[JohnFen]

> people claim Americans are often too artificially faux positive, too effusive, too <insert anything but the cold hard authentic truth>.

I am a genuinely positive person and my interactions reflect that. But I have learned to to be more dour when interacting with people from other countries (mostly from European nations) because they think I'm being phony.

The thing is... I'm not. Being dour to put them at ease is me being phony, but they'll accept that as being "authentic".

So much bizarreness all around.