Never truly alone. In Pictures Ltd./Corbis/Getty Images.
Of all the smallish towns I have stayed in along France’s Rhône Valley, Tournon-sur-Rhône is my least favourite. It’s a loud town with an old expressway, Route Nationale 86, running through it.
Yet even in Tournon, on a boring Wednesday afternoon, there was an active social scene, a communal sense of needing to be, if not directly with other people, then at least near them. At one local café, friends, colleagues, couples, families came and went. Those who arrived alone, mostly older regulars, came to sit, watch the world and chat with waiters and fellow patrons. They were alone in name only. Each had their place, as I later found out when I realised I’d taken the corner seat of one regular. I offered to switch, but they declined with a smile, muttering something I hoped translated as “I may be set in my ways, but I’m not THAT set”.
I stayed at that café for three hours, and though I was alone I never felt lonely. I didn’t order much, but I never felt rushed. The French understand the value of sitting for a long time around others, while seemingly doing nothing.
After this cafe, I went to four others, some packed, others close to empty. Despite the unloveliness of the town, it never felt depressing. And perhaps that’s because people being social is central to human happiness. Loneliness, isolation, having no community to be a part of — that’s depressing. That is the kind of despair that can quickly reach desperate, suicidal levels.
This cafe culture, which I saw every day in every community along the Rhône Valley, is just one example of France’s healthy sense of communalism. The socialising here isn’t “networking” — the point isn’t to make work connections or climb the social hierarchy, but rather to become part of a collective, with a shared understanding of who you are (in this case, French) and why it’s good to be that. This sense of self so ingrained, it’s not explicitly recognised. The water you swim in, but don’t notice.
That feeling of knowing who you are, of recognising that you’re a valuable part of something bigger and better than yourself, is far less common in the United States. In my homeland, being you, the maximal you that you can possible be, one defined by your own flavour of uniqueness, is central. It’s one of the reasons I think Europe (or at least large parts of it) is far healthier than the US: you can see that borne out in the suicide and mortality statistics, but you can also see it with your own eyes, if you spend time shuttling between the two. It doesn’t take long to realise that we Americans are not a healthy bunch, neither physically nor mentally. We are a sick country and we’re getting sicker. We have an unnaturally high level of mental illness, both diagnosed, and not. We are addicted to medicines, both legal and illegal, to try and cope with it. We are killing ourselves in record numbers.
Americans claim that because we have more stuff, we are better than other nations. In my mind, contentment, happiness and fulfilment are the more important measures of achievement.
Yet Americans often miss the strength of Europe because they rarely stray beyond its touristy city centres. Big city Europe is in the process of being smoothed into a generic, boring singular entity. This soulless Americanisation has accelerated dramatically over the last few decades, driven by globalisation, tourism and secular capitalism. The result is McEurope — a chain of big cities where chunks of each are the same. The branding of the franchises might be a tad different, the scenery a little altered, but these chunks serve up the same drab experience.
There isn’t much dignity left in these “historic downtowns”, most of it lost in the rush to monetise the mobs. The Hen and Stag parties flown in on Ryanair. The pub crawls. The cobbled streets lined with the same stores selling trainers, sex toys, raw paninis under glow lamps, absurdly calorific sweets and whatever else tourists splurge on to feel special. Even the cathedrals have been reduced to a check mark on tourist lists to justify a day of binge drinking.
What McEurope is lacking the most is the communalism that’s central to European culture. Thankfully though, McEurope is confined to a few neighbourhoods, and it’s very easy to get away from them. I would always recommend visiting some random mid-sized town in Europe, rather than a capital city. Some place like Valence in France, which like Paris has a long history and an ancient and sublime cathedral, yet hasn’t entirely succumbed to the global forces trying to flatten the world.
In places like this, you can see the care Europeans still give to living: to eating, to relaxing, to being part of a group, to working with a purpose beyond making mint. Here, we find the antidote to the very American ideology of individual liberation. The idea that everyone needs to be emancipated from everything. Everyone needs to find their true self and be it — even if that means severing ties with family, friends, church, nation, anything and everything that came before. Those are provincial, backwards and holding you back.
The purpose of life in America, then, is to be free. Yet freedom is a perverse goal, a broken Telos, that can only be seen as positive if you have an abnormal sense of what it means to be human. To be human is to be social; the ancient Greeks knew it, the medieval Christians knew it and even the early Liberals knew it, but we moderns have somehow forgotten it. Once you understand that, then you understand that the American definition of freedom ends in despair.
True freedom isn’t being so emancipated that you are isolated, it’s the opposite — being part of a group and knowing where you fit in and are valued, whether that’s in a café, a club or a nation. In that sense, Europe is freer and healthier than the US. Most of the rest of the world is. But in the US, and in McEurope, we view community as something to move beyond. This is especially true of the intellectual class, who have an outsized role in policy and business decisions.
