An Alternate Dimension Called Berlin

The best way I can describe Berlin is that it felt like stepping into an alternate dimension. Not a different world entirely — a dimension where everything is almost the same, but small things are just slightly off. The language coming out of everyone’s mouth was completely foreign, and yet people would still walk up to me and start speaking German like I obviously belonged. Glass bottles sit tucked underneath the trash cans instead of inside them — placed there deliberately, so that people experiencing homelessness can collect them and return them for deposit money. Little things like that kept catching me off guard, each one a quiet signal that the assumptions I carry around every day are just that: assumptions.

Living to Work vs. Working to Live

The biggest difference, though, wasn’t something you could photograph. In America, we glorify hard work. Being busy is a status symbol. Your job is a core part of your identity, and being a workaholic is often glamorized — even though it so often leads to burnout and unhappiness. In Berlin, work and life are treated as genuinely separate things. Work is what you do; it is not who you are. Nobody I met defined their success by their job title or their hours logged.

That got me thinking about a deeper structural difference, something I’d describe as this: in America, proximity determines fortune. I was raised to always tip well — the idea being that if you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to go out, and that you should take care of the people who take care of you. It’s a value I still hold. But notice what it means structurally: the people who benefit from my generosity are the people physically close to me. Fortune flows through proximity. In much of Europe, stronger social welfare programs cut off the extremes on both ends. It’s harder to become extraordinarily wealthy — but the floor is also much higher. In places like the Netherlands, the taxation structure means the person who cleans your house can take the same vacations you do and live a genuinely nice life. Whether you think that trade-off is worth it is a personal and political question, but seeing it operate up close made me realize how invisible these structures are until you leave them.

An Uncomfortable Conversation About AI and Energy

One conversation has stuck with me more than any other. At one of the universities we visited, I spoke with a professor about the AI energy problem. Her view was sobering: as AI becomes more energy-efficient, we won’t use less energy — we’ll simply use more AI. Efficiency gains get swallowed by expanded consumption. It’s a pattern that has held for nearly every major technology in history, and it reflects, in her view, a deeper failure to value the earth and its fresh water.

I pushed back — or at least, offered a different angle. I’m a physics major, and I believe the answer runs through space. The more seriously we take space exploration, the better we’ll become at caring for Earth. Putting energy-intensive infrastructure in orbit, mining asteroids instead of tearing open the ground, even attempting ecosystems on other planets or the Moon — I genuinely believe these things would make us value Earth more, not less. There’s nothing like seeing how hard it is to build a biosphere from scratch to make you appreciate the one we got for free.

But I’ll admit: that conversation unsettled me in a productive way. It sent me down a rabbit hole of environmental problems I hadn’t thought hard about before — genetically engineered coral that can withstand rising ocean acidity, the pollinator crisis, and the deep problems with how we farm.

The Nitrogen Problem

Here’s a piece of history that blew my mind. The roots of many of our current agricultural problems trace back to just after World War II. The U.S. government had built enormous factories capable of sequestering nitrogen — for munitions. When the war ended, rather than shutter them, the same capacity was redirected into producing nitrogen-rich synthetic fertilizer, handed to farmers cheaply (reportedly, the first bag free). The short-term rewards were real: yields exploded. But the long-term cost was dependence. Synthetic fertilizer disrupts the ecological mechanisms that soil ecosystems spent millennia developing, degrading the soil itself and polluting American waterways. Short-term reward, long-term punishment — a pattern I keep finding everywhere I look, from tech funding bubbles to farming.

I met a 19-year-old vegan college student from Australia on the program, and while I’m someone who enjoys eating meat, we found common ground: factory farming and current industrial agricultural practices are genuinely bad — for animals, for soil, for water. To me, the most compelling solution isn’t abandoning animal agriculture but transforming it, along the lines of what Will Harris does at White Oak Pastures in Georgia — regenerative, rotational grazing that rebuilds soil rather than depleting it.

I tried asking around Berlin about German farming practices and regulations, hoping to compare — but I didn’t get very far. That question will have to wait for another experience.

Berlin didn’t hand me answers. It handed me better questions — about work, about fortune and proximity, about efficiency and consumption, about the systems underneath everything we take for granted. Which, I’m starting to think, is what travel is actually for.