Full disclosure — my friends are a fairly homogenous group: computer geeks from California, who wouldn't think twice about quitting a job to find a more fulfilling one. They are academics, lawyers and doctors on both coasts; people with Ivy League degrees in their late twenties and early thirties moving across the world like modern nomads with laptops, some of them employed, some not; writers, editors and artists. In short, this is a privileged bunch. I'm sure that the views of, say, a welder from Tennessee would differ from theirs, but among young, mobile, well-educated individuals there's an idealistic belief that their country, despite its economic woes, will somehow continue to do what it's always done and change for the better.

This may go against the grain of the line that's been repeated everywhere: "The American people have rejected Obama's ideology." But it doesn't look as if they have endorsed the Republicans' either, mainly because the latter don't quite seem to know what change they envisage. "Change" may have been abundant this year, but mainly as an idea: the concept itself is thus rendered meaningless because it is far from clear what action "change" calls for. The once- powerful word that got people on the streets in their thousands, got them agitated, happy, angry, has become the dull mantra of Washington: a word nobody outside this peculiar world of government types, lobbyists and think-tank workers particularly cares for.

The unshaken optimism of my friends is justified, however: there is still some truth in the fact that in America the present is always already part of the future. Europe (parts of it, anyway) may be recovering — but it is America that has the value of change built into its way of life. Looking back, now that I'm about to leave, I realise how uniquely American a craving this is, and how personal, heartfelt and defining for one's life, too: "change".