Yet even in America, you can see a glimmer of resistance. Americans are social animals too, as all humans are; we need community so much that we will seek to build relationships in the most hostile environments. Just look at the McDonald’s franchise, conceived as a ruthlessly efficient and transactional way to sell food. You go in, you buy calories, you leave, in as short a time as possible. Yet, many McDonald’s branches around America have evolved into community centres, where some people even meet to pray. (To their credit, the corporation has recognised this and changed their approach, although the higher driving goal is still efficiency.)
During my years focusing on poverty, addiction and despair in America, I saw communities emerge in the most desperate places: from trap houses in the Bronx, to homeless camps under bridges or dive bars in Los Angeles. Without functional communities to become part of, many Americans end up gravitating to dysfunctional ones out of desperation. Without churches or cafes, they go to the drug traps; without families, extreme politics; without sports clubs, gangs; without friends, angry online forums.
Sadly, a growing minority fail completely to find anything to be part of and end up in a state of completely antisocial perversion. A state of depression, confusion, emptiness and then violence, against others and themselves. A state that for too many ends in suicide, either quickly, or slowly, one needle at a time. That is a freedom turned into a tyranny of emptiness.
A version of this essay was first published on Substack.
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SubscribeMy experience of my own country, America, is similar to the author’s in that the cities are home to the striving class that values individuality taken to the extreme. Venture out of the cities, however, and, like France, community spirit is alive and well and is often build around a place of worship.
Many of the deaths of despair mentioned by the author are born not of loneliness but hopelessness. They are the middle-aged men in small town America who might have social connections but no way of making a decent living. I wonder what effect the economic death inflicted on France (and other West European countries) by their leaders in the name of net zero will have on community spirit?
Both you and the author dismiss big cities. Yes, the centres, where business is done and where tourists go, can be cheerless, but what about the suburbs?
I also wonder whether the author speaks any European languages. If you can’t speak (say) German, you can’t really participate in the life of Berlin (e.g. by going to the theatre, or to a church in the suburbs), so you’re not really qualified to dismiss the city as McBerlin.
For what’s it’s worth:
I attended my brother’s wedding in Southern New Hampshire in May. We ended up in an array of pubs, ice cream shacks, clam shacks, not to mention the New England farmhouse where we stayed.
Everywhere, I chatted with ordinary Americans, about their dogs, about their travels, (rarely about the politics that dominates the news cycle). All you had to do was turn to someone and make a small comment, the smile came out and the conversation started to flow.
One of the best chats I had was with a group of kids on the summit of Mount Monadnock, nibbling blueberries and taking in the 360 view, while my goofy brother challenged one of the college kids to a push-up competition (and lost!)
Now, I live a stone’s throw from the French border – I go there all the time, I speak fluent French and I can tell you I never get that kind of engagement there. The place is simply overrun with French people.
Vive les Etats Unis!
Not sure chatting to people while being a tourist relates to living in a place and forming long term relationships with locals. Southern NH you need a car to even go get a pint of milk. No one walks anywhere. Majority commute to Boston, work longer hours, have way less vacation time than in the EU. They return to homes in the woods or suburban sprawl. There is no walk five minutes to a plaza or square – like in almost all densely populated EU towns – where locals congregate. Getting together is a real challenge, it takes way more time (which people have less of) and energy.
Can’t really disagree with these points, many of which are perfectly valid – though perhaps a bit overstated (my brother does, in fact, cycle into the centre of town). But in general yes, the car culture in the US, plus strict enforcement of drink driving laws, makes getting a cheeky one down at the local a bit of a pain.
On the other hand, lots of Europeans drive everywhere too. Outside of Paris it’s mostly the same kind of car culture.
But sure, I’m (nowadays) a rank tourist and my experiences reflect that. I’m just really comparing with France, where I also go as a rank tourist. So I maintain: USA – 1, France – 0.
Yeah, but confrontations over tipping, self-bussing (cleaning away your own table because the staff are too lazy to) and micro-aggressions from overweight bearded lady servers, ensure that the US cafe experience is neither restorative nor a balm to the lonely soul.
That’s a huge generalization.
The author is unfamiliar with the small diners, donut shops, and hometown eateries one finds in every small community across the nation, where just such coming together happens every day, although, true, without images of dead French artists painted on the walls. But the piece was really just about slapping the USA around anyway, the same old same old cobbled together by the world’s America haters, including the especially virulent ones who happen to be Americans.
America’s population includes that strangest of cohorts – people who hate the place but refuse to leave.
This author is a waste of skin if you ask me. He seeks meaning in just jumping from place to place, but can’t see that is exactly what is driving meaning away from his life. You have to just settle down somewhere, set roots, and live with the people around you for better for worse. His work is of a childish outlook.
‘Aint that the truth!
Why do Americans tend to be so adipose? Because they eat too much. Why do they eat too much? Because they are lonely and they are hoping to drown their loneliness with food.
