My husband and I had a consultation with a financial planner based in Italy today. Financial planning is very different in Europe, and he explained some of the changes we would need to make were we to move to Spain, which is our intention, although execution of our carefully constructed timeline is tenuous, mostly because the Spanish consulate in San Francisco is extremely busy right now.

One of the biggest differences is a dearth of places to leave money where it could earn interest. For variety of reasons, European banks don’t want to stash money, and not only do they not pay interest for the privilege of doing so, they often charge. Out of curiosity, I asked, What do Europeans do with their retirement funds?

The planner told me they mostly don’t have retirement funds, that salaries are lower there, so most people don’t set aside savings. That sounded terrible to me, until he explained it.

Europeans, he said, don’t view retirement as a time to stop working and start doing whatever they like to do. They spend their entire lives doing whatever they like to do; no one works 14-hour days, or stresses themself out to make a killing, or has to work multiple jobs to survive. They tend to live in the same house until it’s paid off, raise their families, and form communities, and nothing much changes when they retire.

Remember, he said, there’s no cable news in Spain recycling the headlines of the day into more headlines, endlessly. People aren’t barraged by frantic assertions that they need to act quickly to avert the next disaster. Speculation and fanaticism do exist in the realms of sport, celebrities, and the royal family, but not in a way that derails the routines of daily life.

Elections, he said, come and go without most people spending a lot of time on them, because there is not a lot to worry about. No political entity is going to take away health care, or close schools, or use legislation to “reverse” the discoveries of science. That’s why when a pandemic comes, or there’s a nationwide power outage, the people are mostly calm and compliant.

No Drama Living.

Now I’m really looking forward to moving. I try for No Drama Living every day, and as a retired person willing to ignore the news and able to live as I like on my retirement funds, I succeed most days. But the drama is lurking just around the corner, popping out in a guy you meet at a party whose daughter was arrested at a protest, or a member of your dance troupe who lectures on the “failings” of the “other side” during a team dinner.

Since I am an American, I also feel some obligation to keep up with the current dismantling of our society, mostly by skimming NYT and The Guardian daily, occasionally by contacting a representative or supporting an organization. I also delete quite a few inflammatory emails, despite spending considerable time unsubscribing.

My husband and I are moving, but our friends and family are not, so I’m sure I will always want to keep an eye on what is going on here. But I can easily picture it becoming more of a background hum then a headache-inducing stress. Should I try to be the person who makes the difference? I may have aged out of that behavior.

Or maybe that’s only a thing in the movies. Civil, stable, locally-oriented living is optimal for humanity. Without supervillains, no superheroes are required.