Things that are different so far, part 2

One of the hardest things for me to get used to in the Netherlands has to be the hours the local stores are open. Most of the stores here close at 6:00 pm. A couple of grocery stores stay open till 8:00 and restaurants tend to stay open later but over all this city shuts down at 6:00. Except of course for Thursdays. Everything stays open till 8:00 or 9:00 on Thursdays which seemed pretty odd to me until I realized that many offices are closed on Friday making late Thursday hours seem a bit more reasonable. Even odder is that nothing really opens till 1:00 on Mondays. Sunday hours involved local businesses filing a law suit to keep from having to open at all on Sundays. Back in America I could run to a store and pick up almost anything I could want 24 hours a day, here you have to do some very careful scheduling to make sure you don't run out of food at home.

I think I have begun to figure out why the store hours seem so strange to me. In the US most businesses want to be open as long as possible and they normally have no trouble finding employees to fill the hours. In the Netherlands it isn't that people don't want to work, the Dutch have a very strong, Calvinist influenced work ethic. The Dutch maintain a very high level of productivity, one of the highest in the world and equal to if not higher than US labor productivity. All of this productivity happens within the shortest average work week in the world. An average Netherlander only works 29.5 hours per week, because of this they also have a slightly lower average annual income than an average American worker, and they are perfectly OK with that.

In America we seem obsessed with income. We want to make more and more money so we can spend more and more money even though all of the hours we work can prevent us from enjoying the things that we purchase. In the Netherlands the average person seems much less obsessed with income than they are with quality of life. If you can live with less, or less expensive things, you can get by with less money which means you can have more time for yourself and your friends and family instead of your boss. In America we like big, flashy, new cars. The Dutch like these cars as well, but they reason that if a €5000 used car will get you to where you need to go then why would you pay €30000 for a flashy new car? In the US we would say, A. because we can, and B. because it is flashy. This isn't the way the Dutch think.

In the Netherlands someone who owns a flashy car or wears expensive clothes is considered a show off and very shallow. Here almost nothing is purchased on credit so if you own somethings it is assumed that you worked all of the hours required to pay for it in full. If you own an expensive car you obviously have no life, spend no time with friends and family, and are probably not very interesting. In the US someone might decide the responsible thing to do instead of buying an expensive car would be to purchase a bicycle and use it for most of their commuting. Then they would go out to a bike shop and purchase a really nice new bike, an expensive helmet, cycling clothes, and all the other accoutrements required to show the rest of the world that you are a responsible cyclist. The Dutch would just laugh at this. They would instead buy the cheapest used bike they could, ride in their daily clothes, and never think about a helmet. Then they would ride the bike home and enjoy being gezellig.

"Gezellig" is a Dutch word that can't really be translated into English (it also can't be pronounced correctly by most of us who speak English as our first language) but it is a descriptive word relating to things that are cozy or comfortable or warm or pleasantly familiar. It is also possibly the single most important word in the Dutch language. Netherlanders seek out gezellig, they cherish gezellig, they value gezellig over almost anything else. Work isn't gezellig but the income it provides can help provide gezellig. After a certain numbers of hours at work though your job starts to provide diminishing returns when it comes to gezellig as it takes away from the time you could be enjoying gezellig things. The Dutch are very concerned with efficiency and have discovered that when it comes to living a full and happy life a 40 hour work week isn't very efficient and certainly isn't very gezellig.

Could Americans ever figure out a way to translate "gezellig"? It seems like the nation that considers itself the most innovative on Earth should be able to find a way to let its people enjoy life.