In that spirit, my first stop was Scranton, a city in northeast Pennsylvania. The downtown nearing dinner time was empty except for professionals dashing from cubicles to cars, and the destitute hiding in nooks from the lingering heat, emerging only to ask for money, either via long lies or by pleas to my empathy.

My motel, a run-down, squalid place that at $45 a night was still extortionate, was at least social, with the buzz of a long-term residency, which was what it was for everyone there but me. My fellow guests were outside smoking and drinking in the only fresh air and view they had.

Kevin, who was sitting on his milk crate “lawn chair” chain-smoking Criss Cross cigars, was the most talkative. He was a lifelong union Democrat, who, before I could finish asking “What do you think the American Dream is?”, snapped back: “It doesn’t exist these days, it was ruined by Reagan in the Eighties.” He then commenced a chronicle of his last 50 years of ups, and mostly downs, that began with “I got a degree in computer science from University of Scranton” and ended with “I don’t have hope. I understand why there’s so many druggies out there.” His tale was peppered with detours into local gossip about who’s a pervert (the guys drinking in the beat-up Accord watching us), who’s hard-working (his smoking friends on the other side of the motel), who’s an incompetent dumb thief (his brother), and so on, with most of his wrath directed at the CIC (Community Intervention Center), Donald Trump and the Sackler family.

The next morning, after a night of heavy rain, loud music and unexplained loud blasts, Kevin was where I’d left him, joined by John and Dewey who together completed America’s political triarchy of “Trump’s my man” (John), “Trump’s an ignorant asshole” (Kevin), and “Neither. Nothing’s going to change. Nothing. They don’t care about us people” (Dewey)

Dewey and John were passing the time, waiting for their boss to pick them up. As it was raining, they’d probably miss out on the $150 cash they got for a day’s work painting. And given rent in the “shit-hole was $1,500”, that really sucked.

Both were less talkative than Kevin, although not out of impoliteness. John was a tad shy, and a little confused as to why someone as educated as me wanted to hear his views. He was from McDowell County, West Virginia, and had come here for work, and to get a “change of location, and change of situation” since that was the only way to stop the heroin. He’d been on it a little, way back when he was a kid, but “he came out of it, with no rehab, but by willpower”, something all his high-school friends and family didn’t seem to have. He wanted to stay here because if he went back he’d “judge them harder than God for still putting needles in their arms”.

John thought the American Dream was “going downhill”, while Dewey burst out laughing at the question, followed by a loud “Shiiiiiiiiiiiit. That’s long ago dead”. He then launched into a soft-spoken condemnation of people on welfare, including some of the other residents, who “walk around all day doing nothing, drinking liquor, shooting smack, getting $700 a week, while I work my ass off and get less than them. That ain’t right and I wouldn’t vote for no politician who supports that bullshit, and they all support that bullshit.”

I tried to spend the rest of the morning walking around Scranton talking to strangers, but the rain, heat and emptiness made for a desolate beginning to the day. Hoping for something a little more buoyant, I drove to Wheeling in West Virginia. But I soon found I’d stepped further into the gloom. I’d remembered Wheeling as a busy, active and alive town, albeit a bit forlorn, but there was none of that this time. Even on a Friday night, the downtown had the energy of a patient on life support: there was still a heartbeat, but it felt feeble and artificial.

When I remarked on the town’s emptiness, Mike at the Carin pub was bemused by my naivety. “There used to be 15 bars in the area, one on every corner, but those all died after the steel mills left and we are hanging on only because our regulars are too stubborn to go anywhere else,” he said. It was unlikely any of them would agree to an interview: “The only people you going to find around here are too messed up to talk.”

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Mike was firmly in the no-point-voting camp (“I’d rather vote for Mickey Mouse than any of these corrupt idiots”), and when I asked him what he thought about the American Dream, he asked: “Is that like a show on TV?” When I repeated “no, you know, the American Dream”, he burst out laughing: “Hell no, that died 40 years ago.”

The next morning, though I was still committed to my three-week trip, I was beginning to waver. I still hadn’t walked anywhere — the landscape of the last few days was too sparse and too hot for that — and it was beginning to grate on me.

My next interaction — with Luther, who was buying packs of cigarettes in a gas station across the river in Belmont, Ohio — was another gut punch to my spirit:

Me: What’s the American Dream?

Luther: What American Dream anymore? I’m too old to dream anyways because I got lung cancer, so no sense in dreaming.

Me: Oh shit, I’m sorry. What stage is your cancer?

Luther. Don’t know, don’t want to know. The doctors said I got it, and to come back, but I’m not doing that. Chemo kills you.

Me: I’m sorry, but maybe…

Luther: Nope. I’m done and living one day at a time, doing my best. I got baptised on my 61st birthday, so I fixed myself for what’s coming.

