Henry James had this thought in 1907, and I had this epiphany in 2019. But now the hyper-financialization of the West has so thoroughly permeated life that people cannot even fathom an alternative. Westerners cannot even imagine what life looks like outside the over-optimized, over-financed, late-stage capitalist West, and I say this as a person born and raised in Canada.

In 2019 I moved to a small, poor, non-EU, European country. The first thing I noticed was how well the restaurants were decorated, as if the owners put their heart and soul into it, profit-be-damned. And I only paid $10 for the meal. It's breathtakingly beautiful, yet still incredibly cheap. As I stayed over the years, I got a taste for what an entirely different life looks like outside the late-stage capitalist West. Small boutique coffee shops, mom-and-pop custom furniture stores, local clothing manufacturers, family-run hotels, lots of small independent entrepreneurial ventures - things that could not exist in America anymore due to the stranglehold of megacorps and private equity like BlackRock. It's more than just a breath of fresh air, it's actually something of heaven on earth. It's what I imagine Henry James America looked like.