USA Inc.

I was having a conversation with a German friend of mine, who made a very interesting point. He moved here from Berlin a couple of years ago and recently started working at a retail store.

The other day, he mentioned how a woman came in and he greeted her with a “how are you?” The woman was caught off guard and a bit startled by the remark. He then instantly apologized and asked if the woman was European too, to which she confirmed.

In Europe, people don’t greet strangers with “how are you?” because why would you? It’s a pretty intimate question. Here in the west, do we really care how some random stranger is doing at any given time? Or does our culture just tell us to because it's “polite” to care?

But that doesn’t change the fact that more often than not we don’t care at all. We expect everyone to just respond with a simple one-word answer so we can get over that awkward moment and move towards something we really care about.

That leaves us with a question: is it better to say it on the grounds of being socially “polite” (whatever that means), or be honest with one another and really not use it at all?

I would argue for the latter.

When we trivially toss out the phrase without ever assigning any real meaning to it, it ultimately loses the true weight it can carry when used and meant in the proper way.

We see this all the time in American culture: someone we love will be going through something, and we genuinely want to help and know how they are doing. So we ask “how are you?”. But no matter how bad that person might feel or how much they want some honest advice, more often than not they will respond with “good”.

It’s become hardwired into us, for the worse.

What is it about modern American culture that prompts us to have a phrase that's at the cornerstone of every engagement we have with one another, yet means absolutely nothing?

To me, it's the crux of everything wrong with modern culture. We are constantly moving at 100 mph, sprinting towards what our society has agreed upon as the ultimate goal: money, power, and fame. A goal that is predicated on self-actualized success. So even at its core, the basic conversations we have with others are simply a cultural transaction.

Our country has become nothing more than a massive LLC.