The rest of the day spent driving to Bristol, Tennessee, hearing more stories of pain, apathy and destitution and resting in blazing ugly strip malls, cracked my desire to continue with the trip.

Why did I decide to give up? While driving through some of America’s most majestic natural beauty, I was reminded that almost everything man-made in the landscape was ugly: bland pre-fab buildings that looked like they were airlifted in and plopped down in plots of land bulldozed flat, with zero shade or attempt to integrate them into the surrounding nature.

It didn’t help that I was also feeling physically gross, unable to walk and eating trash. That’s what’s almost exclusively available on the road in the US, because that’s what most Americans eat: great globs of fat and sugar. Indeed, America’s diet, outside of a minority of successful neighbourhoods, has grown worse since my last American Dream trip, with everything now somehow bigger, sweeter and fattier. This mass-produced, highly-processed gunk has about as much in common with what the rest of the world considers food as pornography does to intimacy.

There are still a few remaining culinary oases, with some vestiges of the communal and authentic still lingering in family-run Mexican restaurants. But even they’ve started to feel formulaic, and given over to pushing the most calories, the most grease, the most cheese, the most fat, because that’s what most people seemingly want.

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Nine years ago, I didn’t think what we built and what we ate mattered that much; it seemed a small problem dwarfed by the much bigger issues of heroin addiction, suicides, joblessness and spiritual emptiness. Yet perhaps our gross food and bland environment are integral to the problems. Wolfing down four doughnuts and a Kit Kat Frappuccino from the Dunkin’ in a concrete plaza denuded of trees, or two bacon, egg and cheese biscuits from the Sheetz at the intersection of two eight-lane roads, in your car on the way to work, is no way to live. By boiling life down to the most utilitarian goal of maximising stuff and minimising cost, America has abandoned any trace of the shared communalism that the rest of the world understands as essential to a fulfilling life.

Our dismal culture has stripped everything of the sublime. And in doing so, it’s left the majority of Americans obese, flabby and despondent. You can’t separate physical and mental health which, like the two weights of a Bolas, are connected, each pulling the other further in the same direction. Right now, in the US, that direction is despair.

When I woke on the third morning of my trip, I knew I was done. I’d heard enough to know I wasn’t going to learn anything new. In the nine years since my last American Dream trip, I’ve come to realise I don’t like America, not as a place to live. We have an ugly, selfish, winner-take-all culture, devoid of community, meaning and the majestic, and almost all our policy is built around the notion that individual liberty, with the most stuff at the cheapest price, is the ultimate good. I don’t believe that, and my last three years spent travelling around the world have strengthened my view that while the US provides its citizens with the most opportunities, and the most stuff, we don’t give them the most fulfilling, beautiful and elevating lives.

But while I might be done with the US, I’m not done with Americans, who have, like all humans, a tremendous capacity to endure. Take Caroline, who I found sitting alone in a Boston McDonald’s at 6am, drinking a cup of water, and playing on her phone. I didn’t know what to make of her. Curious about why she was there so early, but not wanting to make her uncomfortable, I left her alone until she joined me to vape outside, at which point she opened up.

She had moved to Bristol, Tennessee six months ago, after getting her “teeth knocked out through domestic violence”. She apologised for not speaking well as a result, although I didn’t notice. Originally from Grundy, Virginia, “a little coal mining town in the middle of nowhere”, she’s now living in a homeless shelter, “which is a little rough” but safer than Grundy. She tells me that after “trying to kill me, putting me in the hospital for three days”, her abuser was set free the same day they put in him jail. “He made bail somehow, and they let him out, and he’s been on the run and they haven’t been able to find him since, so I’m here.” Her father, “a good man who worked in strip mining”, died in 2012, and her mother is “an addict out of my life”.

I asked Caroline if, after all her troubles, she still believed in the American Dream. “Yeah, you just got to work for it,” she replied. What else can you do but believe, she said, still laughing. I suggest that some people turn to drugs instead. “Been learning and seeing my whole life what it can do to you and cost you, and no.”

After talking to Caroline, I realised my trip was done. I wanted Caroline’s sanguine, sweet indefatigability to be the final and lasting image from my trip, because while America might be an ugly and unhealthy country, at least it hasn’t broken everyone’s spirit. At least there’s still an aspirational American Dream bubbling beneath the drab, treeless strip malls.

Driving home, thinking about why I gave up so early, I realised my negativity had little to do with America, which hasn’t changed much in the last nine years, and everything to do with me. That America hasn’t changed much, that it was all so familiar, is what I find so discouraging.

