10 things you MUST do to be happy in the Netherlands

It's weird here.

Photo by Luca Cavallin on Unsplash

Do you ever imagine a different life? Do you have what it takes to move abroad?

You see a lot of posts like this. The advice they provide is vague, like, “be open minded,” or “develop a tolerance for paperwork.” Handy, but what does it take to immigrate to the Netherlands specifically? And how are you supposed to be happy once you get here?

The Netherlands is always popping up on various lists as a “high quality of life destination for expats,” whatever that means. But life in the Netherlands is weird in ways that you might not expect, and there’s an art to navigating this weirdness.

How would I know? I’m American and I’ve lived in the Netherlands for almost ten years. I learned Dutch, became a dual Dutch-American citizen in 2023, and had a long relationship with a very Dutch dutchman. We lived on a houseboat and everything. And I write this newsletter out of my curiosity about Dutch culture and politics—both in relation to American culture, and how aspects of Dutch culture are becoming my own after all these years.

Here are the ten things you MUST do to live a happy life as an immigrant in the Netherlands.

1. Get used to the rain (but)...

If you need a lot of sun this is not the country for you. It tends to rain more in the spring and fall than summer and winter, but the truth is that it can rain at any moment and for no reason, or so it seems, out of clear blue skies. I get sick of the rain, sure, but it doesn’t really bother me. I grew up mostly in the northeast of the United States, where I was “raised on little light,” as that Noah Kahan song goes, and I find the constant sun in California mildly offensive. Like, leave me alone?

I’m fortunate that this attitude came to me naturally, but if that’s not the case for you, once you land in the Netherlands you must cultivate it. This is the only way to fend off abject weather-related misery.

Luckily, there’s an outlet for the seasonal depression the most grey-sky-hardened amongst us will inevitably face. You must simultaneously:

2. Complain about the weather all the time.

That I’m not bothered by the rain doesn’t mean that I enjoy it. Far from it! In the Netherlands, one isn’t culturally permitted to like the rain. That would be bizarre. Almost anti-social. Rather, we endure it.

If America’s national pastime is baseball, the Dutch national pastime is complaining about the weather. This isn’t confined to rain, either; you must complain about good weather too. You will always be too hot, or too cold. Being comfortable is suspicious, and basically unacceptable.

The only time you are required to be happy about the weather is when the sun comes out for a few measly hours after several weeks straight of grey skies and rain. Then you must sit on a terrace with a coffee and turn your face to the sun with your eyes closed, for pathetic sunlight exposure therapy. You will laugh at people doing this when you first arrive, and start doing it yourself within a year. In order to survive.

3. Strike "how are you?" from your vocabulary.

Americans ask how are you? as a form of hello. To Americans, this is polite. To the Dutch, this is rude and intrusive. Now even when I go back to America and encounter this kind of friendliness I feel vaguely assaulted. It’s a lot, especially in California when it’s combined with all the sun. I just want to be ignored and left alone in the dark, like I am in Amsterdam.

The most illustrative story I ever heard about this dynamic was from an American friend who brought her Dutch boyfriend to a family wedding in Texas. He went off on his own for a while, and returned to her and asked: Why are all of these people pretending like they know me?

See, American friendliness comes off to Dutch people as fake. You’re in for heartbreak if you try to engage Dutch people in your ha-ha-we’re-all-friends-here-please-don’t-shoot-me American way. They will look at you like you’re crazy. They won’t engage with your dumb little jokes. You will feel alienated and unhappy. Best to stop saying it.

4. Stop apologizing.

English people apologize constantly, as if for their very existence. If sorry is the English version of how are you?, shorthand for a kind of friendliness designed to ameliorate the slightest social tension, you, too, will be happier if you strike it from your vocabulary.

A couple of years ago I was mauled by a neighbor’s dog to the point that I needed five stitches in my arm. When I saw the neighbor afterwards he expressed regret for the situation but did not apologize. I couldn’t believe it! If that happened in America he would have fallen all over himself to apologize! (If it happened in America I could have also sued him for $10 million, which of course I wouldn’t have done, but still.)

Apologizing too much in the Netherlands will simply make you feel bad about yourself. I can say this because it just happened to me yesterday. A crazy neighbor scolded me for not saying morgen (good morning) to him, which I had, he just didn’t hear me. I apologized a billion times, because it’s not like I’m capable of following the advice I’m laying out here all the time, and it had no effect on him. He simply continued looking at me like I was an asshole, because there is not the same social contract around apologizing here that there is in the US and UK. It gets you nowhere. If I’d been more Dutch I would’ve firmly replied that I did say good morning, and immediately forgotten about it. The interaction certainly would not have made it into my newsletter.

One complicated note: sorry in Dutch is used as excuse me. It’s the exact same word, but it doesn’t have the same meaning.

5. Get over the shitty customer service.

Wherever you are from, whatever you are used to, unless it’s federal prison, the customer service in the Netherlands will be worse. No one will greet you upon entering a shop, no one will ask you if you need help finding anything, and waiters will ignore you. The service here is terrible! you will say, ten times a day, until you stop saying it because bad service has become a fact of your life.

