Bad Americans

I’ve been in LA for three weeks, which is just enough time for people to invite me to about twelve different things that will absolutely never happen.

The natural shape of interactions here seems to be: who are you, what do you do, and should I be interested?

After deciding you are worth their time - which, as a “writer from London,” I apparently am - everyone is so warm. Effusively warm. “We should hang out!” warm. “Let’s definitely grab coffee!” warm. The kind of warm that makes you check your calendar, only to slowly realise the calendar was never part of the plan.

I started to think Americans were fake, which felt unfair. Then I wondered if maybe this is just a different social contract, one where enthusiasm is real, and follow-through is… optional.

Most of this I’m going to put down to the hotel I’m staying at, which I will not name out of respect to Fabio’s production team that apparently books him here every time. A place where the staff have mastered a very specific energy: not “I’m here to serve you,” but “I exist on a slightly higher plane, and I’m choosing to help you anyway.”

It’s incredibly polite. Flawless, even. But there’s an unmistakable sense they are calmer than you, more put-together than you, possibly better hydrated than you - and they know it.

At one point I asked a question and got an answer so measured, so gently reassuring, I felt like I’d interrupted something important just by existing.

No one is rude. Which almost makes it worse. You can’t push back against it. You just stand there, slightly disoriented, feeling like you’ve been kindly assessed and found… a bit much.

I’ve started trying to match their energy, which is how I ended up saying “no rush at all” in a tone that suggested I had absolutely nowhere to be, no past, and no identifiable personality.

There’s also a particular style of conversation here that feels less like talking and more like a soft interview. I was approached by a man who told me, within seconds, that he worked for Playboy. Two days later, his French nephew introduced himself in almost exactly the same way - same tone, same casual importance, like they’d both been given the same opening line and told to deliver it confidently.

Both of them ended up sitting at the end of my sunbed, asking me questions in turn. It felt less like conversation and more like I was being assessed for something I hadn’t applied for.

Not aggressively. Not even intentionally. It just seems to be the natural shape of things here.

Who are you. What do you do. Should I be interested.

And as an elusive Londoner, I can’t help but treat the whole thing as an experiment - one I appear to be the only person quietly amused by.

I don’t think this is really about Americans. There are plenty of Londoners here doing exactly the same thing - just with slightly better accents and a LinkedIn voice that’s migrated into real life. If anything, I judge them more. It feels more deliberate somehow.

Maybe it’s not cultural. Maybe it’s environmental. A place where everyone starts speaking in soft opportunities and open-ended enthusiasm, and nobody quite remembers how to end a sentence with an actual plan.

And then I start to soften on it. Because there is something real underneath it. LA is a place where people genuinely believe they can make their wildest ideas happen - and sometimes they actually do. That part isn’t a myth.

London, for all its clarity and cynicism, could probably use a bit of that delusion.

Moira, a friend of mine from London who moved here six years ago, said as much as we drove through Silver Lake on the way to a small Japanese place to eat and drink cheap beer: “Everything here feels more free.” I can wholeheartedly agree.

I watched her as she spoke - now fully American in accent, glitter scattered from beneath her eyebrows across her lids and down toward her cheeks - and I couldn’t help but think: I want to be sprinkled in glitter too.

I’m heading home tomorrow, and after almost a month in this strange, sun-soaked bubble of other people’s dreams, I’m not entirely sure I want it to burst just yet.

People keep asking me how my time here has been. I think, mostly, I’ve been a fly on the wall. An outsider. Watching it all play out from a safe distance.

And then, when my social battery allows it - and admittedly, after a few spicy margaritas - I enter the room. I answer the questions. I spill my dreams.

Before quietly retreating again, back into my shell. Underneath my glasses and a novel.