I loved your comment. I think it complements very well what I have been writing about. I share many of the same experiences that you are detailing here. However I have experienced this from a different background so I can provide maybe some context to some of your experiences.
You wonder how we deal with the lack of selection. Growing up in Norway I have an extremely different perspective. I have experienced going from much smaller selection to an enormous selection, in relative terms. When I was a kid there was 3 types of potato chips in the store: paprika, salt or "salt and pepper". 3 kinds of bread: white bread, kneip (in between) and whole grain. Selection has expanded so much each couple of years that it is hard to complain.
In addition shopping abroad has become so much easier. Today I mostly buy books e.g. from Amazon. It is tax free to import. This was a huge problem when I was younger. As someone interested in technology, science and programming it was extremely difficult to live in a small town in Norway. I remember one of the joys of going on vacation abroad was a visit bookstores. In particular visiting a bookstore in New York at age 17 was like heaven. Now this is a soled problem. I can live in the smallest town in Norway and order any obscure book on Amazon at the click of a mouse button.
I am periodically into Maker stuff, as you seem to be. That is indeed difficult, but much easier than it used to be. I can give you some tips on where to get supplies.
Byggmakker and Maxbo is a bit like home depot. Kjell & Company sell Aluminium extrusions and various other Maker stuff. You got Digitalimpuls selling stuff like Arduino and Rasberry Pi. I used to order MakerBeam online. Then there is RS Components. Some of those things are harder now due to Brexit. You got stormhalvorsen for mechanical components. I believe you could also order directly from Misumi. I know a lot of Norwegian makers order through eBay stuff from Chinese suppliers. You might want to check out https://bitraf.no. It is a makerspace in Oslo. People there can give you a lot of tips and help.
I think your impression of Norway is also been where you live and when you came here. Lots of people have a garages in Norway just maybe not where you live. When I was twentysomething lots of friends had garages where they where doing things like fixing up cars. But e.g. Oslo where I live now is not like that. It is more densely populate. You have also come at a time when housing prices are extremely high. I was much easier to get into the housing market when I was a kid. Everybody had a house in Moss where I grew up. And this was normal people. My neighbours was anything from Policeman, truck driver, teacher, priest, ship captain, mechanic, computer repairman etc. My grandmother on my mothers side was house wife and her husband worked in a paper factory. They built a house with a yard and everything both came from very poor backgrounds. So my mom, while being working class grew up in a house with two floors, a basement and an attic. Her whole street and her friends lived like that. But my father grew up in Oslo and he always lived in an appartment. Much less space there.
How are the downsides of living in Norway, is simply the downside of living in any small country. You cannot expect that country of only 5 million people would offer the same kind of selection and choices as a country of 330 million people. For a country like Norway you have to look at Europe as a whole. We rely much more on importing and buying things in other European countries. We are used to when going on vacation to take into account things we should be buying in the country we visit. I don't think you've developed that mindset yet. I never had to have it. If I was in Germany for instance I would go to electronics stores, and look at components.
I suppose that is also why we tend to have a bit more of an international outlook. I had to learn reading Swedish and English early on to access the information and parts that I was interested in. I even have data sheets in German for integrated circuits. You pick up stuff wherever you find it. America is certainly way more convenient but a downside is that it creates a very insular bubble. You never have to deal with the outside world because you got everything inside your own country.
American garage start ups are certainly infamous. But I don't think the differences are quite as large as you think. You cannot compare the innovation and creation of one small country to what is basically a whole continent. Europe as a whole has a lot of innovation, but it is harder to spot because we are so divided by language. A similar service to Facebook or eBay in Europe can never go big like an American one due to the language barriers. E.g. I think something like Finn.no was early on better than anything else on the American market but it simply could not scale up rapidly being locked in by small country and language.
In America you get really large companies in tech because of the large market but it doesn't necessarily mean all important innovation happen there. E.g. ARM is British. Arduino is powered by AVR developed in Norway. Arduino itself is Italian. Rasberry Pi is British. First OOP programming language Simula was created at University of Oslo and inspired Bjarne Strastroup when making C++. Erlang was made in Sweden. Haskell was in large part made in Britain. Linus Torvalds began making the Linux kernel in Finland. Skype was made in Sweden/Baltics. So was Spotify. First video conference systems was made by Tandberg here in Norway. Europe lacks behemoths such as Google, Microsoft and Apple and those are really hard to create. Whenever there is a successful software company e.g. here in Norway it gets bought by an American multi-national. Europe in general don't have an innovation problem per say but a venture-capital problem. We can start small innovative companies, but don't have ready access to large quantities of capital to grow them large. That is a lot down to mindset. Europeans are simply not as ready as Americans to shoot for the stars.
American has been more business savy for a long time. Even in the early 1900s when Europe was way ahead of the US in science, the US was still ahead in rapidly growing businesses. In the cold war the USSR actually had just as many patents created as the US, but was simply far less capable in turning innovation into business. I am not trying to belittle American accomplishments. I just trying to say that having some bigger garages would likely not have made a big difference. I think there are much bigger cultural differences at play. Americans are simply more prone to want to build large enterprises fast.
Take Werner von Braun, the creator of the V2 and Saturn V. When he decided to surrender to the Americans, it was not because of garage innovation. He did not lack innovation and expertise. His concern was capital and resources. He did not think realizing his dream for a moon rocket could happen anywhere but America. It had the economic muscle he needed.
Got to follow up some of your other points later. Friendships and child protective services certainly deserves some reflections.
