Someone left a comment on one of my Substack Notes a few days ago that said Europe has always been behind the United States. In terms of being with the ‘times’.
I’ve seen versions of this comment before, sometimes about Europe broadly, sometimes about France specifically. The underlying claim is consistent. America is winning, the other side is trailing, and the difference between them is a question of speed.
I replied: I’d argue they’re not behind. They just picked a different finish line. The US is winning a race Europe opted out of running.
I’m going to narrow what I said in that reply. I cannot speak for Europe. I’ve never lived in Italy or Spain or Germany or anywhere else on the continent. What I can speak to is France. Rural France specifically. And the rest of this essay is about that, because that comment and my reply has been sitting in my head, and I think it’s the closest I’ve come to articulating something I’ve been trying to say for almost three years.
I am not an economist. I have no credentials to evaluate national systems. I am a writer who moved from Los Angeles to a small château in rural France with her husband and two children, almost three years ago now. What I can report on is what I’ve watched, what I’ve felt, and the slightly mortifying rearrangement of almost everything I thought I wanted.
Two finish lines
Here is what my American measuring stick used to measure: how much money we made, how impressive our jobs sounded at a dinner party, what cars we drove, what neighborhood we lived in, how many milestones our kids had hit early, whether we looked like we had it all figured out.
This wasn’t even conscious. Nobody in my life sat me down and said here are the metrics for success in the United States. Follow them blindly. I hadn’t really chosen the metrics. They were what everyone around me used, so I used them, too. I would have told you, with full sincerity, that I valued family and time and rest above all those things. I would have (thought I) meant it. I also would have continued to organize my Saturday around the playdate that would help my child get into the right preschool. The said values and the actual measuring stick were not the same.
My husband and I dreamed about cars. Specifically, we dreamed about a Tesla, or an Audi SUV hybrid, or a pretty BMW. The kind of car that would act as a signal at the school dropoff line. The signal was: see us? We are doing the thing. We are people who can afford this car.
We also dreamed about a house. A house in the right neighborhood, with the right number of bedrooms, near the right school, with the right finishes. We wanted to be on the upward trajectory we’d been raised to understand as the meaning of an adult life. Climb. Earn more. Buy the better version. Show up at the gathering looking like you’d ‘figured it out.’
Then we moved to France, and gradually, without permission, the measuring stick I’d been using started to register as a measuring stick rather than as reality. Which is the only way I know how to describe what’s happened in the last two and a half years.
If you’re new here, I’m an American writer living in a small château in rural France with my husband and two children. Once Upon a Castle is where I write about the château, the renovation, and the ongoing reorganization of two Americans who thought they knew what they were doing. What you’re reading is free. Paid subscribers get six posts a month: two more essays like this one, two château renovation diary entries, and access to everything in the archive. Come stay a while.
What the French seem to measure with
The first time I noticed something was off was at a hunting lunch. I was sitting next to an older gentleman, trying my best to converse in French, and at some point I asked a typical American question, which is whether he had any children.
He said yes. Then he told me about the four of them.
He told me where in France they each lived. He told me how beautiful each region was — what the landscapes looked like, what was particular about each town. He told me how many children each of them had. He told me about the beautiful grandchildren. The conversation went on for some time.
He did not tell me what any of them did for work.
This was not a man avoiding the topic because his children were struggling, or because he wasn’t proud of them. He was a well-to-do gentleman who used to live in Paris. If his children had been engineers or surgeons or executives, he could easily have led with that. He just didn’t. He was bragging, but he was bragging about the regions and the grandchildren. The professions did not come up because the professions were not, in his framing of the conversation, the point.
I have since had this experience several more times.
People I’ve met here, including people who own properties significantly grander than mine, drive cars that look like they’ve been driven for twenty years and probably have been. They wear clothes that are not new. Their houses are full of furniture that has been in their families for generations, not because they’re sentimental but because the furniture is fine and there’s no reason to replace it. They take their vacations seriously and at length. They eat well. They host. They walk after dinner because the light stays out until nine-thirty in summer and ending the evening early would feel wasteful.
It’s a different theory of what days are for.
The currency of flaunting here, when there is any flaunting at all, is experiences and moments. The last vacation, a particularly good cheese someone discovered, a wedding they just attended, a hike they took on Sunday, the new baby in the family. The moment that signals the life.
Paris is its own animal, and the wealthy in any country find ways to signal. But the ambient pressure to consume, the constant low-grade signal that you should be acquiring more and better, is genuinely lower out here. I can feel the absence of it in my body.
A reader of mine, Nataliya, put this more cleanly than I could in a comment on a different post. She wrote: America supports consumption. France supports life. She nailed in five words what I've been chewing on for almost three years.
What I want to tell you next is who this country actually treats as its kings, what I said when someone asked what I'd do with a windfall, and what my scoreboard looks like now that I've been keeping a different one for almost three years. Those three small observations are how the measuring stick stopped being an idea I was entertaining and became the way we live.
