I am a 20y/o student w/$5000 to my name. Could I feasibly move to a different country?

Many Americans do have a superior that few other cultures subscribe to as obsessively, God, in a theorectical thought out kind of sense. Its the basic "no one but him can tell me what to do" mentality, justified. I'm excluding worship based societies because practice based religions and theory driven religious culture are too different to compare. Its like comparing people who do performance art without justifying it to those who try to live by a code of "1+fruit = 3 chickens", it can't be proven but we're gonna figure out how to make it mentally make sense and explain why this matters.

And I wasn't saying that weight and informality are inherently related, I'm saying that for example, one cannot talk about weight nor one cannot talk about being compared to an animal (its in the social fabric) because they consider it insulting when the concept is arbitrary, so American language and cultures do have formalities in the sense that its not free and liberating as people say it is. It IS carefree society but there are still lots of land minds everywhere in terms of conversation topics.

I'm sure you're a super smart guy so I'm not gonna doubt you but the link you sent me about social scientists is absolute nonsense. There are plenty of cultures more direct and less formal than any American culture is.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy that America is more formal than, say, China. It doesn't take a lot for me to imagine an American getting mad at a country Chinese man/woman because the Chinese guy may use language patterns that offend an American.

"Give me that" "Are you going to do that or are you not going to that?"

In Chinese, there are plenty of ways to say things that can be said in a "nice" way but are asked directly and the entire culture is based around being... well, linguistically direct (not culturally direct all the time necessarily). American language is much less direct.

Yes, there are other languages much much LESS direct than English. But that doesnt mean English by any means is the most or least direct at all.

And directness is to me directly linked to formality. If I can't tell you "Hey, your shirt looks horrible today, why did you buy that? You should change it so you don't look foolish" Its already an insult, even if the intention of the speaker isn't to be insulting but to be direct. Instead, if I really thought your shirt looked terrible, I have to pull you aside and say "Hey, I don't mean this in a bad way, but I think that your shirt is really distracting from how cool you are. Wearing a florescent pink pony shirt on a 38 year old man in the south just isn't really doing you any favors, can I suggest another one?"

Anyway, none of this is really important.

Point is there are more formal cultures than the US and less formal cultures than the US.

And nothing is black and white either, within the US there is more formality at times and in other cultures with more formality there is less formality in aspects.

Like nudity! America is obsessed with covering up bodies unless its on TV or media. Yikes.

/r/personalfinance Thread Parent