Based on the viral essay “How We Live in the US is Not Normal” my upcoming book examines the toll of hyper-capitalism on Americans’ lives and what we can do about it

I am thrilled to announce that Harper One acquired my book, ‘It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way,’ based on the viral essay, “How We Live in America is Not Normal.”

I can’t say why it’s taken me so long to share this news about the book, since I signed the contract last summer. Perhaps I can blame it on my slower living in Italy. Things feel less urgent, but I have wanted to share this news because I know that essays and other posts about the plague of late-stage capitalism brought many of you here.

In this book I’ll be examining the huge toll late-stage capitalism has taken on American life and the many lessons we can learn from other countries on how to live differently. I’ll also delve into what we can learn from looking at the United States’ not-so-distant past when capitalism existed within certain guardrails and our system looked more like our peer countries in terms of social support.

This book is personal to me because I nearly destroyed my mental and physical health in the pursuit of professional success and financial security before I woke up to the fact that the US economic system has turned into what feels like a massive scam.

It demands you work constantly, not just for money, but also for your identity, and then, when your body can’t handle it, sells you “solutions” that are band-aids at best. Whatever the problem is, the solution is always us buying something with money we don’t have, rather than the system changing. Every problem is treated like an individual issue that can be solved with more discipline or a ‘life hack.’

The fact is, hyper-capitalism has destroyed quality of life for the vast majority of Americans, because affording the basic necessities of life has become an impossible burden to bear.

But what’s even worse it that this system has colonized our minds and made so many of us think that the entire purpose of life is to work, acquire, grow, and build and that if we aren’t doing that something is wrong with us.

It’s made us think that this is just the way life is and nothing can be done about it.

But we aren’t the problem, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

While most industrialized countries manage to provide health care, education, regular working hours—you know, the basic things people need—to it’s citizens, we are asked to believe that it just beyond the capacity of the United States of America to do this even though the government provided these things just a few generations ago.

It’s not just that there is basic support in many of the US’s peer countries. There is a vastly different understanding of what the purpose of life is and what is important. It actually isn’t that different than what I experienced terms of values when I was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s.

But somewhere the US (and it seems, some other English speaking capitalist countries) diverged and went down a starkly different path.

This is not to suggest that a perfect country exists. This is a straw man argument made by defenders of the status quo. They will point to a problem in Italy or Denmark or Sweden and say, “see it isn’t perfect,” even though nobody said it was.

All countries have problems. No matter where you live, you will have problems.

Another country doesn’t have to be perfect (that’s impossible) for us to learn from them about culture and public policy.

It’s also important to remember that many countries with a fraction of the United States’ resources and wealth—countries that are considered ‘developing’, such as Costa Rica—have populations with higher levels of health and happiness than Americans.

That’s why, as the name of my book suggests, the worst part about all this is that this didn’t just happen by accident. We actually had a system that provided basic support to Americans, and then we didn’t. It was far from perfect, but there were some basic guardrails.

It was more normal.

So, what do I mean by a ‘normal’ culture?

A normal culture is one that follows basic norms. So if all your peer countries provide for education, health, workers’ rights, and so on, it would be normal to do the same things. Normal countries don’t have constant headlines like these below, especially when that culture has more resources and money than any country on earth:

Fed up: 2 in 5 Americans say living in the US no longer enjoyable

Average American Spends 138 Minutes Mired in Worrisome Thoughts Every Day

American Wealth Is at a Record High. Sentiment Is Low, and Falling

More Americans Cannot Afford Medical Care

To Escape the Grind, Young People Turn to ‘Mini-Retirements’

Elon Musk Told Twitter Staff to Expect 80-Hour Work Weeks, Report Says

A normal culture doesn’t have massive wealth disparities and inequality.

The greediness of the people at the top of American society is simply not normal—and just a few decades ago nearly everyone would have agreed on that. But what is the most ‘not normal’ thing is the way Americans now worship these people, rather than reviling them.

It’s actually deviant behavior to hoard money and demand more tax cuts and preferences when you have more money than you could spend in ten lifetimes. It’s not normal to constantly lay off employees just to make the stock price go up a few points, so you can have even more money while creating constant instability for your workers who probably live paycheck to paycheck.

To be clear, I’m not against wealth.

Many countries that provide a robust social safety net and have vastly less income inequality have wealthy people, even billionaires. The difference between the US and those countries, is the super wealthy are taxed at very high rates in most countries, whereas in the US they are coddled and given massive preferences in the tax code.

What I’m against is the deranged, immoral system in the United States that is designed to benefit the people at the top and then claims that it will ‘trickle down’ to everyone else, when that simply doesn’t happen.

What’s just as distressing is seeing how the hyper capitalist mindset in the United States is bleeding into the cultures of countries that typically have different values.

I see this among younger people in Italy who have been fed a steady diet of US media whether it’s TV shows, movies or social media that depicts US life in an extremely glamorized fashion without any showing any of the down sides.

I guess it would be a bit of a downer if on a TV sitcom the characters were bankrupted by medical debt or had to skip major life events of friends and family because they already used up their two weeks of vacation time. (You should see the reaction from an Italian when I explain how vacation time works in the US. They are shocked.)

There wouldn’t be much of a plot line if the characters of a television show or movie could never spend time together because they were always working and/or commuting. But unfortunately, these shows are conflated with reality for many people who don’t live in the US.

One of the frustrating things about watching people defend the US system is when they say that Americans make more money than people in other peer countries, so what’s the problem? Why are people complaining? They fail to mention that it costs at least double to live in the US than in many of these countries, and often more if you factor in the price of health care and education in the US.

But more importantly, there is this built in bias in the US that making more money equals happiness. To the extent this has become true in the US (it didn’t used to be true) it’s because having more money means you aren’t in a constant state of worry about how you will afford the basic necessities of life—food, shelter, health care.

But why are people in the richest country on earth worrying about such things?

There are those who would have you believe that the US (and other English speaking capitalist countries) just changed naturally in response to a changing world, when the change occurred because of policy makers who wanted to change the system to benefit certain types of people over others.

Some people call the cause of all of this “neoliberalism.” I don’t really care what we call it. What I care about is that capitalism became untethered from any sense of basic decency and gave us what we have now; the term I typically use is late-stage capitalism.

Right now, it seems to be taking the worst toll on the English-speaking industrialized countries, but it’s coming for everyone.

But it really doesn’t have to be this way.

We don’t have to accept this, and we can have a different way of life. But first, we have to understand what happened and then demand a more economically equal society. We have to reject the idea that the “productivity” and “wealth” of a country are a measure of its goodness. We have to deprogram from the hyper-capitalist conditioning that makes us think that professional success or acquisition of goods is the measure of a life, or that it’s okay to sacrifice our happiness and joy in the name of “productivity.”

There is so much to delve into, and I can’t do it all here, but I wanted to fill you in on what I’m working on and what I’m spending most of my time thinking about these days.

I don’t have a pub date for the book but it will ideally come out in 2026. I’ll keep you posted!

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