Things That Work

There’s this Vietnamese student making videos about how she can’t believe how good Germany is. Traffic actually flows. Cosmetics aren’t complete garbage. There are parks. The infrastructure doesn’t actively fight you. She’s right, obviously, but hearing someone articulate what you’ve completely stopped noticing is disarming.

You grow up surrounded by something functional and it becomes invisible. You spend years taking the absence of chaos for granted, always comparing yourself to everywhere else—America seems bigger, Japan seems more advanced, Scandinavia seems cooler—while the actual privilege of living somewhere that simply works goes completely unremarked. It’s like someone visiting your house and commenting on your light, and suddenly you realize you haven’t noticed that light in years.

What gets me is how specific her observations are. Of course the trains are reliable. Of course cosmetics companies actually test their products. Of course parks exist. But the fact that these things are boring enough that we’ve all stopped looking at them—that’s the real thing. I’m busy reaching for somewhere else while what’s already functioning is right here.

I don’t know. There’s something weird about having an outsider hold up a mirror to the ordinary stuff that works. Not in some flag-waving way—it’s not that I suddenly love this country more. It’s more like noticing the light. The systems that don’t collapse. The parks that exist. The absence of the grinding chaos that exists everywhere else. It’s almost embarrassing how long you can live somewhere without actually seeing it.