Why We Moved to the Netherlands: Life Beyond American Individualism
A personal essay on community, collective care, and why I fear the US will never change.
America was built on a contradiction. The early colonists depended on one another to survive — to build homes, plant crops, and care for each other in a wilderness that didn’t care whether they made it or not. Yet out of that cooperation grew a story that prized the individual above all else. By the time the Revolution rolled around, freedom had shifted from a shared goal to a personal possession — something to defend, something to own.
You see it now in the news — delivery drivers threatened at gunpoint, people shot for knocking on the wrong door. Everyone’s scared on the inside, but they call it freedom.
The Declaration of Independence promised liberty, but it also quietly rewired the American imagination. It told us that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness belonged to you. But what about us? That idea carried through the frontier, through the Industrial Revolution, through the myth of the cowboy — until community became something you had to buy your way back into.
Even in small towns, the system is built so you stand alone. Healthcare, education, childcare — everything that should exist for the collective good is treated like a personal problem you’re expected to solve yourself. That’s the quiet cost of rugged individualism: we all build our fences higher and wonder why we feel so disconnected.
There are still good people in the States, still pockets of community — but I haven’t felt part of one since my twenties.
That’s what started eating at us. The quiet realization that everything in America is built to make you stand alone. You can work hard, earn well, live in a neighborhood full of people and still feel like you’re carrying everything by yourself. Every problem is framed as a personal failure; every solution as a product you can buy.
After a while, it felt like the whole system was whispering, you’re on your own.
One medical emergency, and you could lose everything.
Looking at the U.S. from the outside now, I can see what I was starting to see before — the country is operating as intended.
Take the latest shutdown debate over healthcare subsidies. Whether or not we should extend them has become a political football, even though without them, some Americans could pay upwards of $30,000 a year for coverage. The premium tax credits are expiring, costs keep rising, and the average family is being crushed in the middle.
It’s not an accident. The system was built this way.
We’ve allowed corporations to dictate the markets, middlemen to wedge themselves between providers and patients, and politicians to protect the profits that keep it all moving.
Then we wonder why Americans aren’t doing better. We aren’t doing better because the system isn’t broken — it’s functioning exactly as it was designed to.
Healthcare is only one example. Once you start looking, the pattern is everywhere.
Corporations shouldn’t be the biggest beneficiaries of tax cuts while their workers get shafted cashing their checks. Companies make billions and earn billions on their billions — it’s a dirty business, but it’s the system working exactly as intended for those in power.
With the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Chevron Doctrine, it’s clear where this is headed. Regulation will fade, corporations will tighten their grip, and Americans will be left holding the bill.
As we reach middle-age and our kids reach adulthood we want to be in a place that will be more likely to care for us. We don’t want our kids drowning in college debt like I am either. Especially when there are better options available.
We didn’t move to the Netherlands to escape America. We moved to live somewhere that still believes in the idea of us. A place where community isn’t something you have to manufacture, where you can feel the weight of shared responsibility in small, ordinary things — biking to school, public parks that actually belong to the public, conversations with neighbors that aren’t just polite small talk.
Just today, I read a newspaper story about a neighborhood vote — 674 residents, ages twelve and up, deciding how to spend €25,000 on improvements. Over the summer, neighborhoods across the city held their annual block parties.
We wanted to know what it would feel like to live in a place where systems are designed to hold people together, not let them quietly sink behind the walls of their homes blaming them if they suffered a loss or failure.
American individualism got me far. I will never fully shed that part of my identity but allowing a collective to care about my family, myself — I’m okay with that too.
Until next time,
Heather
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This is such a nicely written piece and I can definitely resonate with these sentiments. There is something special and unique about the community aspect in the Netherlands. To be honest, I don't think I appreciated it enough when I lived there, and it's something I definitely miss since moving to France.
Well said: "That’s the quiet cost of rugged individualism: we all build our fences higher and wonder why we feel so disconnected." It happens here too, but particularly in city centres that are actually liveable and densely populated, I find it's more difficult to stay in your own bubble and instead, you more easily come in to contact with people who don't look, think, and earn like you. And that is a boon for us all.