Americans are fake and the Dutch are rude (2022)

But many of my social interactions are based in commerce. So I'll go to a restaurant to eat, alone. I'll go grocery shopping, alone. And so the clerk/cashier/waitress greets me and serves me and of course they're nice, because their wages are on the line here. And gradually I just felt fake and futile, because all these pleasantries we exchanged had an undercurrent of a business transaction and not the bonds of trust, fraternity, an actual relationship.

Yes, it does feel really hollow when I enter a store and the clerk greets me enthusiastically, because they don't know me, and any concern for one another's feelings, that's merely a business transaction. I tire of this fakery.

In the Netherlands, efficiency is part of communicaton, especially in cities. In more rural places people connect a bit more and take time for eachother. These are different rules.

And yes, sometimes Dutch people are rude because they like to be. Different people, different strokes.

Interesting. Since I'm the fish who can't see the water, could you provide me with some examples of this?

1. I wonder when this "difference between culture-driven emotions" fades away. I've been in the US for 35 years now, and I still sometimes sense that I'm viewing interactions the way a British person would (less often than I used to)

2. I wonder how the "noise" of differences between individuals compares in "amplitude" to the ability of culture to shape emotion. Any given population of any significant size will likely contain fairly wide variations of introversion, sociability, communication comfort, positivity, etc. etc. To what extent does or can cultural factors create any sort of coherent pattern "on top" of that variation?

3. Some US habits can be seen as having nothing to do with the relationships between individuals, and everything to do with creating certain social moods. The reason that US retail interactions are studded with "Have a nice day" is not, in general, because anyone actually cares that much about whether your day is nice or not, but because having people behaving in that way creates an easy going, affable mood in which people's anger, disappointment and sadness of the moment is not really appropriate to bring to the surface. It can seem grating and "fake" on early encounters with it, but after a while (maybe a long while), you can appreciate it as a communal, non-coercive effort to "make nice" because everyone benefits from that, on average and over time.

4. US English really needs to re-acquaint (no pun intend) itself with the word "acquaintance" as an alternative to "friend". The almost universal use of "friend" to describe anyone you know (even from the most singular and minor of interactions) really robs verbal behavior about the social environment here of so much subtlety.