Mental Health Crisis in the US
0:49 Hey YouTube, Alex here, coming to you today from Chiang Mai, Thailand. What do I not miss about living in the United States?
0:56 The number one reason I don't miss living in the United States is the mental health crisis. The clip that you just watched, I took that when I was living in Berkeley, California. I was riding home from doing laundry, and that's just one small example. If you could call it small, I know for those who haven't lived in the Bay Area, it looks pretty extraordinary. For those of you who haven't, that's just one small example of the chaos and the mental health crisis in the United States.
1:22 That's not just in California. The mental health situation seems to be spreading across the country. I know California gets a lot of flak. I think that's just because there's a large population there. If you've spent time in any major city in the United States and you've witnessed something that could only be described as a mental health crisis, there's no real way for the average citizen to address this due to changes in laws. These people cannot be committed.
1:51 What I'm talking about is there's certain individuals that cannot function. They are permitted to act out, do whatever they want to do. This issue is amplified by a culture of aggression. That guy was giving the bus driver a really hard time. I personally have been bugged by vagrant beggars, by people hanging around outside of train stations in the Bay Area. If you don't give them money, some tend to get quite angry.
2:14 Unfortunately, the political willpower is just not there to address the issue in any meaningful way in the US. It's a culture where it's acceptable not only to be aggressive, act out, depending on where you are, you're not going to get pushback at all as a response to this. Like with everything in America, if somebody can make a dollar off of putting a Band-Aid on it, they're going to. We see this with the pharmaceutical industry's pushing of that stuff.
2:40 The culture of aggression and the social struggle with mental ailments is not going to be solved anytime soon. The country is run by business owners, some of whom are willing to make money even if it actively prevents certain problems from being solved. The desires of these business owners seem to supersede everything else. I could go on and on about that crisis in the US. I'm not going to in this video.
High Cost of Living and Artificial Inflation
3:05 Definitely check out some of my other videos if you're interested in topics like that. Alongside that, I've had various mental health elements within my own family that I felt were not taken as seriously as they should have been. Some of that is due to being in an area with inadequate mental health resources, but some of that is also the culture of hustle and grind.
3:22 The number two point here is the high cost of living, caused in part by artificial inflation. What is artificial inflation? That is inflation that is caused by poor policy and not just supply and demand. People act like, 'Oh, America has supply and demand.' When you look at the housing crisis, the housing crisis is not caused because Americans have forgotten how to build housing. Americans don't have the skills to build new houses.
3:47 Americans are intellectually incapable of putting a house together. It's actually because of laws and zoning restrictions that fall under what many call NIMBYism. This policy artificially restricts the construction of new housing. It makes it such that 75% of dwellings in the United States are single-family homes. And if you can't afford that, you're going to be paying really high rent.
4:08 A lot of people think we just change the laws, alleviate it. Well, now construction has become so expensive. You got on the ladder or you didn't. It's not a matter of, 'Oh, they're going to suddenly make housing affordable.' No, the government wants to put pressure on people and financial stress on people by artificially constricting housing. Because not only does it make the existing houses go up in price dramatically, it also makes it so that people have to work harder just to pay for necessities.
4:36 I would describe the US as a country with a declining standard of living for the average person. While it may be going up in absolute dollar amounts, that doesn't take into account what those dollars actually buy. If those dollars buy less housing, less food, less transportation, they're not necessarily getting ahead, even if the number amount on their paycheck is going up.
Widespread Unhappiness and Stress
4:56 In an effort to survive, people give up a lot of the things that they used to enjoy doing because they need to work more hours to pay for things. The third point I have for you here is that there's a lot of unhappiness out there.
5:09 You notice that when you look at videos of New York City or San Francisco or LA, and you look at the street level, people are walking with their heads down. They just look beaten down from the stress of working all the time, not getting enough rest, probably drinking a lot of coffee and being overstimulated to get through what they need to do. And it's just a recipe for unhappy people.
5:33 I think it's hard on relationships. I think it's hard on families, and I think that's why so many people are opting out of having kids these days. You also see this in road rage. I remember in my hometown, it was extraordinarily rare to see road rage when I was a kid, and now it's very commonplace.
5:49 It's in the news on a regular basis. You see people just totally losing their patience while driving, and it's really another unfortunate sign. I frame it like the American working class people are beaten down.
Loss of Unique Culture and Roots
6:01 The next point, point number four, is the loss of unique culture. And this is something I've definitely noticed since the pandemic, where everything shut down. But it seems like everybody's kind of shifted away from any kind of tradition. They're just in the consumer mindset.
6:19 As a result of that, I think people lose some of the things that make them interesting or unique. In lieu of tradition, people substitute politics or sports to get that tribal feeling going. Because so many of us have moved around so much for work, like myself, then we don't really have roots in any one place. I am a migrant surf, where I'm willing to move just about anywhere in the US for work. I don't really care where it is.
6:43 And I think that was gone for a while. I think it might have been a thing a long time ago, but I think that's coming back where people, they just move to wherever the work is. They're not a homeowner where they're tied down to one location. I know some people will say that sounds awesome, but after a while, it gets old.
6:57 When I move to California, then I'm the guy from Tennessee. When I come back to Tennessee, I'm the guy who left Tennessee and moved to California. There are times where I wish I could just go back to my childhood home. I visited there several years ago, and I hardly recognized the place. I didn't see anybody I knew.
7:14 Most of the people I grew up with have moved on. The few people left were very fortunate that their families held onto a family home for a long time, but I think a lot of people were not in that situation.
Car Dependency and Lack of Public Transit
7:24 The fifth and final reason is the car dependency. I've been here in Thailand for close to eight months without a car, and I don't miss it. It's a necessity where I'm from, and when I'm in my hometown, it's always nice to be able to use a personal vehicle.
7:38 But part of that is a lack of public transit in my hometown. In my hometown, there's no train system. The bus system is pretty small. You're not going to get around on public transit. I don't know anybody that does, except for maybe some people that happen to live in a really good location where they can just get on one bus and ride 15, 20 minutes, which isn't very many people. It's just not a robust system.
8:02 But here in Thailand, not only are there a lot of things available within walking distance where I live in the city, but also there's songthaews, there's also tuk-tuks, there's Grab. There's a lot of different options for you to get around. You don't feel like you have to have a personal vehicle.
8:17 Even in a city like San Francisco, really densely populated, even in Manhattan, one of the most densely populated cities in the United States, 50% of the people have a vehicle. Outside of a small handful of expensive cities in the US, you have to have a car. I don't miss having to pay to maintain a vehicle.
8:34 I still own a vehicle back home, but at least while I've been gone, certain maintenance costs are deferred or not needed as frequently since I'm not there driving every day. Let me know if this video has been helpful for you. In this video, I discussed what I don't miss about America. This is a short list, so I'll probably make more content like this.
8:50 Let me know what you think down below. Give us a thumbs up if you want to see more content like this. Subscribe if you haven't already, and we'll see you next time.
