Forced to choose between two cookie-cutter models of mass living baked up by policy wonks and culture pundits, Americans would be better off grabbing their passport and opting out entirely.

This isn’t a dig against the less fortunate. It’s not even a dig at the lazy. Americans spread across our class structure work day in and day out with a vague and anxious belief that it must, in some material sense, be worth it. It just can’t be true, we assume, that America’s really not the best place under the circumstances for us to personally pursue happiness.

But with that kind of falsely innocent chauvinism, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

As is seemingly very well known, in the old days lots of our struggling citizens hit the open road, bound for parts of America that weren’t, let’s just say, Americanized yet. Yet today, we don’t have to perpetrate a genocide in order to emulate them. We just have to dare to start over in a foreign country.

The case for doing so ought to be pretty strong.