Your last paragraph is a good one. I fell in love with Sweden when I was there. Then I talked to some teenagers and they said they really wanted to live in America. It caught me off guard. I didn’t understand why they would want to leave a place that seemed so safe, secure, and comfortable. They said they wanted more flexibility and opportunity. Sure, they could get a stable living-wage job and keep it for their whole career, but in America they thought they would have more chances to try new things and reinvent themselves.

Whether our perceptions of each other’s countries are correct or not, for all of us the grass certainly looked greener on the other side of the fence.