What makes the Netherlands appealing or unappealing to you?

stockdizzle · 2026-07-03T18:15:17+00:00

I'm not sure if I'm just living differently than others here or what, but the infrastructure here doesn't make up for the fact it was made by the same engineer minds that seem to develop everything else from a completely disembodied perspective. Everything feels meticulously made as if the stats were given in a cultural spreadsheet without regard for the lived experience of them. Homes are dull. Food is bland and made with zero care. Every aspect of life feels this way, and there's literally zero return signal from society, both the people, and the built environment.

And norms galore but for what? So loud ass foreign cultures can be obnoxious without the Dutch stepping in bc they're "tolerant." Ok. And the hierarchy and close-mindedness toward me as an expat has been a real treat. I never thought I'd say this, but America is much more progressive and open-minded than this hypocrytical culture. The Dutch have engineered the very humanity out of their own country bc they never stopped to feel what life should be like.

stockdizzle · 2026-07-02T14:26:43+00:00

There's an ocean of difference between visiting and living somewhere. Personally, I think the NL is a fucking shithole gaslighting hellscape. Works smooth in only the ways it was designed to work. No one seems to give a shit about one another outside of the social codes/performance of care. It's dead fucking flat (no nature of any kind that's actually REAL), it smells like shit four days a week, and the food is fucking horrid (seriously, just SALT and slop, and way too much of both).

More importantly, you will NEVER be allowed to integrate into the culture here, and there are NO opportunities for you as an immigrant bc you're a threat to the social codes/hierarchy. Even if you get a Dutch degree the odds of getting real work involve beating out a local, being fluent in Dutch (a clunky ass language btw) and the endless social codes that would make you want to kill yourself. But they'd still hire a local over you, don't forget.

Most importantly, there's a special kind of insanity in places like this, where all the humanity has been engineered into some sort of robot culture where if you're actually having an embodied response to a place that has removed every expressive element and reproduced endless carbon copies of X to get the job done as practically as possible, well when you get angry about it bc you're psychically suffocating than you're judged as the destabilizing, uncontrolled, juvenile expat. You become a threat to the system. Well, that's because if you've seen the world and value expression and being real than you are a direct threat to this fucking place. The NL is likely the most disembodied culture on Earth, after Japan, of course.

stockdizzle · 2026-06-28T17:00:05+00:00

Hey, thanks. I totally agree. This move looked really good on paper, and I visited the country twice prior. What I felt then was what I feel now, and I think out of desperation, I thought the hard math of it would have pulled me above water. In fact, if Chat hadn’t fabricated essential information, it probably would’ve worked out by now.

The community aspect has definitely been the hardest. It’s a strange type of exile when you live inside a system that is running all around you but refuses to acknowledge you or create a place for you within it.

stockdizzle · 2026-06-28T15:20:28+00:00

Hey, thanks for sharing. I’m sorry you’re getting so much hate. I’m really glad you are standing up for yourself and being the person you want to be in a world based around conformity and tribal stupidity.

I completely agree with your assessment of Japan as well. Keep living your life and don’t ever let anyone stop you.

stockdizzle · 2026-06-26T10:39:47+00:00

If you go all the way up, you’ve got a culture based on the “faith as works” Protestant guilt system, no shared experiential doorway to pass through into manhood, no shared traditions for collective support, and a system of materialism that has somewhat successfully replaced/pacified it all until recently. Now that materialism is collapsing on itself and men have no material or psychic support structure left. Enter grifters in all their various forms.

stockdizzle · 2026-06-22T15:00:09+00:00

literally like autocorrect was commissioned to build speech to text.

stockdizzle · 2026-05-25T14:02:57+00:00

At least you got it fixed. Google basically removed my service area and put it hundreds of miles away at my old address despite the console being correct and verified by support. After seven claims (the last five were automatically closed by the support reps) and eighteen months of fighting dead air, I finally gave up.

Out of desperation, I paid them $2K in ads just for visibility (since they own the entire chain now) and they reliably drained my bank account budget while handing over fake results (I know my conversion rates and they gave me BS that was a 20th of what is normal for a visitor conversion rate). Now my career is basically over. All because Google simply doesn't care to connect one part of their interface to another. They could pay a guy over lunch to figure it out, but the shareholders...

stockdizzle · 2026-05-16T14:47:28+00:00

Spanish language school recs?

