Learning to Live with Shifting Ground
What 13 years in the Netherlands taught me about a beautiful, messy, and absurd world.
So…what exactly is going on in the US right now?
As I write this, we’ve seen the Trump administration’s chaos and cruelty on full display in Minneapolis. A lot is going on, and all at once. During my last visit stateside, a friend and I tried to make sense of the disorientation and uncertainty. And we chose to chat while strolling up to Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. On that sunny walk, we talked about politics, civility, and cultural shifts in America. About halfway up, something finally connected in me what I’d been sensing before: people seemed more in their own bubbles than I remembered.
I’d noticed this change in small interactions around my hometown of Charlottesville. There was a kind of low-grade impatience, a sense that people were in each other’s way. More self-focused, less polite, and less small talk with strangers. Even customer service instincts felt numbed. All in all, I couldn’t tell if I was aging out of the culture or if something had genuinely shifted.
At Monticello’s gift shop, my buddy and I paused for a couple of minutes in the book section. Books by Jill Lepore, John Meacham, Allen Guelzo, and Clint Smith were asking us to reflect on America as an ‘experiment’. I remember wondering how many of us encounter these ideas outside museums or PBS documentaries. And I considered messages shared earlier by another close friend who had texted, “our values are all out of whack…that has to degrade society over time.”
These thoughts and exchanges followed me back to the Netherlands, where I’ve lived for almost 13 years now.
The View from The Hague
After years of writing about the world, Robert Kaplan wrote Earning the Rockies. Part of his rationale was to study America’s “domestic condition.” It was his way of ‘coming home’ with foreign eyes. I understand that now more than ever, even as I make an effort to visit home two to three times each year.
The distance brings perspective. In my experience, however, it’s also meant watching your country change as you do too. Over time, it’s been hard to know which is doing more of the shifting. In a rhyming way, I’ve started to recognize feelings my parents have shared when we visit family in the Middle East: a longing mixed with mild estrangement.
For example, years ago, someone remarked that my father’s Arabic sounded like it was from another era. It was a compliment, said with endearment, but it captured something real. When you leave a place, you freeze a version of it in time while the place keeps moving without you. In that sense, coming back means reconciling the place you remember with the one that actually exists.
Living between The Hague and Charlottesville, between Dutch moderation and American fervor, I’ve learned that progress isn’t inevitable. The Netherlands showed me that societies can build systems that work better — healthcare, public transportation, labor laws, and transporting kids in ‘bucket bikes’. But those systems endure only if people choose to prioritize and sustain them.
And what one generation builds, another can dismantle.
When I left the US in 2013, I assumed things would keep improving — more progressive politics, more equitable investments, more rational emotions, and continuing realpolitik restraint. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” By 2026, I’ve finally accepted something my Middle Eastern roots long understood: time alone doesn’t advance equity or justice. Progress isn’t inevitable.
Living abroad has softened some of my American instincts. For example, I’m less convinced that hustle equals virtue, less interested in optimizing everything, and more comfortable with contradiction. I’ve learned that not every problem needs solving, and not every conversation needs a winner.
At the same time, distance has clarified what I admire about America: the belief that reinvention is possible, and that limits can be challenged rather than accepted. Dutch pragmatism is a real strength, but American restlessness carries its own bold energy too. Living between the two has made me more attentive to humble, practical choices — what Mark Twain recognized as ‘brash practicality’.
Waypoints
As the US approaches its 250th anniversary and the FIFA World Cup this summer, neither feels much like a celebration. We’re in a transition, and perhaps something messier than that. Still, there’s a strange relief in admitting that some old ways of thinking no longer work. None of this means we’re lost. It just means we need new reference points.
That’s where Waypoints comes in.
Waypoints are markers that help orient us. They give direction when certainty fades and when the terrain shifts. They’re the places and ideas that matter.
I started this project because I keep finding myself between countries and between worlds—one where, as the Economist puts it, “intelligence is pressing forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”
To be clear, I’m not offering answers, only what I see and experience from The Hague — shaped by Charlottesville and DC, by 13+ years of living abroad, by time spent with family and friends in Palestine and Jordan, and by watching both the US and myself change in unexpected ways.
Some of what I’ll write will be weighty. Others lighter, such as food, books, places worth your attention and time. But all of it will be driven by the same impulse: to share the waypoints that help us navigate when clarity is in short supply.
Thanks for being here. Let’s see where this takes us.
— Hank Mobley, “Remember”
52.0705° N, 4.3007° E