The America I See Every Day
Upfront Tip
Weekly. Free. Straight from the driver's seat.
One of my favorite parts of this year’s World Cup hasn’t been the soccer. It’s been watching visitors discover America. They’re amazed by free refills. Ice in every drink. Air conditioning. Giant gas stations with equally giant portions. The friendly people in small towns.
They came expecting one country and found another.
What’s even more interesting is that a lot of Americans seem surprised. If you’ve spent any time on TikTok, Instagram, or X lately, you’ve seen the videos. A German fan apologizes because America wasn’t anything like he’d been led to believe. Japanese visitors talk about how kind people have been. Fans from around the world marvel at little things Americans hardly notice anymore.
Now, people helping people isn’t unique to America. Every country has generous people and difficult people. That’s not my point.
What has been refreshing is watching people discover a version of America that rarely makes the news. I think most of us experience America through screens. Our understanding of the country is shaped by headlines, social media, and algorithms that reward outrage. Every day we’re shown another shooting, another political fight, another scandal, another reason to believe the country is coming apart. Our digital world is clickbait.
Now, of course, those things happen. They’re real. But they’re not the whole story.
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg became famous for describing what he called the “third place.” The first place is home. The second is work. The third is where community happens, like a church, a coffee shop, or a neighborhood bar. Those are the places where relationships are built outside of home and work.
Most of us spend nearly all of our lives moving between those three places: home, work, and community.
It’s a small world.
I think Uber drivers experience a fourth place.
The fourth place is a car filled with strangers. Unlike my home or my church, we are strangers. I don’t choose who gets into the back seat. They’re random. A college student. A surgeon. A retiree. A construction worker. A tourist from Germany. A refugee. A millionaire. Someone struggling to pay rent.
For fifteen or twenty minutes, we share the same small space. Sometimes we don’t speak at all. Or sometimes we have conversations I’ll remember for the rest of my life. Over more than 15,000 rides, I’ve met people from nearly every background imaginable. Different races. Different religions. Different political beliefs. Rich. Poor. Young. Old. And after thousands of conversations, I’ve come to a conclusion that surprises many people.
Most people are really kind.
No, our lives are not perfect, and we're not always happy. Some people are rude. We're not free from problems. But most of us are kind.
There’s another difference between my job and most people’s lives. I don’t just meet people from every walk of life; I see the city they live in. Before I started Uber driving, my world consisted of my neighborhood, my office, my son’s soccer field, the golf course, and a handful of other places.
Today, I know nearly every neighborhood. I know where the hospitals are busiest, where the college students live, where the factories change shifts, and yes, where every pothole seems to be hiding. My city felt much bigger once I started driving through it instead of around it.
The news reports exceptions. My job exposes me to averages. The news has to report violence because violence is unusual. Nobody runs a headline that says, “Millions of Americans were polite to strangers today.” But that’s what I experience.
That doesn’t mean America doesn’t have serious problems. It does. I’ve driven people battling addiction. I’ve driven people facing homelessness. I’ve driven people to hospitals, funerals, and courtrooms. Those stories are real too.
But so are the nurses finishing twelve-hour shifts. Parents are taking their kids to the airport. College students are going home for Thanksgiving. Couples headed out for dinner. Friends laughing in the back seat. Those stories just don’t make the evening news.
Maybe that’s why the World Cup videos have resonated with so many people.
Foreign visitors came expecting one country. Instead, they found ordinary people holding doors open, making conversation, giving directions, recommending restaurants, and welcoming strangers. They discovered the America that exists between the headlines.
That’s the America I see every day.
