Living abroad in my 60s taught me what Americans get wrong about happiness

Some of that turned out to be true. The basil did fine. The pastries were not a lie.

But the biggest change had very little to do with scenery and everything to do with ideas—especially the ones I’d carried for decades about what happiness is and how you’re supposed to chase it.

Living outside the States in my sixties didn’t make me anti-American. It made me suspicious of how American I am. It also gave me a few truths I wish I’d learned earlier.

The day the market beat my to-do list

My first month, I went to the open-air market with a proper American plan: speed-walk through stalls, buy the healthiest things, get home to “be productive.” The tomatoes ruined everything. They were ridiculous—heavy as softballs, smelling like sunlight. I asked the vendor if I could have three. She took my hand. Not the tomatoes—my hand. Then she tapped the bones near my thumb and said something I didn’t yet understand. The woman next to me translated: “She says these are for sauce, not salad. Your bones are telling her you cook gently.”

Your bones are telling her you cook gently. I have never once thought my bones were sending messages at a grocery store. In the U.S., I shop like I’m trying not to get in the way of someone in a hurry. Here, this woman was reading me like a book. I lingered. She gave me a recipe and two bruised apricots for free. I came home an hour later than planned, to-do list gasping for air, and made a sauce that tasted like permission.

That day started a quiet revolt. In the States I often treated time like a locker I rented by the minute. Abroad, other people’s time had edges I couldn’t sand down. Markets opened when they opened. Shops closed for lunch because people actually ate lunch. If the bus was late, the bus was late, and no one looked personally betrayed.

What Americans get wrong, or at least what I got wrong: we think happiness is the trophy you win for managing time perfectly. Here, time wasn’t a competition. It was a neighborhood. You could walk through it. You could stop and talk to the tomatoes.

On walking and seeing

I used to count steps because a device told me to. Now I walk because it’s how you get anywhere. The lanes near my apartment are old enough to have a personality. They curve around small gardens and the kind of dogs who look like they’ve seen empires rise and fall. People say hello because they expect to see you again tomorrow. There’s no heroic effort to “get cardio in.” Movement is simply a byproduct of joining the day.

It’s hard to explain this without sounding sentimental, but the absence of constant driving changed my sense of scale. In the U.S., distances shrank and time sped up—everything was fifteen minutes away, until it wasn’t. Here, distances expanded and time slowed down—twenty minutes on foot is twenty minutes of the world. I started arriving places with a calmer face.

Happiness isn’t easier here. But it’s more available because life is designed to bump you into other humans. Americans underestimate the joy of bumping into people. We spend a fortune manufacturing community (memberships, programs, events) because we built our towns to avoid it. Then we wonder why we feel lonely.

Coffee is not a productivity tool

In a small square not far from my building there’s a café with wobbly tables and a barista who scolds your cappuccino order after noon. (“Milk is for morning,” she says, with a smile that means she’ll still make it if I insist.) I take a notebook and drink my coffee like it’s a conversation, not fuel. People sit, order one thing, and occupy their chair for an hour without shame. No one is hustled out. When the owner needs to refill sugar, he uses the back of my chair as his tray like we’re all part of the same sitcom.

In the States, coffee shops are often offices with nicer lighting. The cup is a receipt for time. Here, it’s a reason to be still. I don’t think either is morally superior. But one posture pushes you toward constant self-improvement; the other lets you be a person who simply exists. Americans are masters at optimizing. We think happiness is what you get when everything runs like an app. Living abroad taught me to let some moments be unoptimized and excellent anyway.

Money talks differently

I expected a lower cost of living. I found a different vocabulary of “enough.” Neighbors talk about money like weather: something to plan around, not worship. Status displays are smaller and less performative. People notice if you’re generous with your time more than the shine on your watch.

Back home, I wore my frugality like virtue and my occasional splurges like a confession. Here, I learned a simpler rule: pay for fewer things, but better ones—shoes that last, bread that goes stale in two days because it was alive when you bought it, a knife that cuts tomatoes without caving them in. I stopped thinking happiness was the curve of acquiring. It became the curve of caring for what I already had.

Healthcare is not a thriller

Getting older means your body sends memos. Abroad, the memos didn’t come with suspense music. Appointments were short, mildly bureaucratic, and calm. No drama, no financial cliffhangers, no sense that a routine checkup had a secret twist ending involving your deductible.

I’m not naive—every system has flaws. But the background hum of dread I carried in the States quieted, and with it, a portion of my daily vigilance. When part of your mind isn’t calculating risk every time you sneeze, happiness has more room to stretch. It turns out peace is not just a feeling; it’s a budget line item.