Whereas you are required to complain about the weather, I encourage you not to complain about the customer service.

In America, at least, there’s an implicit hierarchy when a customer enters a shop or restaurant, with the worker lower than the customer. In Dutch culture there is a strong sense of social equality amongst all people, even when a transaction is involved. There’s no good customer service without a degree of subservience, and that's one of the reasons why it’s nearly impossible in the Netherlands, except at multinational corporations.

Good customer service also can come from a desperation not to not be fired, because again, unlike in America where sixty percent of people live paycheck to paycheck, any Dutch retail associate is a lot less likely to be one paycheck away from homelessness. There’s a strong social safety net in the Netherlands and robust worker’s rights, which means that waiters don’t need to be nice to you to survive.

Which is perhaps only mildly comforting when you’re waiting thirty minutes for someone to take your order, but there you have it.

6. Temper your optimism

Optimism is a part of the American condition. Putting a positive spin on things, as I have done above about customer service, is in my DNA. I don’t know why we’re like this, but I do know that the Dutch are not.

It’s related to their directness somehow, being straightforward. They see no reason to look on the brightside. A Dutch person would not need to come up with a ten-point plan for coping with bad customer service; they would call it bad and this badness would not fundamentally bother them.

If you’re like me, you won’t be able to stop your optimism, the same way you were able to stop asking how are you?, or start complaining about the weather.

But it is within your power to recognize that this is a cultural quirk, like any other. So when you are being optimistic and you are met with a brick wall of Dutch realist neutrality (not pessimism, necessarily), you will silently find an optimistic spin to put on the attitude (“cultures are so different and interesting!” for example) and move it along.

7. Cycle everywhere, all the time.

You might face a lot of personal psychological obstacles to cycling. You might not be used to it, you may be scared of admittedly aggressive Dutch cyclists, you may prefer to walk, you may be used to driving or taking Ubers everywhere.

But if you are going to be happy in this country, you must simply suck it up and throw yourself into the chaos of cycle paths.

If you had told me back when I was living in San Francisco that my main mode of transport would be a bike, that I would cycle everywhere, even in the wind and rain, on routes that often involves ferries, I would have assumed that I’d fallen into a kind of poverty that obviated even the purchase of a bus ticket.

If I can get used to it, so can you.

You’ll be happier if you cycle than if you don’t. The whole country is set up for pretty comfortable cycling. (Unless terroristic fatbikes ruin it for everyone, but that's a different story). Not cycling comes out of fear, laziness, or an unwillingness to be uncomfortable, three impulses we are all better off not indulging. I can say this because I’m as afraid, lazy, and precious as anyone else. I often drive to the gym, for God’s sake! But I try to cycle as much as I can and look down on myself as mildly despicable if I don't.

8. Wage war against “that's not possible.”

Niet mogelijk. The number of times you will hear this! It means not possible and it might as well be on the coat of arms.

When a Dutch person tells you something is not possible you must first assume that they are being literal. Second, you must assume they are wrong.

Let’s say, for example, you call some office to make an appointment at, say, 16:00, and the receptionist says that's not possible. The way she says this will be so harsh that it might come across like there are no more appointments available for the rest of eternity; that you are ridiculous for calling in the first place; that you should just go off and die in a ditch, where you belong.

But remember! She is being literal, and wrong! So you will say: How about 16:05? And she will say: that's possible! And your sense of victory will supersede your frustration about the nonsensical tone of the conversation.

I think this rigidity is in part due to the massive Dutch bureaucracy and social welfare system. The state can’t do as much as it does here without categorizing people in order to determine who gets which benefits. If hurt people hurt people, so do categorized people.

It might seem counterintuitive that a society with the sense of social equality I described in #5 would also have all this categorization, but it isn’t. You can't level the playing field unless you first determine where the lower ground is.

9. Try to learn a little Dutch.

Learning Dutch is very hard. People like to say it’s pointless because everyone in the Netherlands speaks English. And you can’t even speak Dutch with Dutch people, who will switch to English as soon as they hear your accent. It’s a very annoying thing they do, even with Belgians.

Don't try to learn Dutch for the same reason people usually have for learning to speak a language, which is, you know, speaking it. Learn Dutch because it is hard. Immigrating to a new country and not learning to speak a word of the language has to do with a kind of laziness that’s incongruous with the complexity of the nature of immigration itself. Immigrants are up for hard things. Do the hard thing because hard things are rewarding.

I took a lot of Dutch classes, and my favorite was Dutch Courses Amsterdam. They use their own materials, rather than the standard Dutch textbooks which are boring, with all this Where can I buy a bus ticket? kind of dialogue, which you don’t need to know how to say, because as we’ve already established, you’ll be cycling everywhere.

10. Become a LITTLE Calvinist

In this post I have advocated for you to cycle everywhere in the rain, learn an impossible language, and called you lazy twice. That’s because I’ve lived in the Netherlands for ten years and I've become a little Calvinist.

Calvinism is a branch of Protestantism that had a major influence on the shape of Dutch culture for everyone, not only Christians. It’s about modesty, hard work, straightforwardness, and discipline. To be clear, I'm advocating for like, 1% Calvinism. There are many Calvinist principles you wouldn’t want to live by! A full blown Calvinist would not be very fun at a party!

