to/for us

[anreak]

I was rewatching The Goodfellas and it happened to me to get curious why they sometimes use to us and sometimes for us.

Whenever we needed money,
we'd rob the airport.
To us, it was better than Citibank.

For us, to live any other way was nuts.
To us, those goody-good people who
worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks...
and took the subway to work every day
and worried about bills, were dead.

Can anybody help me to sort this out? And I wonder if changing For us for To us in the example would make it inocrrect. Would it?

[RonBee]

It's hard to say what the difference is (if any). They both mean from our point of view.

[David L.]

As I see it:

To us, it was better than Citibank.
To our way of thinking/the way we saw it, it was better than Citibank.


To us, those goody-good people ... were dead.
As far as we were concerned/the way we saw it, those goody-good people ... were dead.
As RonBee said: They both mean 'from our point of view'.

For us, to live any other way was nuts.
'for us' takes this further. Now, they are imagining, thinking about something as if comes back on them, and actively could affect them

To us, Smallville seemed a pictureseque enough place, nice people.
But for us, it's not where we would want to live - there's no nightlife.

In the dialogue, notice how 'to us' is used when commenting on others, situations 'out there'; and 'for us', his point of view is about how some change (in their 'lifestyle' - getting 'straight' jobs) would affect them - "to live any other way was nuts."