There's this twitter feed or thread or whatever that really struck me earlier. I don't really use twitter, there's not much that has been able to keep me going back for more, but this particular string of tweets resonates with me because it has been something bugging me for a long time. Years, in fact.

I'll just copy it out verbatim, coming from some guy @Thomashornall - I've no idea who he is:

1) Financial Openness:

Americans freely discuss salary, deals and revenue.

Brits are guarded and awkward on money matters.

2) Belief In Possibility

Discuss big plans in America: “Why not!?”

In the UK: “Why bother?”

One culture expands, the other stifles.

3) Rising Tide Mentality

Americans celebrate wins with genuine infectious enthusiasm.

It’s all: “LET’S GOs” high-fives, celebrations.

Brits tut, cringe with impotent envy, and think “who does he think he is!?”

One attitude lifts all boats. The other sinks them.

4) Learning Focus

Every win shared triggered rapid-fire questions:

• "What worked?"
• "How'd you do it?"
• "Can you teach me?"

Americans study success. Brits suspect it.

5) Risk Tolerance

"Failure" in America's proof you took a big swing and missed … this time.

In the UK, it’s like a generational stain we try scrubbing off quietly behind closed doors.

No wonder America scales while Britain stagnates

6) Speed of Execution

US: "Let's make it happen"

Jump on a call. Refer through networks. Action-first mentality.

UK: "Let's be realistic".

List all problems first. Worst-case scenarios. Every reason NOT to try.

They ship while we shuffle.

7) Follow The Money

Britain will lose nearly 10,000 millionaires this year.

The US is forecast to gain nearly 4,000.

Capital flows where it’s respected, not resented.

Back to my thoughts

It really hammers the nail on the head. It's correct in every regard. My entire life's experience among the British is just negativity. We apply it into our own self-deprecating humour and it can often be seen as a certain cultural charm, a timid kindness or something.

But it also comes with the far more powerful and significant dark side, the hopelessness. Ascribing every unfortunate event as inevitable with phrases such as 'typical' and playing down events with uncomfortable humour or minimization.

We blame everything else, perhaps rightly so, and yet we don't look for solutions or work around it. Then, we vote in politicians who are an unfortunate reflection of us with added elitism and pompousness.

Seriously. Only 20% of the voting population voted for the current leadership, who somehow won in a landslide. We voted in who we actively dislike, the leader of which became the most unpopular prime minister in history within about a month.

Prior to that, we continuously voted in the opposition to the current party for 14 years, as we watched out country spiral into the impoverished dirt, and we shrug it off and say 'well, it is what it is'.

Our negative attitude keeps us unproductive and out of work. We are one of the least productive countries among our peers. Sick leave has gone up 55% in 3 years. That's not normal.

We've given up hope now, sure, but this has always been the case. Even when I was a kid in the 90's, this attitude persisted, and that was supposed to be one of the golden eras. You see it in our 1970's comedy, the jaded cynicism. It's everywhere. It really is cultural.

It's not something we can easily get out of. We think because our individual effect is so minimal, 'what's the point'. So nobody does anything.

Sure, we can blame a government for being out of touch to some extent, despite us voting them in. But we're also supposed to do everything we can in spite of everything going on around us.

American culture does this, and though I'm loath to adopt Americanism more than we already are, we should have our own style of positive thinking. Our one source of this is the empire, the control our little island had on the entire world, the way we civilised it, ended slavery, invented basically everything.

But we've been taught to feel shame for it, embarrassed, apologetic. It's infuriating.

I live abroad and I watch my home tear itself apart via a stream of unforced errors, laziness, and corruption.

We should be doubling down on the cultural exports we're known for. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, James Bond, etiquette, a strong Navy, science & medicine, law and order, football, wimbledon, the Royal Family, Theatre & musicals, the Proms... The list is practically endless.

We should be aiming towards essentially creating a caricature of ourselves culturally. It's what we love and it's what the entire world loves.

Instead, what I see is the world mocking us for becoming so poor, losing our high-trust society to foreign immigration, hating ourselves, being too scared to speak freely.

Polish people used to migrate for work to the UK. Now they're leaving in droves, because they can earn more income and live more cheaply and safely in Poland. Even Ukranians and Hong Kong citizens express massive regret from ever setting foot there. I have one long-time Hong Kong friend who was an anglophile her whole life, visiting many times and becoming a stereotype of it all. Union Jack pillows and such.

Now she's like '... eh, not a fan anymore. I'd rather stay in Hong Kong where the Communist regime has now taken over and we lost all our freedoms'.

Not even joking.

What even are we? What do we even do? What do we import? What is the point in the UK now?

We shied away from everything that made the country amazing. And now the UK is just a shithole with no redeeming features other than 'a nice countryside', which tbh isn't nearly as nice as the countryside in places like Switzerland, France, Germany and so on because we replaced all our historical infrastructure with derelict, 'economically viable' structures and made downtown highstreets financially impossible to sustain.

So we board em up, shut down the bus services, close the banks, and replace it all with foreign barbershops, nail salons and vape shops, all very clearly there for money laundering purposes as they ship their illegally acquired wealth back to their homeland, and buy sports cars with the change.

that's modern Britain.

Ugh.

We blame the politicians because we're too weak to blame ourselves. If we blame ourselves, we're too weak to do anything about it.

I hope things will change before it's too late. I know we're not the only ones struggling - most of Western Europe is, and in a few ways, even worse. But that just means we're prone to accept it even more as we normalise paying 70% of our income on rent, and making ourselves poor for the next 6 months to go on a single weekend trip to Blackpool or whatever.

DO SOMETHING

STOP MAKING EXCUSES

Of course, there is a lot the government could be doing, but not the current parties. Tories and Labour both need to die. Tbh, Lib Dems, Greens, probably Reform, too. None of them have the charisma, willpower, strength, or pizzazz that's needed. They're all weak-kneed timid Brits.

It's the responsibility of the public to annihilate every single one of these wet rags and replace them with something like, oh, I don't know, Argentina's Javier Milei. Here's another feed from Twitter that is extraordinarily inspiring:

In short, the thread tells the Argentine story. Once wealthier than the likes of France and Italy, terrible management causes a death spiral into poverty and chaos.

Milei comes along.

AFUERA!

Goes against every possible grain. The country immediately starts seeing economic surplus, improvement in life, positivity, productivity, efficiency, business and investment. Suddenly, the hidden potential of Argentina has come bursting into the light. All it took is to get rid of the barriers with a chainsaw.

It can be done.

/rant

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