I can take a stab at that but honestly pretty much everyone else here has lived in Indonesia much longer than I have. My experience is pretty much confined to three years in one region and it's a big country.
When I say that the locals lead more satisfying lives you have to keep in mind that most of my relatives want to escape to the United States whereas I want to live in Aceh. We each have an idealized vision of how the other half lives, the grass is greener on the other side. Most of my Acehnese relatives work harder than any Americans I know and have less to show for it. They tend to feel trapped, that any move they make will be a lateral move at best.
For someone like me, there's a great deal of privilege. I have the option of going to Aceh whenever I choose, I have the option of leaving the kampung whenever I feel like it. I can talk a good game about how life there can be good, and it can be very good, but I will always be speaking about it as a man with options.
I like to think of it in terms of what the Acehnese get right Americans get wrong and vice versa and that there's a happy medium somewhere between the two extremes. For example, as a survival strategy my Acehnese relatives are interdependent. This is wonderful for the human connection, I never got burned out being a dad in Aceh because there were so many hands around to help me raise my eldest daughter. That's a huge source of happiness because children are among the life events that make people the least happy (despite the public face we may give). At the same time, it is entirely frustrating to have your relatives just show up whenever they feel like it and you have no recourse to tell them no without causing shame to members of the family. There's a trade off.
Another thing that struck me about life in Aceh and its relative simplicity were the funerals I went to. There was some mild crying, but the majority of the time was spent together as a group sharing in food, sharing in duties. You don't pawn off the duty to a funeral home, everything is done at home from washing the body to digging the grave. And yet because it's so close and so personal the burden is shared and is lighter. Death doesn't become a commodity like it is in the United States, it remains an everyday part of life in Aceh, it remains completely natural.
If I could sum up what I love about living in Aceh it's that, to me, it feels natural, connected.