A decade ago, I had hope that things were so bad that we couldn’t possibly keep ignoring the malaise, the emptiness, the ugliness and we would move to right the ship. Instead, we buried our heads deeper into the sand, allowing life in the US to grow even more banal and isolating. We still haven’t grasped that the problem isn’t economic, it’s spiritual. And the answer isn’t to build another basic housing complex, another road, another shopping mall, but to build more cohesive and meaningful communities. Which isn’t easy, but unless that’s done, little will change towards the good, not in another year or another decade.

***

A version of this article was first published on Chris Arnade Walks The World.

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.

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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.

The first happened, but the second didn’t even come close. To describe Terminal One that Thursday night as a shitshow is unfair to shitshows, which are at least darkly entertaining. This was bureaucratic hell: lines of exhausted travellers snaking out into dreary linoleum hallways festooned with disconcertingly cheery posters welcoming us to NYC. It took close to an hour to even reach the main hall, and then we endured another hour of slow shuffling up to the 10 or so border security agents.

Ever since I began my project to walk around the world, it has always been jarring to come home to the US, often from much poorer countries — in this case Bulgaria — to find that our infrastructure is infinitely worse. Of course, flying internationally is still a luxury, and complaining about it is a bit elitist. I really wish the US, and JFK in particular, would make an effort to meet global standards of air travel — but it was what happened after I left the airport that convinced me that America, and especially NYC, is broken.

After crashing at a friend’s house not far from JFK, I got up to take a 4:39am subway train to the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan, so I could catch the first bus home. The train, to be fair, was on time. But it was filthy. The carriages were mostly empty, except for three or four homeless guys in each who were either sleeping or passed-out. The dozen or so of us who got on at the first stop chose our seats carefully, positioning ourselves close to each other, for safety, and as far as possible from the sprawled-out guys and their piles of trash and puddles of urine.

The train slowly filled at each subsequent stop, until it was standing room only. I was seemingly the only person on the train who didn’t have to be there. Ride a NYC subway from the outer boroughs at 4am and you’ll find that it’s jammed with overnight construction workers, office cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel employees — all coming from late shifts, or going to early shifts, carrying tool bags, hard hats, work clothes. The “help” coming in and out of the city. United in fatigue and quiet frustration with the squalor, with the unconscious men taking up multiple seats.

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I thought about Sofia, where the subways and buses — and other public spaces and resources — are so much cleaner, safer, and smoother. Where workers simply wanting to get to their jobs don’t have to deal with navigating the mentally ill, addicted and desperate every day. For context, the GDP of Manhattan alone is about nine times that of the entire nation of Bulgaria. But NYC’s problems only seem to be getting worse, especially for those who have the least. I don’t have to take the subway; I have the cash for an Uber. But I try to see, and to understand a little, the world as most people see and understand the world.

And what I see is that, in the US, larger cities are basically two-tiered. A wealthy downtown professional class relies on inexpensive labourers who can’t afford to live near their workplace or drive a car; who are forced into long commutes on public transport systems in terminal decline.

Eventually, that morning, a guy covered in old vomit and carrying a cane, his trousers only just above his knees, got onto the subway train, and went up and down each carriage, hitting every sleeping or passed-out guy on the legs, yelling at them to move on, to give the rest of us some space. Everyone else pretended it wasn’t happening, hoping it wouldn’t go south, focusing instead on the floor or their phones.

And nothing “bad” did happen, beyond a few raised voices and some pantomime air punches. We all got where we needed to go.

But having garbage-strewn subways that effectively serve as mobile homeless shelters is no way to run a public transit system. It isn’t fair on the riders who don’t have the money to avoid the subway. It also isn’t fair to the homeless, who are being encouraged — or at least not discouraged — to hang out on crowded trains, maximising the chances that bad stuff will happen. The Daniel Penny-Jordan Neely case was a horrifying example. The death, on Sunday, of a man who tried to break up a fight on a Manhattan-bound subway train may be another. NYC’s authorities, even if they tried, couldn’t design a better system to provoke a nasty backlash against addiction, mental illness and homelessness.

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But this isn’t just an East Coast problem. Last May, city officials in Los Angeles proudly announced a new kind of bus stop to address rider complaints by providing “shade and lighting”. They called in La Sombrita — and were promptly and roundly mocked by Twitter users, who pointed out that it’s a sad provider of both light and shade. I mean, just look at it. At best it provides shade for one person, maybe. As for the light, I’m not sure how it is any different from your standard streetlamp?

And then there was the expense. It was claimed that each La Sombrita came to $10,000, although the research that went into designing it is said to have cost well over $300,000. That process included junkets to foreign cities, to see what works, including Quito in Ecuador, a city I’ve spent a fair amount of time in. I can tell you, Quito doesn’t have these sad things.

I’m not saying LA shouldn’t be doing something about bus stops. While the city has a surprisingly extensive system, with clean and comfortable buses, the stops themselves can be pretty terrible: a pole by the side of a road under an underpass that reeks of urine, or a simple bench in the glaring sun. But that they came up with La Sombrita as the solution — and announced it so proudly — is depressing, and another revealing example of America’s much bigger problem: its inability to build nice things.

