Disclaimer: this post is not about politics at all, but rather about my personal reason.
Here’s the story that finally made me realise why USA is not for me (beside many other reasons that have something to do with my tastes. And don’t label them as sour grapes—I got some job offers from there back in the day yet I rejected them in favour of Europe).
I like to spend week-ends and holidays travelling around. Before 2020 I liked to travel somewhere far and travel around that distant point, now I can take only local travels (for health considerations). Last Sunday I decided to visit Seligenstadt but thanks to Deutsche Bahn I missed the connection and had to wait for almost an hour at Hanau. Since I had nothing better to do, I decided to take a walk there and was shocked.
The town turned out to be not merely Grimm (being the birthplace of the famous brothers) but also grim and soulless. Essentially all it had to offer in historical buildings was its town hall and a church (maybe I could discover more but probably not in the town centre and definitely not in the time I had). You don’t need to read any documents to guess that Hanau was heavily bombed during WWII and nobody bothered to reconstruct it (it’s much more important to have a bank and an airport after all).
And then I saw Seligenstadt, which is a complete opposite, with a preserved historic centre next to the more than millennium-old monastery. That’s what made me realise that I can’t live in a space without history comfortably. And USA is exactly a country that is rather poor in that aspect (compared even to Mexico). For comparison I consider my home city rather young—and yet it had been founded before New England royal colonies were chartered let alone USA as a country appeared on the maps. That is why I subconsciously liked Europe; probably other things I like about Europe (like food) also have roots in its rich historical soil. Similarly probably a lot of things I dislike about USA also come from its lack of historical soil (again, like food).
Of course other people don’t care about such things, which means less competition for them from my side and vice versa.
P.S. In case it was not obvious, this post name comes from the early Pratchett’s novel Strata, where one of the ideas was that newly terraformed worlds also included specially-crafted fossils in different geological strata—because humanity does not feel right living on a planet without history. It turned out to be true at least for me.