Holding Our Breath
On Travel, Perception, and a Nation Living on the Edge
By Theodora Filis
Americans aren’t clueless or indifferent right now.
We are in a constant fight-or-flight mode—waiting for something to break or finally change.
I’ve seen how we appear.
I know what we carry.
And I don’t think the world yet realizes just how close to the edge we are.
Having traveled across Europe for more than twenty years, I’ve often encountered the familiar stereotype of the “stupid American”—a shorthand used to describe tourists who are loud, entitled, incurious, or dismissive of the cultures they visit. At times, I admit, I slipped into the local language when Americans were nearby, not out of shame but out of discomfort. Too often, I watched fellow travelers treat ancient places as backdrops rather than living histories, measuring their value by convenience or entertainment rather than by attention and respect.
For a long time, I thought this behavior was just ignorance or arrogance. But over the years, I’ve realized there’s something more complicated beneath it. What may seem like brashness from the outside often hides a deeper restlessness, a nervous energy that stays with us wherever we go.
Travel is meant to open us up. Yet many Americans arrive abroad already tense, carrying the weight of a country that feels constantly on edge. Even thousands of miles from home, we bring unspoken vigilance—an underlying sense that something is always about to go wrong. In that state, curiosity diminishes. Listening becomes more difficult. Presence escapes us.
The stereotype persists partly because Americans are often viewed as disconnected from the broader world—less fluent in other languages, less knowledgeable about global history, and less accustomed to seeing themselves as part of a larger human story. There is validity to this view, shaped by an education system that has long deprioritized geography, languages, and international awareness. However, this explanation by itself feels incomplete.
What’s missing from the caricature is context.
Americans are going through ongoing political, economic, and social instability at home. Years of polarization, distrust in institutions, racial injustice, aggressive immigration enforcement, and public violence keep the nation in a constant state of alert. This isn’t a short-term crisis; it’s a long-lasting condition.
When people stay in fight-or-flight mode for too long, something changes. They become reactive instead of reflective. Defensive instead of open. Loud instead of curious. Not because they don’t care—but because caring feels risky when the ground keeps shifting beneath them.
This helps explain the contradiction I often see abroad: Americans who travel far but struggle to truly settle in. Their bodies cross borders, but their minds remain tense, scanning for threats and waiting for the subsequent rupture. Travel, in these moments, becomes less about learning and more about escaping—finding brief relief from pressures that feel relentless at home.
And yet, something else is happening beneath the surface.
Across the United States, many citizens are grappling—often painfully—with the gap between national ideals and real-life experiences. Protests, racial violence, demands for accountability, movements for climate action and immigration reform, and renewed civic engagement among young people all indicate a population that is not asleep but stretched thin. Exhausted, yes. Sometimes scared. But not indifferent.
What appears like chaos from a distance is, in many ways, a society battling itself, struggling to determine whether it will split apart under pressure or eventually transform.
From the outside, it may seem easy to dismiss Americans as shallow, self-absorbed, or unaware. From the inside, it feels very different. It’s like holding your breath for years. Like waiting for either collapse or correction. Like knowing something is unsustainable but not knowing which way it will break.
I return once more to travel — not as tourism but as a test of presence. Actual travel calls for humility, listening, and a willingness to be transformed by what we experience. When someone or a country is in survival mode, embracing those qualities becomes more difficult.
But awareness itself is the start. That’s when the waiting finally breaks—whether through rupture or reform—what comes next might tell a very different story about who Americans are, and who we are still trying to become.