One of the forces that influenced LA authorities, though they won’t admit it, is homelessness. They built La Sombrita, rather than a proper bus shelter, for the same reason NYC is taking benches out of Port Authority: they don’t want people to sleep there. It’s something you see more and more in American cities: a locking down of public spaces in an attempt to deal with the growth of the homeless population. A removal of resources for the majority, because of concerns over “misuse” by less than 1% of residents.

I’m not saying those concerns aren’t well-founded. Benches become unusable if someone is sleeping or pissing on them. But removing them is a cowardly way to cope with a problem that authorities are otherwise not wanting, or able, to address.

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To get big-brained about it, something like La Sombrita could only happen in a high-regulation/low-trust society like the US. If regulations massively limit both bottom-up and top-down solutions, and if those solutions are expected to protect against all sorts of bad behaviour, you end up building the least to mitigate the worst — building things the majority doesn’t want, or doesn’t find useful.

The high-regulation part of the US is usually couched in the language of safety, but it’s really about not allowing organic growth, which is messy — even though, people being people, it tends to result in things the majority really wants. Ecuador, by contrast, is a low-regulation (although low-trust) society: here, you get ad hoc, bottom-up solutions. If there is a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, without natural shade around it, riders rig an umbrella to a pole, or throw some old seats under a tree. In the US, such solutions would be dismantled within days.

But also, in places like Quito, bus stops attract street vendors, who come with umbrellas, making people feel safer by their very presence. LA has some of that, but it’s against the letter of the law, and vendors are constantly hassled with fines, or threats of shutdowns. My favourite taco place was closed down twice during my short stint in LA, for bureaucratic reasons. All this is to say that in Quito getting the bus is a much more pleasant experience than in LA — even though the latter city is roughly 10 times richer than Ecuador, and the latter has its own serious troubles.

Regulations themselves aren’t the problem, though. Germany, like much of northern Europe, is a high-regulation society, but it’s also high-trust, compared to the US. Here, nice and fully functional things are built without fear of misuse. For Americans, who have both a high-regulation and low-trust society, this is all rather depressing; it’s the combination that means we can’t have nice things.

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I like to live here, but the reality is we are rapidly falling behind the rest of the world in liveability, especially when you adjust for our wealth. Our cities are being frozen in time by an absurd, centralised regulatory mindset, which sees human flourishing as dirty and unsafe, and seems determined to wring out the last drops of any soul from our urban spaces. A mindset that manifests as one useless La Sombrita at a time.

It’s not that I’m worried about Americans moving overseas. That’s a luxury most don’t have — or want. I’m worried that authorities don’t feel compelled to provide citizens with towns and cities that work, and feel safe, and offer slivers of shade and corners that don’t smell of piss. But I’m also worried about the cultural forces that have got us here: that they allow the tolerably well-off to ignore the plight of those who are forced to depend on public services. The regulatory mindset is a problem that can be easily changed; the more pernicious part is that we are now firmly a low-trust society, and social trust impacts everything — every facet of life — and it can’t simply be legislated back. Like a ratchet wheel, once social trust comes undone, it spins quickly out of control, and getting it wound back is a long, arduous, and complex process.

I wish we could stop it from spinning too much further out of control, but I’m not particularly hopeful. The first step would be to realise that something is wrong, and right now a lot of people in the US seem determined to deny we have a problem. Why complain, when you can just order an Uber to avoid the subway?

The first Wetherspoon I went into was The Cherry Tree in Huddersfield, to hide from a morning rain shower. Even at 10.30am, it was buzzing. At first glance, it appeared to be filled with more outwardly broken people per square foot than almost anywhere I’ve been in the world: alcoholics (functioning and not), people with disabilities (mental or physical), and the very poor. If I were that way inclined, I could easily paint it as a scene to be gawked at, mocked, pitied, or all three. I could make a clown of the perfectly and precisely dressed bald gentleman who sat four tables down from me, alone, staring straight ahead, sipping his pints and periodically lifting up his tie to lick off the drops that fell on it. Yet as I sheltered in The Cherry Tree, what I saw in him, and beyond him, were hundreds of warm, human and moving scenes of otherwise lonely people not being alone.

The table directly next to mine catered to an evolving mix of mostly elderly people who seemed to all know each other. They would come, hug, sit, sip, gossip, get up, hug again, then move on. It ebbed and flowed like that through lunchtime, until by 2.00pm the table sat only a single couple, across from each other. They eventually invited me to join them. When they introduced themselves, they explained they were not a couple. Not like that, you see. Just friends, drawn a little closer now, because each had recently lost their spouse, and they were more alone than they’d ever been.

