Probably no surprise some (Western) European countries allow you going to the GP, telling you are exhausted/burned-out/anxious, whatever fits the extreme fatigue, and you get some time of commonly agreed off, prescribed, paid. Everyone is better off that way (except the manufacturers of stimulants. Coffee excluded here! :-) ). Also, overtime is not a trend. Preserved for exceptional circumstances, for a brief period that an otherwise balanced person can handle. Europe is economically uncompetitive, the rest of the world makes circles around it performance and money-wise, also many abuse the system, still, without people a society is nothing, economy alone is crap if it is not for the people, as much people as possible so the streets are not crawling with too much crazy. We need to have a life first. Most of my European friends would never think of living in the US or Asia prolonged, only for an energetic period to boost some aspects (financial, experience, knowledge), mostly when they are young (but not with children, no!). Those places are not liveable from a European perspective.
> Europe is economically uncompetitive, the rest of the world makes circles around it performance and money-wise, ...
Don't buy the propaganda. You're talking about the second-richest part of Earth, with undeniably the world's highest average quality of life. It's also a big place with massive differences.
You have to understand that when Germans are being dramatic over the economic state of their country, they are describing issues that the vast majority of countries would absolutely love to have. Economic growth of only 0.9% is very bad if you have a lot of catching up to do, but Germany doesn't, so it just amounts to being slightly behind other rich countries.
"Deteriorating Europe" is a Russo-American psyop. Luckily we have better memory - we've heard this song for at least 100 years by now, and yet here we are. That's not to say that there aren't issues, but Europeans are largely unbothered by things like the GDP growth difference between the Eurozone and the US, because it's quite clearly driven by a runaway stock market and unfathomable inequality. You can't eat GDP figures.
Depending on where you work, in Europe it can be just as bad. It doesn't matter whether Europe is economically uncompetitive (is it?), if the people themselves think they have to compete and become deprived of time and energy then they will burn out regardless. I see it happening left and right lately.
The only thing here is that there generally is a fairly robust social net ready to catch you if you do, as you mention. But my honest opinion is that this is not a solution, it's a bandaid for the real problem: why do people feel like they have to work themselves into the ground in order to be able to live?
You are right though, many here including myself cannot imagine living in those circumstances in other continents. I think that is another problem in itself, that people are becoming complacent here due to the low risk. That might even be part of the reason why people are so careless with their work-life balance, because they can't really lose it all like in other places, so maybe people stop paying attention to things that are actually important. Just guessing.
Meh. It's competetive enough. Productivity per hour worked is about the same (sometimes higher) than in US. We just work reasonable hours.
> Those places are not liveable from a European perspective.
If the sacrifices these people make were at least for something that was obviously good - I could maybe understand that. But it's mostly making the world worse (either through financial schemes, addictive social media, marketing, AI, or other pointless bullshit).
Imagine wasting your life slaving away at making better ways to get people addicted to nicotine. That's IT now.
Really? The last time I checked, Germany was sitting well in the middle of Europe
* contrary to many countries it has had export/import surplus since decades. Not a single year with a deficit since 1952. Compare this e.g. with the USA, which had the last surplus in 1975.
* it's tiny, look at it on a globe. And yet it's number 3 worldwide on economic power. Two years surpassed Japan that is larger by size and has double the people
* in June it had the highest exports ever in it's history
And that is just ONE of the European countries. Others, like Switzerland and Netherlands aren't shabby either, especially normalized to inhabitants or country size.
