The American Dream is to leave
What the European summer obsession says about how Americans think about money
Everyone I know is trying to get to Europe this summer.
Americans have been doing European summers forever, obviously. The past few years particularly involved a flurry of think pieces about “euromaxxing” and romanticizing the European way of life.
But this summer’s desire to sojourn across the Atlantic is less like a vacation and more like an escape plan.
America is having a pretty bad PR moment right now. People who live here are not having a good time. People who don’t live here don’t want to visit. The country that spent two centuries as the place people wanted to move to — the biggest cultural exporter on earth — has become deeply uncool. That’s a sizable shift for a country whose entire brand was aspiration.
You take a country that’s become too expensive, whose promise of upward mobility has broken, filled with political dissatisfaction and intertwined with an intense, exhausting culture of hustle and optimization — and maybe a desire for a European summer is becoming a desire for a permanent European life.
A country built around the rat race
America’s relationship with money is different from basically every other wealthy country’s. Our entire national identity is built on the idea that you can make it here. Upward mobility. Meritocracy. The belief that effort translates to prosperity in a way that’s uniquely American. That story really helps justify a lot of our policy decisions, like the lack of a safety net, pensions and subsidized healthcare tied to full-time employment, zero guaranteed vacation days.
The argument has been: sure, the floor is lower, but the ceiling is higher.
Which did work for a long time and shaped how Americans related to money in a very specific way. Our risk tolerance was higher because the upside felt real. People took on debt for college because college was a path to a better life. People worked long hours because the payoff (financial stability) was tangible.
When people stop believing in that story, the way they think about money and prosperity flips. It also becomes destabilizing to our identities as Americans, which changes how we feel about being here at all.
It’s still technically true that many American salaries are higher on paper. But wealth on paper and wealth in lived experience are very different things. You might earn $120K in New York, but after rent, healthcare premiums, groceries, childcare, student loan payments, and the thrumming dread of knowing that one medical bill could wipe out your savings, it feels precarious. Especially right now.
Compare that to the European model. In most of Western Europe, your healthcare is covered. Your parental leave is measured in months, not weeks. Your vacation time is guaranteed by law, higher education doesn’t come with $100K in debt, childcare is subsidized, retirement is a public system.
When you have a safety net, your relationship to risk changes. You can leave a bad job. You can start a family. You can go to the doctor’s. The cognitive load of just existing is lower, which frees up bandwidth for things like long-term planning, career satisfaction, and — this matters — being a decent person to the people around you. (I wrote about that dynamic last week.)
The things Americans romanticize about European culture — the long lunches, the walkable cities, the café culture, the sense that people have time — those things are downstream of policy decisions. Europeans walk everywhere because their cities were built for people, not cars. They have time for lunch because labor laws mandate breaks and cap working hours. Third places exist because public space is funded and maintained. Case in point:
When Americans romanticize European culture, what they’re often romanticizing is the existence of a functioning safety net.
Which is why people are actually leaving
And this emigration wave is part of a larger trend: America’s population is shrinking. I hosted a video for Dynamo this week about why the U.S. is facing a population crisis unlike any other country’s. Three forces are driving it — falling birth rates, a shutdown of immigration, and a rising wave of Americans leaving the country.
All three are rooted in our current economy. People are having fewer kids because they can’t afford them. Immigration is being cut off by policy. And the people who are leaving — primarily working-age, college-educated, in their thirties — are chasing the version of the American Dream that America itself has priced them out of.
The people leaving are often the highest tax-paying, lowest service-using cohort the country has. And when the people who fund the most services and consume the fewest are the ones who leave, the economy gets worse for everyone who stays.
What we romanticize about European culture is not doing things
Waking up late, lingering at a cafe, smoking a skinny cigarette, having a long, leisurely lunch with your friends, reading on your balcony, working for a handful of hours until it’s time to relax again. The aesthetic of Eurocore, European summer, Euromaxxing, whatever you want to call it — is often defined by absence.
There’s no Notion, or Teams messages or even a laptop. It’s a fantasy rooted in the physical world (nature, books, conversation) in a way that American hustle/optimization culture is not.
Nylon put it well: Europe has come to represent a state of mind rather than a continent. After years of political disappointment and a sense that American culture has gone vacant, many young people are rebelling against being American.
The fact that so many young Americans romanticize European life can be read as a simple aesthetic choice. But as someone who’s written about optimization and how it’s rooted in both economic precarity and American culture, I would argue that it’s actually a coping mechanism (and rational response!) for downward mobility.
I see a longing to live like a European as a rebuke of what the last decade of American culture has told young people to do: optimize everything. Hustle. Side-hustle. (and maybe side-side-hustle?) Build your personal brand. Monetize your hobbies. Track your steps, your macros, your screen time, your sleep.
Many young people are questioning whether the definition of a good life means having a lot of money, and finding new ways to discover contentment outside of making money and consumerism. For some, that means going to Europe.