She had lost her Oliver eight months before, after 53 years of marriage. He was everything to her, and her to him. Oliver had been a builder, she had been a dinner lady, and after they raised a family, they retired to live their dream of travelling the world. Nashville, Italy, Spain, Vegas. Then he passed away. She tried to tell me more, but kept teetering on the edge of tears.

Her tablemate, a retired military man, had a similar story, although instead of tears there was a measured stoicism. A lost spouse of 22 years, and now confusion. Life wasn’t supposed to be lived without her.

So, they both came to The Cherry Tree daily, to forget and connect. We talked for two beers, and they tried, with all they had left, to keep the conversation positive — even though Huddersfield isn’t what it used to be, the world’s become crueller, and everything is going down the gutter. You have to make the best of the ups, and weather the downs, and focus on the grandkids.

It was an eerily similar conversation to one I’d once had with two widowers in McDonald’s outside of Houston, Texas: a conversation that had helped me to see the fast-food chain not as the soulless corporation to look down on, but as an essential part of local communities, especially “downscale ones”. A welcoming space in a world that’s becoming ever colder and more mechanical. Society needs these inexpensive, judgement-free zones, for people who are used to being judged; places where those of any race, class or age can get together simply to be together; where someone can escape loneliness and the elements, and sit all day in a quiet corner, reading the paper.

After The Cherry Tree, I would go into a Wetherspoon whenever I was near one, and I came to respect them even more than I respect McDonald’s. Partly because they are so pleasant: there is no blasting music or blinding lights. They have comfortable chairs with actual fabric. They are thoughtful, too, with separate spaces for every type of customer, from large families with rambunctious toddlers to sullen singles wanting to bond only with their pint. The employees are polite, which puts the customers on their best behaviour, even those who’ve been drinking for hours straight. I’ve now been to over 40 Wetherspoons, in all parts of the UK, and there are no clunkers.

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It is easy to take those things for granted, if you are well-off. But Wetherspoons are also beautiful. Other large chains aim to be dull in their consistency, but every Wetherspoon is unique. With rare exceptions — The Cherry Tree being one of them — each one is in a refurbished historical space, done up in neither a gaudy nor a sterile fashion, honouring the past while keeping it alive in the present. The preservation spirit alone ought to make cultured people gush about Wetherspoons, but, as I quickly learned, when I did gush about them, few gushed back. In fact, they tended to be downright scornful. I learned that I wasn’t supposed to love Wetherspoon, except perhaps ironically, because the chain is “problematic” with an owner “who’s a closed-minded arse”, who supported Brexit and “was wrong about Covid”.

The founder and owner of Wetherspoon, Tim Martin, is not loved by journalists, or others in the credentialed class. When I first picked up the chain’s in-house magazine, I found that the feeling was mutual. The issue in question had a blood red cover blaring, “Does Truth Matter?” with the subheading: “Many untrue statements were made about Wetherspoon during the pandemic. Wetherspoon News sets the record straight.”

The case he makes — about a snobby media class twisting his words to make him sound like an Evil Boss — might have merit, but it really doesn’t matter. The snobs can adjudicate over the finer details of the morality of going to a ’Spoons for breakfast when they’re hungover; meanwhile, the regulars’ loyalty has never wavered.

I find it particularly odd that people object to Wetherspoon because the owner supported Brexit. Because the other reason the chain gets judged is because it’s killing off smaller, family-owned pubs: undercutting them in price, due to its size and scale. I won’t deny that, after a week of going to such pubs, I was shocked at their prices. Was I really getting my favourite locally-made cask ale — the work of a craftsman, from an American perspective — for around £2? The same one for which I’d paid over double a few nights before? In short, Wetherspoon is doing exactly what the EU was doing.

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One of the main reasons for voting against Brexit was for more open markets: for the cross-border, neoliberal agenda that encourages global uniformity, and consequently larger corporations offering lower prices — like Wetherspoon. Those well-travelled, well-educated Londoners, with careers in big global corporations and enough money to pay the £7 for a pint in their uptight South Kensington local, sneer at the poor for drinking in a big corporate chain run by a bad man. But if they were consistent, they’d cheer it on, as one of the more pleasant and socially useful manifestations of corporatisation.

Because ultimately, what matters is this: that Wetherspoon is good for people. Politics has absolutely no bearing on whether that couple will keep meeting to share their sorrow over a drink, or whether that solitary man with the 1,000-yard stare will find shelter in a well-upholstered corner. It does not explain why I will continue to tour the Wetherspoons of England. All of us will keep going simply because we take ’Spoons at face value, and like them without irony. They are simply great establishments to have a pint in — which is how a pub is generally judged.

