And the result, at least sometimes, is greatness. There's no city as immediately impressive as New York City. Walking down its boulevards is a lesson in modern exaggeration and fantastic achievement. Walking a little further may take you to the depressing ghettos that are its consequences. Rome was built on the backs of foreign slaves. St. Petersburg on the backs of Russian serfs. In a certain sense, New York and America, in general, is not so different. Greatness is a matter of extremes and requires enormous sacrifice - so we sacrifice. Education in the United States is worse than in most European countries. Americans travel less than virtually any other modern nationals. A greater percentage of Americans live in gross poverty or in jail than most European countries. Everyone's armed and the bullets keep flying. There's virtually no American city whose citizens feel safe going out for a nightly stroll. There's something paradoxical about the existence of all this in the world's most powerful and wealthy country, but Americans are ready to sacrifice. The extreme conditions and available opportunities that push us to work harder and harder to come to terms with ourselves - out of all of this comes greatness. As a result, the United States remains the center of creative innovation, dominating culture and the arts on the world scale.

And this is where Europeans have for so long looked at Americans with wonder - with so much admiration for many American accomplishments, but with the criticism that we blindly sacrifice too much too quickly. That we have forgotten what's really important - how to live the good life. We've always had enough of our own social critics reminding us of the absurdities of equating success with the good life, and most of us do know, inside, that the good life is made up of something else entirely. The problem is that we're already smack in the middle of the rat race and we just can't stop to question because we've already given up too much to just slow down and let the others pass us.

Americans mark life by their lists of achievements - hence the continuous need for work. For Europeans, life passes more in the small details of the day to day - fresh bread in the morning, a drink with co-workers in the middle of the day, spending quality time with friends and family, stretching night lives into the morning hours and social lives into old age. This is where all that time goes - those two whole months. This is the benefits of 300 hours of added time for living. Yes, I do think that Europeans lag behind Americans in creative edge and grandiose achievements, but the subtle depth of such lives makes those of Americans appear sadly superficial and misguided. These are the real goods of life. Having and appreciating them - that's the good life!