Americans are way too sensitive
Sometimes I wonder if political correctness is in your constitution. I found out very quickly in my first visit that I had to bite my tongue pretty much all the time, and (more annoyingly) that nobody was ever straight with me.
It seems that speaking your mind to individuals is a major taboo. You can’t tell a friend straight when he has fucked up, nobody will ever tell you that you look like you could stand to lose a few pounds, and there’s way too much euphemism to avoid the hard truth.
To a certain extent, I can understand it – America generally does a great job of preventing people from singling out ethnic groups and toning down hate speech. But it waters it down far too much at the individual level.
A lot of Americans I met feel very lonely, and I feel this is a major reason. You may never find a boy/girlfriend if a friend who knows you well and supposedly cares about you, doesn’t tell you the hard facts of what makes you so damn annoying… so that you can change it! Being insulting for the sake of it is needless aggression. But constructive criticism is what friends are for.
The one time in my entire last three months that someone was straight with me was when my friend Karol Gajda gave me some tips to improve my presentation in future after I gave a TEDx talk, while everyone else was doing nothing but massaging my ego. It was really useful advice but it caught me off guard because I was used to months of…