I now tune out when people start telling me the political reasons they don’t like a Wetherspoon. But I also skip over the editorial at the front of Wetherspoon News, before I read the rest of the magazine, which tells the stories of regular customers and long-time employees, such as shift leader Carol, who skipped 100 times a day for a month to raise money for cancer research, in honour of her late grandmother. 

Not surprisingly, my favourite profile to date is of a former medic, Steve Jones, who’s halfway to his retirement goal of visiting every Wetherspoon in the UK — using only trains and his feet. Wetherspoon is not its owner’s politics or even its owner. It is this: human stories, told simply.

There was the hunchbacked man with a pork dinner; the woman in a motorised wheelchair eating sticky toffee pudding; and the obese man stuffed into a far-too-small football kit, working on a nut roast and strawberry shake. Outside, in Market Square, the only thing going on was a showdown between two addicts, “John’s a lying cunt” and “Wendy’s a fucking a fat whore”. I started on team John but quickly pivoted to team Wendy, when John insisted he hadn’t punched the guy we all just saw him punch.

I had planned on staying in Dover for two nights, but by the time the police came to take John away, it was clear I’d been fooled by decades of tourist board propaganda. Here was a scrappy, poverty-riddled port town struggling to live up to its historical hype. An essential node in modern life where motorways intersect next to a huge port, allowing us to have the stuff we have.

I thought about giving up on Dover and going to sleep, but first I went to Wetherspoons. There, I met Sandra. Or as she wrote in my phone, Sandra Puta. Since I’ve spent time in Brazil and the Bronx, I recognised this as confirmation of what was already pretty clear — she was for sale, or rent at least.

Sandra had come into the Wetherspoons 20 minutes earlier and methodically worked her way through the tables of men, none of whom wanted the problems she was selling. It was a buyer’s market anyway, since there were plenty of younger, blonder options nearby. Some were accompanied by both their newborns and their mothers, so that the latter could act as impromptu babysitters if their daughters got work. Three generations at one table.

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Sandra was originally from Brazil, she told me, but had been making her way through the EU, using refugee status to get what she wanted. She’d arrived in Dover a few months ago, using what she called her “Pussy Passport” to gain a long-term visa, a flat to bring men back to, and the £170-per-week payment offered to victims of human trafficking. She alternated between talking to me and FaceTiming a man who could have been her dealer, her pimp, her boyfriend, or any combination of the above. 

She wasn’t shy about any of this — what she did, or the bullshit she told the bureaucrats. Her honesty was disarming. I’m used to deflection, but she was upfront about everything, including what she currently wanted, which was more money for crack. I made it clear I wasn’t going to help her with that. We talked for about two hours, before I left to get some sleep. The next day, I would begin my week-long walk to Portsmouth. When I woke at 5am, I had over 20 missed calls, because addicts be addicts, no matter how smart, genuine, and interesting they are.

When I planned my trek along England’s South-East coast, I had images of boardwalks crowded with arcades, high streets chock full of fish and chip shops, and town centres of ancient churches and quaint inns above pubs. I wasn’t prepared for how populated the beaches themselves would be. Despite being an island, England isn’t thought of by us Americans as having a beach culture, perhaps because in reality it’s so ingrained — the literal and figurative water everyone swims in. It’s a good attitude, which I prefer to the American one of “let’s invade the beach for a few hours with loads of paraphernalia”. The coast to the British is more about long-term therapy and less about immediate pleasure — it has to be, given the climate.

The result is the British, more than most, want to live close to the coast, even if they don’t ever swim in the water, even if it means giving up a larger house with space. The shoreline, even in the most remote parts, is dotted with trailer parks and clusters of RVs, tents, and vans — some right on the beach, others off in the hills with only a view of the ocean, but all gaining value by their proximity to the sea. Wherever in England there is the right to settle near the coast, people settle; sometimes they even settle where there isn’t the right.

Somewhere between New Romney and Rye, I met Mark, who lives with his furless cat in a van in a squatters’ camp. The pebbled land is owned by “some rich guy in Thailand who doesn’t give a fuck about us”. He claims it is one of the few remaining plots on the southern coast that hasn’t been taken away by “them fuckers in the government, or the rich”. It is a self-policing year-round community of about 100 people — most retired, on the dole, working odd day jobs, or all of the above. I’d seen other squatter communities along my walk, but none as well-organised.

Many of the beaches I walked along between Dover and Worthing were the sad pebble and concrete beaches that Americans picture when they feel sorry for the British. They are rocky, cold, misty, mercurial — but they are busy, which fits with the rather passive English attitude toward life: people making the best of what they have and accepting things as they are, rather than trying to change them. This is how it is; this is how it’s always been.

