I’ve been trying to find the right words for it. At first I settled on “America lives in a simulated reality, while Israel lives a real life.”

Today I was exploring the idea a little more, and I decided that Americans try to control everything. It’s not just that they try to make everything safe and absolutely comfortable for the individual- it’s that they try to control everything, from time and weather, to every individual moment of their day. Life isn’t happening unless they are making it happen; what happens the rest of the time is simply wasted time.

In Israel, life happens, and you make the most of each moment it gives you. Which isn’t to say that you don’t have direction, goals, a plan. But you’re flexible within each moment. Israelis have perfected a trait I’ve always admired: adaptability.

It could be that the West and Central US are not like what I’ve seen, and more like Israel. I don’t know. It could also be that I’m more a product of myself than of the East Coast mentality I’m subtly blaming. On a personal level, the reason is barely important, because accountability demands that I work with the hand I’ve been dealt.

In Israel, there are a thousand little signs of this different ideology. The way you exist to people – they look at you, not through you. The way flowers vines grow, unplanned, over gates and in wall cracks. The way things don’t conform to a perfect order, the way you sometimes have to squeeze around a dolley or such thing, because the individual – that America claims to hold above all else, and in doing so, stifles with its safe playgrounds, safe work spaces, safe ideas – the individual’s comfort isn’t the goal of this society.

That sounds odd, it sounds negative, but it isn’t. In America, safety has estranged us from a thousand important things. Our children grow up never falling off the monkeybars, never learning that it’s okay to explore, to climb, to fall off and get bruised and stand back up again and keep trying. As adults we’re so trained to stay in our comfort zones, to conform our lives to the status quo comfort zone, that our creativity suffers.

Life isn’t meant to be perfectly comfortable and air conditioned, with the exact air freshener to improve our hormonal balance for a perfectly emotionally-conditioned life.