The holy boredom of Sunday

Where I live now, Sundays still belong to something other than commerce. Stores close. Streets empty. Families sprawl in parks with plastic containers full of mysterious salads. For the first few months I felt personally attacked by the lack of errands. Then a strange thing happened: I got bored, and the boredom was kind. I cleaned my little kitchen. I called friends without scheduling a “catch-up.” I took a nap with the window open and learned the argument patterns of neighborhood birds.

Americans (again, I include myself) treat boredom like a failure. We cram the gaps with useful noise. But many of the happiest moments I’ve had abroad happened in the leftover spaces—where I wasn’t trying to extract value from the minute, just letting the minute be. If happiness is a muscle, rest day is how it grows.

Enoughness is a skill

My apartment is small enough that if you sneeze, your jacket hears it. Two burners, a dorm-sized refrigerator, a shower that has strong opinions about water pressure. The first week, I missed my American kitchen with its empty drawers and aspirational gadgets. Then “enough” arrived like a well-mannered guest. Two pans, one pot, a wooden spoon. I started cooking like a person, not a catalog. I repaired a wobbly chair with a neighbor who kept a drawer of screws from three apartments ago.

I’m not romanticizing scarcity. I’m saying sufficiency can be delicious. The American gear instinct—buy the thing, and then you’ll become the person—kept me on a treadmill. Here I became the person, and the thing followed, or it didn’t, and either way dinner was ready.

The social script is gentler

There’s a different rhythm to politeness. People greet the bus driver. Kids are taught to say hello when they enter a room. Strangers will help you fold a stroller on the tram like it’s a community project. The seams of daily life are padded with small phrases. My language is clumsy, but I’ve learned to carry a few lines like talismans: “Good morning,” “after you,” “no rush,” “take your time.”

America values speed, directness, efficiency. Useful traits, all. But habitually exercising them turned me into an impatient man who didn’t like his own posture. The gentler script slowed me down without scolding me, and a slower man found more things worth noticing. That noticing read as happiness in the mirror more than any big purchase ever did.

Arguments end with a beer

I witnessed my first proper neighborhood scuffle outside my building when a delivery truck blocked a lane and a line of cars grew angrier by the minute. There was shouting. There were theatrical gestures. An older woman joined with both hands and none of the facts. And then—because apparently this is how it’s done—the driver and the loudest critic crossed the street to the bar and split a beer, still arguing but in a register that sounded like weather, not war.

I grew up in a culture where disagreement breaks things. Abroad, I learned that sometimes it ends with foam on your lip and a story to tell later. I don’t mean we should minimize conflict. I mean the way we hold it can be part of what makes life livable. Happiness, it turns out, is not a life without friction. It’s a life where friction doesn’t always turn into fire.

The fantasy of reinvention dies (thank goodness)

Americans love reinvention. So do I. New city, new job, new haircut that says “I have my life in order now.” Moving abroad at my age came with the delicious illusion that I could become a different man by changing my backdrop. The first time I mangled a verb so badly the baker handed me a loaf out of pity, I met the truth: wherever you go, your habits unpack first.

I didn’t become someone else. I became a more legible version of myself. The part that likes ritual found better rituals. The part that needs solitude found softer solitude. The part that wants to be useful found uses that didn’t require a performance. Happiness looked less like “new me” and more like “clearer me.”

What I wish I could tell my younger American self

Happiness is not a product of mastery over time; it’s a relationship with it. Make room for meals that last longer than the nutritional label. Walk places even when you don’t have to. Buy less, repair more. Keep a short list of people you call without scheduling. Put a chair in a sunny spot and defend it like it’s sacred. Learn to say “after you” and mean it. Let your coffee be a conversation. Accept that the bus will be late and you’ll still arrive.

And—this is the one I resisted most—treat “enough” like a muscle group. Train it deliberately. The day you need less to feel full is the day you become dangerous to the markets and generous to your own life.

I’ll go home someday. I’ll end up in a supermarket with twelve brands of everything and a parking lot designed for chariots. I’ll probably sprint at first. Old instincts die loud. But I hope I carry back a few stubborn habits: a slower hello, a standing Sunday, a tomato that takes the afternoon hostage, a chair I fix before I replace.

If living abroad in my sixties taught me anything about American happiness, it’s this: we’re not wrong to chase it; we’re just measuring it with the wrong tools. Not how much we can hold, but how lightly we can carry. Not how fast we get there, but who we become on the walk.

So, if you took one small thing from this old man who now cooks like his bones told him to, what would it be—a slower cup of coffee, a walk without a goal, or simply a gentler script the next time you bump into someone else’s day?