These beaches fit what I call the British “Extra Rolo Culture”. When I worked in London in the late Nineties, the buses all had huge ads proudly announcing that a roll of Rolos now came with an extra Rolo. Eight, not seven, baby Rolos per Rolo litter. For me and my banker friends, it came to represent the material sadness of English life, compared to the US. You might have a stagnant GDP, a crumbling empire, rock-filled beaches, soggy and tasteless food, rainy and dreary weather, but don’t despair: here’s an extra Rolo!

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At the time my personality was peak Wall Street and I viewed everything in economic terms, and by that measure England is something to be laughed at or pitied. That hasn’t changed in the last three decades; if anything it’s worse. The seaside towns I have walked through are a good example. I’m typing this in a pub where almost nothing works, after spending three nights in three different hotels where almost nothing worked. Where showers are either scalding hot or freezing cold. Where, when the weather turns a bit warmer than usual, people treat ice likes it’s some magical thing that can’t be accessed. Not without offending the Gods. Where everything is small, sad, half-broken and dreary.

Since then, I’ve changed. I get the extra Rolo thing now: it is about moving beyond the material, accepting what you have, which is perfectly fine, and focusing on other things. Sure, you can splurge every now and then, spoil yourself with an eighth Rolo, as a lark, but that’s not the primary point of happiness. From what I’ve seen and heard in my two long walks across England, the English working class is a lot happier, more comfortable in their own skin and content, than the American. They might suffer from many of the same problems, but they seem a lot less angry. 

While there’s a lot of reasons for this, I think the main one is, ironically, that the class system is more calcified. In the US there’s this fantasy that anyone can do anything. The elites peddle this all the time: with enough hard work you can be whatever you want to be. The corollary to that is it’s not ok to be working class. You should always be looking to move on, rather than building your own culture. Divorce your class and be better, you loser!

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In the UK, the knowledge that you are stuck in your class is actually freeing. The attitude shifts from constantly trying to distance yourself from your community to contributing to it. Or at least being happy with it. Because fuck the elites and their scorn. I’m never gonna be them, so I’ll be what my dad was and my dad’s dad was. 

The result of this is the British seem like a wind-up toy that bumps over and over into a wall, but with a smile on its face. As a former banker, and an American driven to optimism, my first reaction is to find that annoying. But a decade removed from my banker days, I now see things in less material terms. I believe the biggest contributor to happiness is not having tons of stuff, but knowing your address in the universe of meaning. Knowing who you are, and why you’re here, and what will come once you’re gone. 

The English working class has that. It is eating mushy fish on pebbly beaches, then heading off to the local for a pint of bitter. That’s the difference between Dover and all the places in the US I’ve visited. They both have addicts — both have people like Sandra who are gaming the system — but in Dover, despite all the dysfunction, despite very little working, there is far more happiness than in the Bronx, or West Virginia. 

Chaplins, despite all the visible unhappiness, is a happy place. Everyone that came in knew everyone else, including lying John, and understood them. They knew where they were coming from and what they were going through. Because England, even the “worst” parts, still has a real community, built around a shared history and culture; even if it sometimes gets turned into tourism board silliness, it very much matters. The English know who they are, and are ok with it. That they also got an extra Rolo every now and then is the cherry on the top.

What distinguishes us from other animals is the diversity in how we live. There is a greater difference between a resident of Hanoi and a resident of Istanbul than there is between a rat in Hanoi and one in Istanbul. While so much modern discourse is about the universality of humanity, it is in fact the variation within our species that defines us as a big-brained species. Rats live rather similar lives, regardless of where they are born, because they are driven by their inborn instincts. But rather than being led by genetically programmed impulses, we use constructed tools, whether literal or figurative, to survive and thrive. And those tools are what comprise a place’s culture.

Your definition of culture might be different from an anthropologist’s. In his book of essays, The Interpretations of Culture, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes that a human being is imbued at birth with “the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life” but generally ends up “having lived only one”. That one life we end up living is largely determined by what culture, and place in it, we are born into. “As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This,” writes Geertz, “is what we have in common.” Oddly enough, many of our subjects express this more clearly than we anthropologists. In Java, Geertz points out, the people quite flatly say: “To be human is to be Javanese.”

What anthropologists seek is not that different from what most people say they want to get out of travel: an understanding of a place. But most travellers’ grasp of culture is what Geertz calls a “thin description”. A listing of the foods, faiths, clothes, and customs that make it unique. For tourists, understanding a place is about figuring out what you need to do to “pass for a native”. That is, to know enough of the language, styles of dress and etiquette to be able to spend time in Lima without causing offence out of ignorance.

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While culture, to Geertz, does encompass the surface-level rules that “guide behaviour”, to him they aren’t nearly as interesting or meaningful as what lies beneath. Culture, he writes, is “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life”. In other words, culture is about why we think we are here, and why we think it’s worth being here. Where the “thin description” asks “how do you live?”, the “thick description” asks: “Why do you live?”

