The whole world is just shouting at each other

“Liaaaaaam!” 

She was mortified the first time I beeped the car horn at someone in Ballina and was rapidly rethinking all her life decisions to this point. To her mind, the town’s inhabitants were collectively staring at the impertinent young man behind the wheel of his mother’s car - or more importantly - were staring disapprovingly at his appalled mother in the passenger seat.

“Liam, you can’t do that! What if we know them? What if they know us!” 

I was young, in a hurry and convinced I had places to be. Sitting at the green traffic lights, the driver ahead of us was stuck in slow motion replay - or daydreaming at best - and so I gave the horn a quick tap. Nothing aggressive, just a polite “Hey there, wake up”.

Unlike my parent’s generation, I had still to fully embrace the ‘small farmer Catholic guilt’ of cultural behaviour which permeated much of how rural Ireland dealt with calling attention to one’s self in public. You could be stuck behind a van that had suddenly pulled up in Garden Street as the owner hailed a man walking up the adjacent footpath, but you’d still allow an eternity to pass rather than risk scandalising the parish by honking.

Although, when eventually I met my own personal Hiace roadblock, I did allow three decently slow “ah for feck sakes” to pass before giving a timid toot. A large head emerged from the driver’s side and roared “Haigh!” at me - “I know the man!” That was his reason for blocking traffic: he’d seen a friend. Perfectly valid, in his view and sure what was my rush anyway?

Now, contrast that with Los Angeles, where honking is practically a second language, but think more World War II German than romantic French.

Aside from some cities like New York, in the United States you can turn right on a red light, but only when it’s safe and no pedestrians are crossing. You’d think that bit of logic would be obvious. But patience, it seems, has been outlawed here and guilt is reserved for not beeping long-and-loud before the other driver does.

Kate tends to walk slower than me - I barrel along like a man late for Mass. Last week as we crossed a Glendale street, an older woman roared at her to hurry up. Just yesterday morning, while crossing the street, a car turning right respectfully waited for her to pass (her famous Ukrainian scowl helped him make up his mind). The driver behind him - a young man with the emotional maturity of a chainsaw - started laying on his horn and shouting in Armenian. What was the first driver supposed to do? Run her over?

There’s a level of road-rage here in LA that’s hard to describe. If you don’t move your car within a nanosecond of the light turning green, you’ll get blasted by a horn. Even if you do move quickly, you’ll still get beeped at if you dare slow down for a pedestrian or a school crossing.

And here’s the thing: it’s not always testosterone-jacked LA dudes doing the beeping. I’ve looked in the rearview mirror after getting audibly abused and seen elderly women or older Armenian men - folk who probably have nowhere pressing to be, but who’ve fully embraced the local horn-honking ethos. It’s as if aggression has become contagious, part of an adopted local culture of impatience and rage, and they’ve caught it like a virus.

Kate and I were recently tut-tutting at prices in ‘The Big Square’, a local Armenian supermarket with an incredible bakery counter. The Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian and Armenian pastries are all freshly made and the baklava is divine. So, after work, the place is jammers.

While queuing at the bakery, an older Asian woman, maybe in her 60s, completely lost the plot. Like us, she’d been waiting a few minutes, then suddenly she stormed all elbows to the front, roaring in broken English at the assistants behind the counter about why they were so slow. The girls were working as fast as they could, but her entitlement filled the whole shop like a bad smell. She clearly wasn’t American-born, yet had absorbed the local custom of righteous outrage.

Kate sees this every day at her work. She’s in retail - cosmetics and hair products - and almost daily, at least one person comes in and literally screams. Rich, poor, doesn’t matter. Designer bags or ragged trousers, botoxed or smelling-of-weed, there’s a growing number of people who just go nuclear at staff for the slightest inconvenience, and anger at the cost-of-living cannot account for it all.

Her bosses, who’ve worked in their Armenian family business for years, say it’s getting worse. Covid changed everything. Manners collapsed. Entitlement is rising. Anxiety and stress is leaking out of people like a sweating Mayo farmer during a tax inspection. It’s one thing wearing disposable gloves, hats and face masks in the store, it’s another when wearing them outside or in your own car. How scared of the world are you?

I’m biased, of course, but Kate says she loved working in Ireland. While you’ll always get one awkward customer out of every ten, in Los Angeles it can be five or six. Irish people, she says, are easier to deal with. More polite, more friendly. We have that cultural tendency to hold back from complaining, even when we probably should.

There’s a well-worn Irish trope: the server asks how the dinner was and even though you’ve been whispering about how awful it is for twenty minutes, you smile and insist, “It was lovely, lovely - thanks a million.” 

My American friends think it is quaint… and stupid.

So why is here so different?

Well, maybe part of the reason is that this place is just so diverse. It’s a melting pot of people from radically different cultures, thrown together in close quarters. And with that comes not just different languages and appearances, but entirely different ways of communicating.

Mediterranean or Latino cultures tend to be more expressive - louder voices, wilder hand gestures. Eastern Europeans are more dour, aggressively nice. Others, like the Irish, are quieter, more compliant and reserved. What sounds like shouting in Barcelona might just be standard volume in Istanbul. But in Glendale, it can sound like a preamble to murder. When you put all those people in the same bakery queue or customer service line, where English is a second or third language, misunderstandings are bound to happen, especially when backgrounded by this culture of stressful anxiety.

You make snap judgments based on tone, not content. And when everyone’s on edge already, it doesn’t take much to set someone off. Add to that the lack of rooted community - this is a city where people are always arriving or leaving - and there’s little opportunity for deeper understanding. No shared norms. No mutual trust built over time. Everyone’s a stranger, and every interaction has the potential to be misread.

And into that fog rolls consumerism. There’s a McKinsey report that said 79% of workers feel unsupported and uncertain at work. I’d argue that applies to far more than just the workplace. People feel lost, and consumerism is their coping mechanism, while social media tells them they are missing out on the great lives everyone else has.

Watch Caleb Hammer’s YouTube show based in Austin, Texas, where he tries to help people fix their finances, and it’s jaw-dropping. People drowning in debt, behaving like overgrown children. Many can’t even talk about their problems - they get defensive, blame their parents, or insist they deserve everything they’ve bought.

And it’s not just a 'Gen Z' thing. That’s a lazy trope. Caleb’s guests are often in their 30s and 40s. The dominant attitude is: It’s not my fault, but someone else needs to make me happy.

When rugged individualism meets capitalist entitlement, you get a population convinced that personal desires are sacred, but personal responsibility is optional.

That’s an alien idea to those of us raised in the west of Ireland. But it’s also a long way from the original American Dream: that with hard work, you can build a better life in the Land of Opportunity. Now, it’s become: I deserve a better life by default. And if I don’t get it, it’s someone else’s fault.

And that might explain why everyone seems to be shouting. In traffic. In shops. Online. Because when you believe the world owes you something, anything short of immediate gratification feels like a personal attack.

So what is wrong with people here?

Maybe, as my mother might say, it’s because they don’t know each other.