I suppose I’ve always valued hard work, personally. It would be hard to maintain a Substack like this if I didn’t. But now I have a different framework for my work than I did when I lived in America. In America we hustle because we’re desperate to hang onto our jobs and health insurance and paychecks so as not to be bankrupted by cancer. Or because we’ve been sold the bullshit ideology of the American dream, that hard work is the path to success. (Actually it’s generational wealth.)

With survival generally off the line, the results of hard work provide a deeper pleasure than the results of easy work. This attitude helps to frame things that are hard about living in the Netherlands, like the rain and the social complexities, as virtuous, and gives them deeper meaning.

This is why you will be so gratified the first time you speak Dutch and the person you’re talking to doesn’t respond in English. You were brave enough to work for it, the same way you were brave enough to immigrate to a new country.

Please add your ideas for what else you need to do to be happy in the Netherlands. I’m can feel follow up post with ten more ideas coming.

---

🔥 Hot Linkjes

Society

• I learned from Tatler that Queen Wilhelmina was the first female billionaire. A lot of that generational wealth came from the slave trade. Ugh.

• The current Dutch king and queen hosted a banquet for the Portuguese president and wore all the crown jewels. Daily Mail.

• International adoptions will be phased out over the next 6 years. Reuters.

• The UK opened its second Dutch-style roundabout in Sheffield. BBC.

Politics

• Lots of Dutch news about the fall of Assad this week:

  • 130,000 Syrians live in the Netherlands. The fall of Assad’s regime was met with jubilation in Dutch streets.

  • The Dutch Foreign Minister said he’s watching Syria with caution and hoping for a peaceful transfer of power. The Netherlands has “virtually no contact” with HTS, now in power.

  • The Dutch government will pause the processing of Syrian asylum applications for six months.

  • There are one million Syrians in Germany, where a debate is now raging about the consequences for German society if Syria becomes stable enough for them to return en masse. The loss of 5,000 Syrian doctors working in Germany would seriously impact the health care system, for example. BBC.

  • The body of a Syrian activist who applied for refugee status in the NL and was then kidnapped by the regime was found in the a Syrian prison. NL Times.

Business

• Staff shortages may drive Dutch businesses abroad; restrictive new immigration policies won’t help. Dutch News.

Crime

• Court cases related to the Amsterdam riots a few weeks ago have started against seven men charged with public violence. Guardian.

• Last weekend, six people were killed in a massive explosion at an apartment complex in The Hague. Five apartments were destroyed and nineteen were damaged. Four people have been arrested. Police have speculated that it may have been related to a bridal shop (“bridal shop”) on the ground floor of the building, but they are not yet speculating about motive. This New York Times article is now a little out of date but it has the best coverage in English.

• Eight cybercriminals were arrested for phishing scams in Belgium and the Netherlands. Security Week.

• A Dutch woman who kept a Yazidi woman as a slave in Syria was sentenced to ten years for crimes against humanity. AP.

---

🥳 Leuke Dingetjes

A lot of leuk cycling content popped up this week. Including the interesting video above on why Dutch roads are so safe, and another short one from the BBC on the same topic.

I also loved this video of cyclists in Amsterdam completely ignoring police directions for the motorcade of the Portuguese president.

---

✨ BNer’s Corner - Halina Reijn

Reijn and Kidman on the red carpet in Venice / Harpers Bazaar

Dutch actor-director Halina Reijn is suddenly internationally famous ahead of the release of Babygirl, her new movie staring Nicole Kidman. There’s been a New Yorker profile and a red carpet love affair with Kidman, who’s been singing her praises all over the international press.

The rest of the world might just be making her acquaintance, but Reijn has been famous in the Netherlands for a long time. She’s always been known here as kind of “annoying” or “irritating,” like the Dutch Anne Hathaway, for reasons no one can pinpoint exactly. Now that she’s internationally famous, the Dutch press has suddenly been forced to change its tune and celebrate her.

In Dutch culture you aren’t allowed to be too big for your britches (doe normaal). Unless you get so big that Nicole Kidman snuggles you on the red carpet. Then you’re just big enough, and possibly the next Paul Verhoeven.

---

📺 Kijk/Lees/Luister List

Not necessarily Dutch stuff I enjoyed watching, reading, and listening to this week.

TV / Movies

I am loving Colin from Accounts, a hilarious Australian will they-won’t they comedy about two people who meet after one of them hits a dog with his car.

Music / Podcasts

The podcast series from Evan Ratliff creates an AI “voice agent” out of his own voice and sends it to therapy, has it call customer service lines, and talk to itself. It demonstrates the dark and creepy way AI voices are already impacting our lives, and investigates how they might evolve. “It’s going to make things that are already annoying a lot more annoying,” as he says.

Articles / Books

• “Luigi Mangione and the Making of a Modern Antihero” by Jessica Winter in The New Yorker.

• “The Survivors of Child Sex Abuse Who Don’t Want Their Abusers Punished” by Roxanna Asgarian in The New Republic

---

*all typos in this post are on purpose