That different cultures, and different places, have different answers to that question shows the depth of human adaptability. It is those differences that fascinate me as a traveller. For me, to travel is to learn how to be human, by observing the variety of ways you can be human.

Most of what passes as travel these days, though, is “thin travel”. It’s about selling an experience of a place, staging a version of its culture. The travel industry proffers package dinners, where you can drink traditional liquors, eat traditional food, watch traditional dances. If there is any meaning there, it’s buried so far beneath the glitz that it’s dead. Meaning isn’t staged. It is so interwoven into one’s sense of self that it’s often unacknowledged, like the water a fish swims in, or the air you breathe.

Every city has a tourist district, which bundles up a culture and puts it in one, easy-to-find, safe area full of quaint shops. These places are the hallmarks of “thin travel”. Sure, you are in Hanoi. Sure, the people here are Vietnamese. But they are not living their true life. They are performing, mostly as a job. Their intention might well be to educate people about their culture. But thick travel is about getting away from performances, and into neighbourhoods where people are going about their lives. People who aren’t trying to teach or sell you something.

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So, how do you travel in a way that allows you to understand a place’s meaning, as best you can, rather than travelling just to see its surface? Thick travel isn’t about intensity, or danger, or going to extremes; it is about seeking the normal, and often the banal. In ordinary places, people are in their default mode, and it is their default mode that people are most “genuine” to their culture. That is why, when I’m in a new place, I try to become a regular in a few average places. Not to blend in, but to let others blend out, by being themselves.

Taking risks, entering sacred or profane spaces against the wishes of residents, or going to the place with the most X or the least Y, isn’t necessarily thick travel. It’s not about trying to play-act as a native, or putting another check on a list of crazy things you’ve done for clout. It’s not about eating the weirdest dish served in that one restaurant highlighted by that guy on the travel channel, but about eating what’s most commonly eaten. It’s about going to 7-11s in the middle-class neighbourhoods of Taipei for breakfast.

Thick travel might not require hours of YouTube research, but it does require time. On my travel blog, I have a bad habit of posting my first thoughts on a place, after three or four days of walking it. I did that in Taipei, writing: “Taipei in many ways is like Seoul. Both have grown quickly, become relatively wealthy, and in the process jumped headlong into materialism while shedding a lot of their traditional culture.”

While that’s partly true, it’s also a “thin description”, because as I learned, after spending two more weeks in the city, religious traditions are central to Taiwanese culture, to people young and old. My epiphany came in a midtown temple. I was only there grudgingly, because I couldn’t book an earlier flight back home (something I had tried to do based on my first impressions).

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I entered the temple at the same time as a young man, a guy who on the surface seemed pretty secular. He was dressed like a kid from a western MTV video, with baggy clothes and a bucket hat. He had three tattoos on his forearms — a pile of US dollars, brass knuckles, and the Mercedes Benz logo. I watched him, figuring cynically that he was there for something other than the rituals. But no, he quickly took off his hat, then slowly worked his way around the circuit of altars and statues, performing all the ritual steps with the upmost reverence. The only scepticism was mine, and it quickly faded.

Faith plays a different role in Taiwan than in Western cultures. That’s not a value judgement, or even an “othering”. “Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity,” writes Geertz. The clearer your picture of another culture, the more rational it seems, while also remaining unique. That is, the teenager in a bucket hat going to the temple to do his daily rituals is, at both at a thick and thin level, very different from a young man in Lima going to the cathedral, but both are being very human. They are both seeking meaning, not through their animal impulses, but through their traditions.

Once you see how a thick description of culture provides people with meaning, you also see how lost we would be without it. “The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man’s innate response capacity means that without the assistance of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete,” wrote Geertz. It is “a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self control, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions”. Or, to quote the philosopher Suzanne Langer: “[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.”

Thick travel has made me realise how much chaos we have here in the US, at a spiritual level, compared with the rest of the world. We are becoming a thin culture, obsessed with the surface, more and more in denial about the importance of what is beneath. We have forgotten that we need webs of meaning, eroding so many of them. People are left trying to cope with what we humans are not equipped to cope with — the isolation and chaos that follows from meaninglessness.

I spent over 10 years documenting poverty, homelessness, and addiction in the US. Now, I am walking around the world, writing dispatches. But my current project is not that different from my last one. My three years of thick travel, of trying to understand other cultures, has given me a much clearer picture of the problems here in the US. It’s made me aware just how deep they are. Our culture is harsh and transactional; it doesn’t respect the very human need for a deeper sense of meaning. The result is our epidemic of suicides, overdoses, and other early deaths.

Worse still is that culture, while easy to erode, is very hard to rebuild once gone. You can’t legislate back meaning. If thick travel teaches you anything, it’s that people don’t work that way.

A version of this essay first appeared on Chris Arnade Walks The World.