer that. The list goes on. If America were an actual democracy, I don’t think many of these people would be having romanticized views of Europe at all because they wouldn’t need to. they could have everything they wanted in the country they were born and raised. And judging from the results of a recent survey showing that 52% of Americans feel that they could have a higher quality of life abroad and that 43% of Americans think they would be happier if they moved abroad. I’d say these things are very much linked. I think this majority of Americans have seen how the US government actually operates counter to the will of the majority of the American people and have mentally given up the idea of the US ever improving in these areas that matter a lot to them. And after being continuously exposed through social media as opposed to Hollywood about how life in Europe actually is and these basic freedoms that are enjoyed over here, I think many Americans are happy enough to ignore the perceived downsides of moving abroad. They don’t really want to move abroad. They probably don’t even want to learn a foreign language. But at the end of the day, they’d probably rather do that and all the other hurdles they have to go through rather than have their family go bankrupt if they get sick or get hit by a car or get shot. Moving to a country in Europe or really anywhere at all won’t solve all your problems, but it very well may solve one or two of the big ones that you actually care the most about. [Music] At the end of the day, a lot of this just comes down to what you value in life the most. Certain things that you value will guide you towards certain countries and certain regions of the world where you can actually achieve those things. The other day, I saw a thread on Reddit titled, “Americans who’ve moved abroad permanently. Was it worth it to you? Would you recommend it and how’s your life now? And the top comment on that really spoke to me and I wanted to read it to you. US to Germany in 2017. Never going back. Our work life balance is incredible. We travel, have time for our kid, public health care, free daycare, free college for our son. There’s reliable public transportation and we can bike everywhere in the city. Cost of living is lower. Quality of life is higher. There is very little violent crime. We live 2 km from a lake at the midpoint between several large public parks and within walking distance of about 12 grocery stores, hundreds of restaurants, and a major hospital with cardiac and children’s specialty departments. Today, we rode bikes to the grocery store and then got cash and pedal over to a sushi place for lunch before riding bikes along the canal and stopping to relax in the sun and play on a swing set next to the canal. It’s not easy, but it’s been infinitely worth it for us. This is about a city in Germany, but this is also how I feel about living in London. I can cycle anywhere I want to safely along the canals to visit friends or pick up groceries. I can hop on any type of train or bus I want. And if I get sick, I can head straight to the doctors and get helped for free. I don’t have to fear getting shot over a disagreement or have my child be shot when learning in school. And that is a big deal to me at least. I could not do any of these things in the place that I was born and raised. I didn’t move here for a higher quality of life because my understanding at the ripe age of 22 was that nowhere could possibly have a higher quality of life than America. It’s the greatest country in the world. Then I experienced it and now I can’t go back. So would I say Americans romanticize life in Europe? No. I’d say Americans have finally stopped romanticizing life in America. If you’re someone that views money and increasing the amount of money that you have as the sole qualifier for quality of life, you probably won’t like it in Europe to be honest with you. Or maybe maybe you’ll find that money isn’t as important a thing when all your needs are met and you can just live your life. What was the line again? The pursuit of happiness. I think that’s what it comes down to in the end of the day. And I’m just glad that I live in a country right now where I do have the freedom to pursue whatever makes me happy. Might not be as easy to get a job after I get go to London because the network isn’t there. I can get a job in London. That’s not where I’m going to live for the rest of my life. But before I wrap this up, let me just take a quick word to thank today’s video sponsor, Incogn. So, if you didn’t know, I actually kept my original American phone number when I first moved to the UK. I ported it to my Google account cuz I originally planned on moving back to the States. And the reason I bring this up is because I can see that America is inundated with spam calls and spam text at the moment. And that’s because, well, a lot of their private data is all over the internet. Thankfully for me, I use today’s video sponsor, Incognate phone number, my address, loads of information that I don’t just want all over the place. and they remove it in the background. Look how many different data brokers they have removed my data from recently. Insane. The line just keeps going up. Now, truth be told, full transparency, you have every ability to email these data brokers yourself and get them to remove your data. But there are quite a few of them. And so, it is incredibly timeconuming if you want to take back control. That’s why it’s nice to just let incognity just like the spam calls won’t affect me. So, if you’d like to take back control of your private data, sign up today at incogn.com/evan ediger and you can even get a nice discount. My link is in the description. So, thank you very much to Incogn for sponsoring. Now, let me wrap this up. This is a video I’ve considered making for a really, really long time. And every time I tried to get started on it, I would end up taking an entire section of the video out and just making a video about that. That’s how my healthcare video came to be. That’s how my supermarkets video came to be. That’s it’s pretty much how most of my videos came to be. And at this point, I was just like, you know what? I want to compile everything that I really feel about my move and all the benefits that I feel like I have I’ve had here and just put them into one thing. So, one thing I feel like a lot of people ask is like, “Well, what did your family think?” And it’s like, “Well, yeah, my mom cried.” She was like, “But how could you ever want to leave America?” And I feel like it’s that mindset when you’ve never left America. The idea of it sounds crazy because of all the indoctrination that you’ve gone through. And if you’ve never left, you can’t ever know what it’s really like until you do. And so, I guess what I can only say is I hope everybody gets a chance to uh either find a way of fixing the broken dem democratic system in the US or find a better life. What a nice ending. Anyway, I’ll see you on my channel next Sunday. Thanks for watching. Goodbye. I don’t care about GDP. I could care less. I should I did the American thing still. Oh, you see, I’m still American inside. You see, I could care less. I I couldn’t care less. So, that’s my first day in London so far. I’m going to go out and uh walk around, get some food. So, thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more England updates. Evan Explores England. I will see you guys next time. Goodbye.