How much money is too much?
I feel most Americans (including naturalized immigrants) have been viewing money through the wrong lens. Money is not the destination, but rather the means to an end.
What is the end? Happiness is the holy grail, I say.
I'm having a beer with a Korean friend, also a recent transplant from California. “I have noticed that people seem genuinely happy here,” he says.
Europeans, whose empires stretched across the seven seas, can now choose to rest on their laurels. It’s America and Asia that are racing, not necessarily ahead, and with no particular destination in mind. Even with the heightened sense of work-life balance in Europe, my Dutch company takes it a step further. It offers 40 days of paid vacation and unlimited sick leave. Expats can now work 20 days from abroad. If you end up working beyond the weekly contract of 40 hours, every accumulated eight hours can be exchanged for a day off. Sounds too good to be true? ASML can afford such luxury, being a rare monopoly in the semiconductor industry.
I believe that one reason for the stressful American work culture is, paradoxically, the work ethic and culture of its immigrants. No country has been permeated to such an extent as the United States. While America may be lagging behind Europe in terms of history and culture, what America experienced 50 years ago in terms of immigration is happening only now in the Netherlands. (Walk into a bar, and it will still be predominantly White.) That rarely happens in America. Immigrants often have a do-or-die attitude, and they want to succeed at all costs, at the expense of work-life balance. Compare that with "Papadag" ("Daddy's Day") in the Netherlands, when new fathers can take a day off every week to spend time with family and support the newborn. If this isn’t brilliant, what is? Sometimes, I speak with my uncle in the States, and he jokes that I’m always on vacation, and hence the European GDP is in tatters. Take a closer look at the numbers, and you will find that the Dutch aren’t far behind. If you adjust for vacation days, they may even be ahead.
I am always willing to trade money for more vacation days, but everyone’s situation is different.
If you want to make white-collar money where the sky's the limit, America is the place to be. If money is the metric, Dutch socialism will always lag behind American capitalism. The Netherlands is also innovating (one only needs to look at the Brainport Eindhoven region to understand) but is it at the same scale and pace as America? I don’t think so. Americans do it faster (not necessarily better) because they sacrifice personal time.
Americans will often respond to emails outside work hours and on the weekends. The Dutch take month-long summer vacations with no access to email. Work can wait. Summer is for making memories with family.
America’s intricate immigration policies for white-collar workers, notably the H1B visa, also don’t bode well for a personal sense of job and life security. Several friends of mine didn’t get selected in the notorious lottery and had to return to their country of origin. If a foreign worker loses a job, they need to get another within three months, or else they will be sent packing.
The Netherlands (just like Japan) is more welcoming. Workers get a five-year visa. If you lose a job (a rare occurrence, given the stringent labour laws), you typically get a cumulative year. America was probably like that, 50 years back, but with the surge of expats, America can now afford to be choosy. If you leave, there will always be another.
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