Can European café culture cure America? Freedom has been turned into a tyranny of emptiness

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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Chris Arnade is an American photographer. He is currently walking round the world.

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