Europe is a big place, you should be comparing the most expensive us cities to most expensive European cities. Having lived in SF and traveled to Zurich for example, I think overall cost of living is roughly similar but specifically eating at restaurants seemed noticeably cheaper in sf.
I had terrible stomach flu while traveling in Dublin, felt like I had no choice but to schedule an appointment with a doctor. found a random one with good reviews, scheduled the next day, no wait time at all, and I think the total cost ended up being something like 50 euro for the 30 min consultation + maybe 5 euro (it was really really cheap) for the medicine he prescribed. this was without insurance so I think it was on the expensive side compared to other EU residents.
contrast that to my home country (US), I have really good expensive health insurance from my company. I had to schedule a few appointments to deal with a finger injury where I paid around $100 per visit (because I hadn’t met my deductible yet) for the privilege of sitting in the waiting room for 30 minutes, going into the exam room then waiting there for 30 min - 1 hour (my doctor later told me he was on an ER on call rotation and was constantly getting paged during office hours), doctor sees me for 5 minutes and says “yep that looks fine come back next month to take off the splint” (or whatever)… now imagine you don’t have insurance, I bet 90% of people just deal with the permanent finger damage rather than paying $500 or wahtever for this BS.
I’ve stayed at a lot of hostels all over SEA and also the onefam group in Europe. Biggest difference is that the party/social hostels in SEA are generally fine with / encourage anyone joining their events, and the bar area is often open to the public anyway. So these days I usually just find a cheap guesthouse nearby (private room in guesthouse can actually be cheaper than a hostel dorm room…) Then stop by the hostels for their evening events. There’s a really famous party hostel in Chiang Mai called Stamps where probably 30%+ of people on their nightly pub crawl / event aren’t even staying at the hostel.
If you don’t want any of this atmosphere at all every city also has plenty of quieter hostels too. Just go on Hostelworld sort by review score and read through reviews. I’ve stayed at random places with like 50 reviews (which is very little) and never had a bad experience at a SEA hostel.
I work kinda similar hours in Japan - sometimes I have meetings with US even later at night like 1-2 AM, other days I have 0 meetings and can work whatever time I want. maybe on average I work 12 PM - 7 PM or so. here it works totally fine because people start going out late and stay out late - even on a weekday there are lots of bars that open at 8 PM and close at “4 AM” (but will stay open later if people want). also I live in Central Tokyo, plenty of tourists and other international expats who have a late sleep schedule to hang out with. in SEA probably Bangkok would have the most similar vibe - I’ve definitely stumbled across random bars in neighborhoods like Thong Lor (expat central) at 12 AM and had fun drinking there until 2-3 or whatever.