Having grown up in Germany and now living in he US since many years gives me an interesting perspective on this. I am used to an environment that's filled with history like this. I remodeled a 300+ year old house!
I find that everything being new in the US makes you feel like you can truly change the world and accomplish anything you want. Being in Europe where most buildings have been around since forever makes you feel small and I find it comforting in a way to have my life put into perspective like that. Iceland had a even stronger impact on me that way because it was so obvious that the land itself had recently (in geological terms) been created and can destroy whatever you do as a human or at least make it all insignificant. I found that calming
"Iceland had a even stronger impact on me that way because it was so obvious that the land itself had recently (in geological terms) been created and can destroy whatever you do as a human or at least make it all insignificant."
Yeah, I can envision that.
America has something related, and related to your feeling about it that "you can truly change the world and accomplish anything you want". We're a land of natural disasters, but very very few of them are as severe and encompassing as the geological events in Iceland. So our disasters tend to invoke a response from the survivors to pick themselves up and rebuild. I had a "better" than front side seat to this starting in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado
