09/20/2026
There are a handful of things I grew up believing were simply part of being an adult in America. I never really questioned them because everyone around me was doing the same thing. You work, you pay your bills, you tip 20%, you pay your health insurance premium, you hope you don’t get sick, and if your employer gives you two weeks of vacation you’re supposed to feel pretty fortunate.
It took leaving the United States for me to realize that a lot of those things weren’t laws of adulthood. They were just the rules of the particular system I grew up inside.
Tipping is probably one of the easiest examples. Twenty percent became so automatic that I barely thought about what I was doing anymore. Restaurant meal, add 20%. Coffee shop, tip screen. Takeout, another tip screen. It was just embedded into the transaction. Then you move somewhere like Spain, where tipping exists but does not carry remotely the same expectation, and suddenly you realize how strange it is that the customer in America is often expected to participate directly in making sure the person serving them earns enough money.
Healthcare has been a much bigger adjustment for me. I spent most of my adult life treating health insurance premiums like a utility bill. You pay a significant amount every month because that is simply what responsible adults do. Then you still have deductibles, copays, prescriptions, and the lingering question of what something is actually going to cost if you need to use the insurance you have been paying for.
Even prescription medication created a reflex in me that I did not recognize as a reflex until I left. A doctor could prescribe something, and one of my first thoughts would immediately be, “How much is this going to cost?” I would check before filling it. I would think about whether I really needed it. I would compare prices. I never considered that unusual. That was just how medicine worked.
The same thing happened with sick days. Going to work sick often felt like being responsible. You didn’t want to let your coworkers down. You didn’t want to use your remaining paid days. You didn’t want the absence sitting there next to your name. Parents make the same calculation when their kids are sick. Can I miss work? Do I have any days left? How sick are they really? From inside the system, that can feel like adulthood. From outside it, sometimes it looks like people being asked to decide whether their health is worth the financial consequences of taking care of it.
Vacation might be the one that makes me laugh at myself the most. There was a time when I would hear “two weeks paid vacation” and genuinely think that sounded pretty good. Two whole weeks. Look at me thriving. Then we started spending extended time in Europe and I watched people treat actual time away from work like a normal part of life rather than something you earn after demonstrating that you have sufficiently destroyed yourself for the company.
I don’t say any of this because I think Spain is perfect. It isn’t. I live here. I can assure you there are plenty of systems that will make you stare at a wall and wonder what exactly is happening. There are also things about America I deeply appreciate and things I think Americans do extraordinarily well.
The bigger lesson for me has been realizing how powerful the word “normal” is.
We tend to assume that the systems we inherited are the natural order of things. We build our habits around them, teach our children how to navigate them, and eventually stop noticing them at all. It sometimes takes stepping into a completely different system to realize that what you thought was just life was actually one version of life.
That has probably been one of the most valuable parts of moving abroad for me.
Not discovering that Spain has all the answers.
Discovering that the questions I never thought to ask were questions at all.
