In general I just think it is a lot easier in, at least some, European countries to set yourself up for a good life. Day to day, year to year, to not endure a long commute or stressful work environment. Having time to spend with your kids while they are young, your parents before they get too old and your friends so you don't lose touch. Not having to worry about the future, managing your kids lives, the financial losses of getting sick or your career.

Once you start wanting to do things that aren't universal or the default in any country, and especially with other people in your life, you can end up paying a large premium to do so.

In fact the EU mandates vacation time.

Few jobs are physically hard and lots of people have the option to choose between free time and money.

Sure being rich in 1916 offers some different benefits.. but I'm not sure I would swap.

Sometimes folks had more holidays and vacation time in the past as well. Not everywhere has a culture of paid vacation time (or medical leave at all).

Sure, there are interesting jobs, but only a small portion of folks have those sorts of jobs. Lots of folks work in retail, though. Many more jobs are much more interesting from the outside, but at the end of the day, they are still a job. Even when you like what you do.

Lots of folks have to do what pleases their parents. This varies by country: In the US, a parent can refuse to offer up their tax information to a child getting ready to graduate high school, basically keeping them from going to college until 24 or something. They get the chance to revoke it once a year. Some folks pull their children out of school in 8th grade. School schedules sometimes need parental permission.

There are lots of areas in the world where women can't really do the same stuff as men.

I do think the world is better overall than it was in the past, but glossing over these things isn't helpful at all because then folks more easily ignore these things.

Your life is more than your work, and everyone should have a certain amount of guaranteed time for themselves and their families. It's an absolute baseline that puts a limit on how bad the rat race can get.

Having seen both systems first-hand, the European attitude leads to a much better work-life balance on a societal level.

People work incredibly hard, long hours and often with very little to show for it. It's surreal.

It’s obviously good to live a decent life and spend time with family, but at some point it cuts into your national productivity.

This!

I'm not familiar with all European countries, and not extremely so with the US, but I think this is an important difference: Free time. 5-6 weeks paid vacation is common, and employers expect it to be used. It's often easy to get unpaid leave for whatever reason, such as studying or starting a business. Parental leave is paid and the expectation is that it will be used. Employers demanding overtime or "crunching" or whatever is generally frowned upon.

Etc. etc. My strong impression is that those "low-paid" European jobs are often a lot more balanced, with more room for life than their American counterparts.

(I do live in Scandinavia, maybe we're on the extreme end of this, but still )

Do you mean more risk-averse? Anyway, to comment on this point. Non-Europeans, get quite a few things mixed up.

>We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of leave to some extent.

The bigger problem is two-fold and has to do with your second point:

1. Europeans have very set schedules, which has only started to erode with younger generations. Summer for vacation. Evening and weekend for relaxation. Weekdays for work. This encompasses almost every hour of a person's life, each year. If you have an idea you can execute alone and deviate from this pattern, great. If you don't and need someone else, good luck finding like-minded people, as you're already a very unique individual. If you can somehow accumulate enough wealth or get an investment, you could hire people instead. Yet, that's tough for younger people to do, and older people will slowly settle in their ways. Also, related to point 1, Europeans typically don't venture very far away from their childhood friends and family unlike Americans having no qualms uprooting their past lives.

2. Europeans don't universally have 6-8 weeks of vacation and 35 hour work weeks. Most of the younger middle class or upper middle class is likely to work 40h weeks and has 3-4 weeks of vacation, as well as some loose mandatory holidays. Loose mandatory holidays kinda suck to work with for bigger projects, at best you can weave them together with your PTO. Even working 32h weeks, which a lot of Europeans started doing, still leaves your head with the job 4 out of 7 days and mentally complex things require pretty big context shifts. The structure of this free time is more positioned as "regular bigger breaks from work" rather than "now I can take time off from my job for a long time and focus on my own stuff". Either way, nothing beats just taking a year off to work on yourself or your own ideas.

Getting on calls at 8pm (due to time zone different), emails on the weekend, work travel on bank holidays, etc.

And I think the general first-world deviation isn't that big either, apart from the Koreans (and to a minor degree, Americans).

Its all a tradeoff. Yeah I'm working very hard during the week - I don't really have time for anything besides work+gym during weekdays, and some weekends I need to work as well. BUT I'm able to provide for my single mother, live in a very nice area in my city, travel wherever I want to go on vacation, eat at nice restaurants, buy expensive toys, etc etc. Coming from a family where the the nicest place we ever went out to eat was hometown buffet, this financial freedom is pretty damn great.

Plus I would argue that I actually have more freedom to do what I want to do during my free time, despite having less of it. I went to NYC for a weekend last week, was in vegas 2 weeks before, and I'm traveling to Japan over Christmas and NYE to snowboard in Hokkaido. You just cant do stuff like that if you don't have any money, especially when you need to help support your family.

Anyway just my 2 cents. Every job has a varying degree of intensity, and mine, despite the long hours needed, is still pretty flexible in terms of when I can take time off and such.

Besides that:

> No one has ever complained of having too much of it.

Isn't that just being bored? I'm sure I've heard people complaining about that.

People say they like their work and they "live" for their work because it's all they have, yet they aren't happy with it. If they were, they wouldn't be so compelled to go out and drink weekends away.

Americans have no choice but to be overworked. I look at professional jobs where I could use my computer science degree, and I have no choice. I basically have to choose a job where I work more than 40 hours a week. And in the US, a lot of employers only pay you for when you work. So that hour lunch break doesn't count toward the time you're working. Neither does your commute.

So there's a large swath of people in the US who work 10 hours a day, have an hour of two of commute each way, and an hour of idle time at work. meaning worst case scenarios, you're looking at 13+ hours a day spent at doing work related things.

Something that people have to do that consumes their life will be perceived as something that that person likes, kind of like how Stockholm Syndrome works.

No one ever speaks of how these long hours affect Americans to the point where they don't have time for constructive hobbies, time to learn about the world, etc, and that is going to hurt Americans far more than anything else.

I realize that their is more distance for Americans to see the world than Europeans or Asians, however, you would think that if seeing the world was considered important, that Americans would have more time off and more paid vacation to make up for the fact that you need to travel so far to experience vastly different cultures.

You've got to think about the fact that we have a generation of people raising children who only know how to work while the rest of the developed world is taking long vacations and living in the assumption that a worker should have access to health care, education, etc.

I am terrified of how the next generation of Americans will turn out. They're going to grow up seeing both their parents work 50 hour work weeks, have no hobbies, never travel to anything inspiring and only travelling for escapism, and thinking that they have it better in the USA than anywhere else.

I don't plan on having children in the USA. I don't think I could morally raise a child and fill their heads with delusions of grandeur and getting rich quick by working 65 hours a week, only to see them swallowed by student loans and debt, never escaping that mortgage until they die, while I look them in the eye and tell them the people in France work half as much yet make more money.

Please, look at these numbers: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL#

I realize they are a bit dated (the new dataset doesn't include the metric I want to look at), but USA already works harder than the Japanese. USA works almost 30% more hours than Netherlands. That's massive. To put that into perspective, that means an 8 hour workday in the USA translates into a 5.6 hour work day in the Netherlands.