Enjoying life while you can: Expat who moved to Lithuania shares a key lesson Americans can learn

Bernard Meyer moved to Lithuania from the U.S. just over a decade ago — and says he's learned one key life lesson living in the country: how to have better work-life balance.

Lithuania, located in northeastern Europe, was named the world's happiest country for young people in the 2024 World Happiness Report, and the 19th happiest country overall.

After growing up in Miami and going to college in Indiana, Meyer moved permanently to Lithuania's capital cityVilnius in 2012 and still lives there with his wife and two daughters.

The 39-year-old, who's a senior communications and creative director at marketing automation platform Omnisend, said he's noticed a profound difference between work culture in the U.S. and Lithuania — where people enjoy a more "relaxed" and "slower pace of life."

"I think the work-life balance is something that is controllable within each person," Meyer told CNBC Make It in an interview.

"So at 5 or 6 p.m. when people turn off, they leave, and they go chill at the bar if they're relatively young or even if they have kids, they take the kids and they walk around the city."

"There's a sense of actually enjoying your life now while you're still young, while you're still capable, I think this is something that they [Americans] can learn just to appreciate," Meyer added.

Americans are known for being work-obsessed which can result in a culture of overwork and burnout. Comparatively, Lithuania ranked as the 11^th best country for work-life balance in 2021, according to the OECD.

"Personally, I'm not against 25-year-olds or under 30s who are spending 12 hours a day at work, because it's a period when you can do that. But once you get past that stage, you should learn how to have a bit more of a life outside work,"