Perhaps the author can familiarize himself with the small towns in America that constitute what is dismissively referred to as flyover country, the places and people held in contempt by the elites and the DC cabal. In those places, neighbors know each other. By name. They have often lived there for generations and will die there. They, too, have all the electronic toys and gadgets but they are a bit less beholden to them.
I suspect had the author tried a one-to-one comparison between, say, a farm town in Iowa or a hamlet in Alabama to rural France, the comparison would be more parallel. Cities are, of course, different because the US has the luxury of land mass and has built outward rather than upward. A commuter class – or perhaps worse, a growing remote worker class – is going to have little meaningful interaction with other city dwellers.
He also leaves out one crucial difference between the US and anywhere else: in America, it is impossible to tell at first glance who has been in the country for five minutes or five generations. That’s not an issue in homogenous societies that embrace their history and traditions instead of tearing them down, who take pride in the country’s accomplishments instead of feeling shame, and who understand that no nation has a pristine past.
Blame the disease on mass tourism and the franchise culture. It’s interesting to see people in Barcelona, Venice, and many mass tourism spots revolting and demonstrating against the out of control tourism invasion, they’ve made life unlivable for the locals with their airbnb’s, swarms of people, out of control rents and cost of living. The locals can’t even live there anymore, they need to live far outside the city centers with long commutes and rising rents in the peripheral areas. Places like Amsterdam are party centre with endless noise and drunken/stoned tourists staggering around, and a crime problem. The thought of socializing at a stinky McDonald’s franchise makes me want to puke. I go to a local pub or coffee shop for my socializing, the city center sucks. It will take alot more than Cafe culture to cure America from it’s psychosis, electing Trump will make things much worse than they already are .
How would Trump make things worse? We did not have this rate of inflation under him. We were not involved in a losing war under him, nor were we considering involvement in two other theaters, all three of which have nuclear implications. There was no record high credit card debt, delinquency rates, the rush to de-dollarize, or an open border. But, please; do tell what Orange McBadman would do to things not just worse, but “much worse.”
The Afghan war was Bush’s war, and Trump made the exit deal with the Taliban before leaving office, it was going to fall apart anyways regardless. As for Ukraine, the Russians started that one, not the west, Putin is the problem here. Trump may try to go isolationist, but the US will pay for that later when the global situation falls apart, isolating is not a policy, it’s denial. If Trump wants to increase tariffs, start more trade wars, cut taxes for the already rich , and restrict immigration, these are all inflationary policies which will increase debts and costs.
I believe that your characterisation of Barcelona and Venice also applies to the haunts of well-heeled tourists in the US, such as Aspen, Colorado.
Wonderful article. During an earlier part of my life I did a lot of work on cycling/walking promotion. I’m a doc, and started into that field for health reasons. But it was interesting that not only were those who cycled and walked healthier, they were happier too. The more time a person spends in a car over the week, the less happy he is., the fatter he is, the less he volunteers, the less social contact he has.
Our auto-centric communities are a wonderful form of “freedom” but also separate us. We live in our big houses (the average person in NA now has ~900 sq ft of living space, as compared to 300 in the 50’s) all alone. We have home theatres instead of going out, home workout rooms instead of meeting friends at the gym. We are bowling alone.
In the 1980’s I remember President Reagan in speeches talking about small town America, how the communities worked and played together, how everybody knew each other, how they respected each other. It is interesting that the closest that I ever came to experiencing that was when I was assigned to Germany in the mid-1980’s and lived in a small town on the Mosel river.
Is that because you never lived in small town America or you did and never saw that community spirit?
It might just be my experience. I’m certain there are small towns in America that have the same kind of community spirit that I saw in Germany in the Hunsruck and along the Mosel, but I don’t think that is the norm for America. My small town American experience has been life in the suburbs and bedroom communities that sprung up after WWII. In these communities we had local schools, community sports, and occasional weekend picnics and fun runs, but it was not the community experience I had in the small towns in Germany.
This article makes some pertinent points but verges on caricature of the differences between Europe and the US. Anomie, and depression ia quite a feature of day France too – and there are other causes – including as the progressive ideological takeover of large parts of society, often discussed on UnHerd and the particular suspicion of white people in general, and young white men in particular. Some professional people don’t have it too economically bad, but there has also been a wholesale exporting of jobs and importing of cheap labour which has certainly adversely affected working men (At one time this was a pretty standard left of centre position which has somehow miraculously vanished).
And aren’t the European café owners also trying to make money? Cafés do close for economic reasons. There are also obvious physical and structural differences between cities on the two continents; with a few exceptions such as New York American cities are not conducive to walking, so a European style café style society just isn’t viable. I happen to agree that there is a big downside of a society almost entirely dependent on the use of cars, but people also want their pools etc -.and in any case retrofitting isn’t really an option.