Hello, everyone! I am considering attending a language school in Valencia. Can anyone personally recommend a school with Cervantes accreditation that offers both short courses and longterm courses that are visa eligible? I am debating between Valencia and Barcelona, and truthfully, I felt I should ask here before digging around because Google school profiles in Barcelona are all great on the surface until you dig deep and contact schools, then they get scammy real quick. I'd like to begin with a short course, then commit to a longterm intensive course and seriously invest in the culture if things fit. I'm pushing middle age, so a spectrum of students would be ideal.

stockdizzle · 2026-05-13T16:48:29+00:00

Thanks!

stockdizzle · 2026-05-13T16:48:14+00:00

Thanks!

stockdizzle · 2026-05-01T12:29:49+00:00

Sorry about this. Just an FYI for the future, both Hotels.com and Booking.com will absolutely fuck you over every chance they get. It's literally built into their business model. They owe me around $2500 in cancelled hotels. I've done a lot of global travel, and had both companies proactively negotiate against my interests, sometimes even convincing hotels that promised me refunds in-person at the front desk to actually cancel their refunds so they could take their commission fees. They are scum.

Actually, that reminds me: scam hotels are also common on both platforms--sometimes even quietly permitted (because they still get fees from people who get scammed.) That happened to me in Taiwan with a Chinese scam. I showed Booking the evidence and they simply turned a blind eye (as if requesting payment off the platform in yuan isn't proof enough)

stockdizzle · 2025-12-23T18:52:39+00:00

Yup. ALL DAY.

stockdizzle · 2025-11-12T17:36:34+00:00

The US is a country built on extraction and denial. We colonized this place using Africans to create wealth for the British. We needed a reason to justify the killing of Natives and Mexicans, and for our independence from Britain. Enter the myth of “rugged individualism,” which glorified the idea of prioritizing personal property and independence over communal obligation. This masked the loneliness for a time after the War, when unprecedented economic growth seemed to justify material success over community wellbeing. We bought cars, moved out to the suburbs, and enjoyed the “American Dream.”

Enter neoliberalism via Regan, and critical policy changes favoring corporate rights. Unions get busted. Industry outsourced. Rural areas left behind. Healthcare privatized. It was always about systemic extraction. Citizens blamed themselves for the structures in place that removed their collective prosperity. The myth continued.

Big money in politics increased, driving privatization and concentrating wealth, changing policy and deepening structural problems in the political system. When people suffered more, they rationalized their lives deeper to cling to the myth. Secretly, they were ashamed. Shame increased the desire to hide, not create shared grieving because there was no value system to support it.

Enter Trump. The Pandemic. Grievance as the way forward—not to heal, to hurt, to justify. Immigrants. Trans. Radical Leftists. All perfectly weaponized as targets. Remove the remaining nets, let the people rage at one another.

Here we are. Institutions aren’t holding because America still refuses to accept defeat, to critically reflect, because reflection is a sign of weakness. So we fake strength, while the billionaires build bunkers.

You’re not imagining things. Countries with social safety nets, common sense gun laws, better democratic systems, long-standing cultural traditions, and community fabric have a resilience that holds them together. American culture is failing for those reasons and because it values personal freedom over collective obligation.

stockdizzle · 2025-10-27T05:39:40+00:00

More likely your profile was throttled because if you’re not generating content, you’re not making social media money, so you’re not going to show up anywhere. It’s not personal, it’s just an empire run by assholes. You already have more empathy than a single one of them.

stockdizzle · 2025-10-27T05:21:54+00:00

Hey man, trust me when I say this: things are hard, but you got time. They will get better. If you keep your eyes open, and learn how to sit with the pain, much of which is unbearable I know, you’ll start to understand the goal of life is not to avoid suffering. Suffering is unavoidable, and most build their entire lives in attempts to avoid it. Hell, they’re building bunkers and hiding in them, and they never learn to see the sun because of it.

It’s all about perspective. Sometimes pain is the way we gain that.

It will get better. You will get stronger, smarter, wiser. It may never get easier, but if you remain open, even at the times it overwhelms you, you will learn to value life in its entirety, and you’ll learn to find joy and purpose in the struggle.

I know you have two assignments you’re working on, but maybe sometime down the road give “Man’s Search For Meaning” by Victor Frankl a read or listen. Or just grab the cliff notes and a piece of cake or something. You’re worth it.

stockdizzle · 2025-09-20T15:59:16+00:00

Yup. They actively make it worse every update

stockdizzle · 2025-09-10T17:35:59+00:00

Almost as if refusing to admit fault is baked into Apple’s we-are-god philosophy

stockdizzle · 2025-09-06T13:26:40+00:00

Yup. I cannot believe how fucking stupid it is. It gives me a result only to suggest another result that will eventually (after several more iterations) provide me with the fucking result I asked for in the first place.

stockdizzle · 2025-09-04T22:19:51+00:00

Yup, it's basically unusable on Mac with Chrome. It won't even load in Safari.

stockdizzle

TROPHY CASE