This is the same impulse behind lazy girl jobs, soft living, the quiet quitting discourse, underconsumption core, the general opting out I wrote about a few months ago.
But take a pure desire for a better life, and capitalism will do what capitalism does and commodify it. Kyle Chayka wrote about this a few years ago — how TikTok’s “eurocore” trend turns the experience of being in Europe into a participatory game, something you perform and share. The desire for less gets repackaged as just another thing to consume.
Not everyone gets a European summer
The European summer — the real one, the one where you actually go and sit in that café for six weeks — is of course a wealth signal. The ability to travel internationally, to take that much time off (or to have flexibility where you can work remotely), to afford the flight when prices are at record highs — is not available to most Americans.
Four in ten Americans have considered moving abroad, but the ones who actually do it skew educated, mobile, and financially stable enough to make the jump.
It’s also worth pointing out that this fantasy is specifically a European fantasy, even though there are plenty of places that offer walkable cities, slower paces of life, affordable cost of living, and strong community. American taste hierarchies tend to put Europe at the top, and that’s rooted in whiteness and colonialism in ways I don’t have space (nor am I credentialed) to fully unpack here.
Essentially, this is a trend that is feasible for a subset of people, that carries a significant amount of privilege, that is shaped by dynamics of race and class.
Is the grass actually greener?
Europe is not necessarily a utopia.
America is not the only country that has an intense work culture or affordability issues. Europe has its own collapsing social contracts, far-right surges, racism, housing crises, youth unemployment, productivity stagnation, and real inequality.
Fantasy tends to be better than reality, which is why there aren’t many expat TikToks that include navigating a foreign bureaucracy, or the isolation of being an expat with no community, or the fact that the charming walkable city also has a ten-month wait to see a specialist.
Plus, uprooting your life and moving isn’t the panacea we often hope for.
Last summer I spent two months in Amsterdam. I arrived feeling burnt out — the kind where you stop being able to tell if you’re tired or depressed or just done with everything. I was going through the beginnings of a breakup, feeling unfulfilled in my job and disconnected from the world. I thought that getting out of New York would reset the neurotic workaholic in me.
And parts of it worked. I biked everywhere. I drank giant lattes. I walked around feeling incredibly short (Dutch people are very tall). I drank natural wine and swam in the canals. It was one of the best summers of my life.
But I was also still working 8-9 hours a day and checking my email at dinner. I was forcing myself into a confined routine to avoid dealing with my emotions. Still carrying all of the psychological stuff I thought a different city would fix.
Towards the end of my stay, I seriously considered moving abroad — even looked up visa requirements, wrote a 12-step plan. But at some point I started wondering if I was trying to build a life for a version of Hanna that didn’t exist.
Something I think about from that summer is how much of what I loved about it was the novelty — the ability to go somewhere and try on a different version of myself for a bit. But it’s different from actually reorganizing your life, which is harder and slower and isn’t very aesthetic.
What we’re actually looking for
It really all comes down to values.
Sure, some people want to be in Europe because they love the culture and the food and the wine. But strip that away and a huge part of this is a fundamental desire for things that aren’t really about Europe at all: flexibility, security, stability, community, time.
The desire to escape the rat race is real, but I think it’s less about geography than it is about the structure of work and meaning. You’re probably drawn to Europe because you want a life where work doesn’t consume everything, where getting sick doesn’t mean thousand-dollar medical bills, where rest isn’t something you have to earn or justify.
Euromaxxing, soft living, European summer, whatever you want to call it — it’s really just an attempt at intentional living. The question behind all of this is really: what do I actually want my life to look like, and is the way I’m currently living giving me any of it?
Some important context about a supposed dreamy life in Europe… the salaries in Europe are about half of what they are in America.
The healthcare is the result of a heavily regulated system, and very high taxes that pay for it.
The policies that give people more vacation, healthcare, and more workers rights, often increase the cost of doing business, and therefore make entrepreneurship difficult, and they tend to contribute to lower wages overall.
We can have meaningful disagreements about how to deliver healthcare and other services, but there are always trade-offs.
We definitely do not sit at cafés all day. We go to work, grocery shop, clean the house, and pay taxes just like everybody else!!!
And the dream of European summer? At least in France, the last five summers have been extremely hot. 🥵 everyone I know is scrambling to get air-conditioning in their apartment and are planning vacations in the mountains or in the northern part of France to escape the heat!
Lastly, I teach at a business school in Paris. In a lot of my students would love the chance to work in the US.
I love my life in Paris. But it is real life just like everywhere else. 😉🇺🇸🇫🇷
Hannah, I really liked the way you at first romanticized "Europemaxxing" and then used your own experience to reset expectations of what moving would be like and to conclude that the desire to move abroad is more about dissatisfaction with aspects of American life. Really well done and balanced. And I can’t believe we "lost" Clooney.