USA 2025

The route

Travel essentials

Three weeks in May 2025 as a family of four: my parents, my brother and me. In hindsight the timing was the best decision we made. May is before the American summer holidays, so the national parks were nearly empty, and seeing Colorado, New Mexico and West Texas without crowds is something I can recommend to everybody. Furthermore, you should plan for continental distances: the road part of our trip alone was longer than a drive across Europe.

Entry. As an Austrian you do not need a visa, but you need an ESTA under the Visa Waiver Program. It is not a visa, however you should not treat it as a formality either. Apply well before you fly. If the automatic check does not clear you, the fallback is a real visa appointment at the embassy, which takes weeks. Only apply at esta.cbp.dhs.gov, since there is a whole industry of lookalike sites charging a multiple of the real price. One approval covers two years and multiple entries of up to 90 days.

Domestic flights. We flew twice, New York to Chicago and Houston to Miami, and both flights were remarkably cheap. Flying inside the US costs a fraction of what the same distance costs in Europe, so do not assume that driving is always the cheaper option.

Renting the car. This was the one part of the trip that really annoyed me. The price you book is not the price you pay, and we nearly paid double. Two things are responsible for this. First, the insurance upsell at the counter, which comes as a stack of abbreviations of which usually only one is worth anything. Second, every extra driver is charged per day, around $12 to $13. As a group of four this is the trap: adding two more drivers over three weeks costs more than several nights of accommodation, and you pay it whether those people ever drive or not. So decide before you get to the desk who actually needs to drive.

Bring a real credit card in the name of the main driver. If you pay the deposit with a debit card, you will be told that the damage waiver is now mandatory, which is exactly the charge you were trying to avoid, and some downtown locations do not accept debit cards at all. Check what your credit card or travel insurance already covers before you leave. That is the only leverage you have in this conversation.

Payments. My Austrian debit card worked everywhere without a single problem, so I would not overthink this. Contactless payment is normal. The one thing to remember is that the price on the label is not the price you pay, because sales tax is added at the register and tipping is expected on top in restaurants.

Mobile internet. An eSIM worked nicely. Coverage was fine in the cities and good enough along the interstates, but it gets thin in the emptier parts of West Texas and around the parks, so download offline maps for the driving days.

Accommodation. Booking.com worked very well, and in the cities Airbnb was the better option. On the road we stayed in motels, which are cheap, unremarkable and completely fine.

Food. Not great, and the real risk is that you slowly give in. On a road trip, the default at every highway exit is fast food, and it takes actual effort not to eat like this for three weeks. Our solution was to shop in supermarkets, which are enormous and have everything, and to treat the roadside chains as the exception.

Safety. The US is not as safe as Europe and nowhere near as safe as China. Nothing happened to us and I never felt in danger, but the baseline is different. Being aware of your surroundings in cities at night is worth more there than at home.

Personal thoughts, experiences and research

Three weeks and around 4,000 kilometres of driving give you a particular view of a country. You see the cities, but you also see everything in between, and in the US the in-between is most of it.

How are they living?

The first thing I have to say is not flattering: the built environment is not beautiful. Cities and streets do not have the quality European ones have, and I noticed it constantly. I do not mean the skylines, those are unmatched, but the ordinary parts: the strips of parking lots, the roads you cannot cross on foot, the towns that consist of a gas station and nothing else. My impression was that Europe is built for people who stay, and America for people who are passing through.

Everything runs through the car, and once you notice it, you see it everywhere. It decides where people eat, which is why the default at every exit is fast food. It also decides how far apart people live from each other.

The other thing you notice is the range. You see absolutely everything in how people dress, behave, believe and live, far more variation than you would ever see in Austria. As a European this is shocking at first, until you realise that nobody around you finds it remarkable at all.

Why are they richer?

The numbers say the US is far richer than Europe. On the ground it does not look like that. The money is very concentrated, and the average American town looks poorer than the average Austrian one, even in states with a high GDP per head.

How can both be true? The explanation is distribution. The US has the highest disposable income in the OECD, but also an income Gini coefficient of around 0.39, against an EU average of 0.29, with Austria among the more equal countries. A high average with a wide spread does not produce a country that feels rich. It produces a country with some very rich places in it. The hardest number is life expectancy, where the US is roughly five years behind Western Europe. Whatever the GDP figure measures, it is not that.

The more interesting part is that the extra output does not come from being more productive, but from working more hours. Take the harmonised OECD figures for 2023: GDP per hour worked is about $97 in the US, about $95 in Austria and $94 in Germany. That is a difference of roughly two percent, so in one hour an American produces almost exactly what an Austrian produces.

Now look at the number of hours. The average American works around 1,810 hours a year, Austrians work less than 1,500, and Germany is the lowest in the OECD with about 1,330. Multiplied out, the American produces something like $176,000 a year against the Austrian’s $140,000. The gap is about 26 percent, and roughly nine tenths of it comes from the hours alone.

So the American economy is not more efficient per hour than the Austrian one, it is the same efficiency run for longer. This is worth keeping in mind, because the headline GDP comparison is constantly used as evidence that Europe has fallen behind in capability. At least against Austria, it is mostly evidence that Europeans go home earlier.

Why are they more innovative?

None of this explains what America genuinely does better. Starbase and the two space centres we visited make this point better than any statistic, and so does the fact that a junior engineer at SpaceX gets interviewed by Elon Musk himself.

My explanation after three weeks is cultural. In Europe there is a correct way to do almost everything, and if you deviate from it, you get judged immediately, usually before you have finished explaining. In America nobody cares. This indifference is the same one behind all the variation you see on the street, and I think it is their biggest asset. A society that does not punish you for being strange is a society where the occasionally useful strangeness survives long enough to turn into something.

A country that only has a present

The last thing struck me only slowly. There is no deep culture or history to fall back on, at least not in the sense a European means it. What they have instead is a story about themselves: they worked hard, they ran capitalism harder than anyone else, and they flattened whatever was in the way. This is their founding myth, and it is not hidden.

What surprised me is that they still live it. It is not a museum piece but the operating instruction, and you feel it from the working hours to the way people talk about their jobs. Europe has a lot of past and spends a lot of energy protecting it. America has almost none and spends all of its energy on what comes next.

How would living there be?

My honest answer splits in two.

For building something, the US looks better than Europe. The hours are longer, but you get judged less, the ceiling is higher, and nobody blocks you for doing things in an unfamiliar way.

For living, I would still choose Europe. The daily quality of life, the streets, the food, being able to walk somewhere, and the fact that being ill or unlucky is less financially dangerous: all of this is simply better at home. Chicago was the one city on our route where I could genuinely imagine living, which is telling, because it is also the one that felt closest to a European city.

So the trade-off is real. You get more upside and less friction, and you pay for it with the quality of ordinary life. Which one is worth more depends on what you want to do with your life.