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Why don't you move abroad?

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Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#81

Post by roncesvalles »

I think OP is exceptionally lucky in that he still has friends and family in India. It's very different for me — most of my childhood friends have actually moved out of India, and I can't stand my extended family. Maybe it's a socioeconomic thing.

OP's experience may be a combination of having a good situation to go back to, and not really fitting in with American culture. And although you could argue that American friendships are not as deep as ones in the Old World, some of that is just the reality of adult friendships.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#82

Post by bartvk »

david-gpu wrote: post #59
felixarba wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nationalism is not the thing stopping most people. It's your friends, family and the feeling of belonging. This is culture, not nationalism. I lived in Canada for 10 years before moving back home. I had a great life in Canada, fulfilled things I quite literally never dreamed possible, but I didn't belong. I lived my life between vacations, just waiting for the time that I can go back home and spend time with family.…

Yeah, people who have only spent a year or two abroad so not understand the consequences of staying there permanently. Estranged friends and family. Aging and dying parents. Feeling like a foreigner in your country of origin (reverse culture shock). Your own children, at the end of the day, belong to a foreign culture rather than your own. Etc.

This. Big chance you'll lose all of your friends, and family ties will suffer greatly. One of my friends moved from Europe to Australia. I think I'm the only one that visited him.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#83

Post by david-gpu »

TrackerFF wrote: post #33

For some, home is where the heart is. I've lived in 11 major cities around the world for the past 25 years, but in the end I moved back home to my rural hometown, in my home country. Remote work made that possible. I make probably 20% of what I could have done in high-COL areas like the Bay Area. But I have a fantastic work-life balance. Make good money, relative to my peers. Clock in 9, clock out 4. Get to spend lot…

> I've never met anyone that regretted on "traveling too much".

And yet you eventually decided that it wasn't for you and you chose to go back home.

There are pros and cons to all possibilities, whether it is staying put, traveling as a tourist, or immigrating in a foreign country. People rarely grasp the true costs of immigrating until it is too late -- I've seen several remarkably similar examples.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#84

Post by 0xEF »

askl wrote: post #40
0xEF wrote: post #30

Being in the US, my career is unfortunately the center of my universe because I rely on having it to afford literally anything else. The system here is one build on dependency, and just like in any abusive relationship, they make it very, very hard for us to leave. Our lives are about our jobs, so things like healthcare and taxation are all inextricably ties to our employers. It's not long before you start to realize…

Why don't you move abroad?

I am not sure if you are making a joke, sorry. If so, well done.

Otherwise, if I did not do a good job of explaining, I can elaborate further on any points that are not fully understood. This is something my wife and I have been considering for years, even prior to America's new experiment with fascism, but there are intrinsic barriers aplenty unless you have a very specific skill set, money, or want to do the Peace Corps thing. Despite what the global community may think about US privilege, it is not so easy for us to just leave.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#85

Post by eleveriven »

TrackerFF wrote: post #33

For some, home is where the heart is. I've lived in 11 major cities around the world for the past 25 years, but in the end I moved back home to my rural hometown, in my home country. Remote work made that possible. I make probably 20% of what I could have done in high-COL areas like the Bay Area. But I have a fantastic work-life balance. Make good money, relative to my peers. Clock in 9, clock out 4. Get to spend lot…

It’s great that you’ve found a balance that works for you! Your journey speaks to the power of finding harmony between personal well-being and career success

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#86

Post by Aeolun »

anal_reactor wrote: post #80
kabes wrote: post #60

Article resonates with me. I'm Belgian and moved to work in SF in 2016. I really hated it and it took me a long time to admit this, because it felt like failure. I moved back 2 years later and the upside is that I now appreciate Belgium, my friends and family here way more. Before I was just focused on moving away to what I thought was a better place.

I live in the Netherlands, so I'm really holding myself back not to make a joke about Belgium being bad. I recognize the text author's struggles. I live in the shit area, and when my parents were visiting, they saw drug addicts. I personally witnessed a shooting once. I have almost no friends. Despite having learnt the language to B2 level, I have zero connection with local culture. But you know what? In my home coun…

There’s a running joke amongst foreigners in Japan that if you have issues in your home country, coming to Japan isn’t magically going to fix them for you. They’ll just come along for the ride, and now you get to deal with those on top of having to deal with living in a foreign country.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#87

Post by Aeolun »

bartvk wrote: post #82
david-gpu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, people who have only spent a year or two abroad so not understand the consequences of staying there permanently. Estranged friends and family. Aging and dying parents. Feeling like a foreigner in your country of origin (reverse culture shock). Your own children, at the end of the day, belong to a foreign culture rather than your own. Etc.

This. Big chance you'll lose all of your friends, and family ties will suffer greatly. One of my friends moved from Europe to Australia. I think I'm the only one that visited him.

I mean, you should kind of expect that if you move to the other end of the world?

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#88

Post by Parae »

logicchains wrote: post #38
dyauspitr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India is orders of magnitude better than most African countries. At the very least it’s safe and you can make a living. Indians actually move back to India after living in the west which doesn’t happen with Africans all that often.

The average GDP per capita in Africa as of 2024 is around $2400 ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/1300864/gdp-value-per-ca... ), in India it's around $2700 ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/263776/gross-domestic-pr... ). A difference but certainly not orders of magnitude. Africa has some really dirt-poor places but so does India. The homocide rate in Africa is higher, around 13/100k vs 3/100k in India, but th…

Let's not forget here that Africa is 10 times bigger than India, 5 times bigger than Bresil and twice as big as Russia. It's a very disparate continent. Algeria and DRC, the two biggest countries in Africa, have very little in common.

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#89

Post by graemep »

My family are Sri Lankan (and I was born there), so I have experienced much the same as the author - Sri Lanka has a VERY high emigration rate, and even more so among the affluent. There have been genuine reasons for people to leave though (civil war, corrupt and incompetent government, a major economic crisis) and even so I think many people hugely over-estimate the gain from emigrating. Pay might be lower but so is the cost of living, and all that emigration of skilled people means that if you are skilled your skills are in demand, etc.

I grew up mostly in Britain. People here a whole lot worse. They talk as though the country is some kind of disaster and a terrible place to live. The economy is apparently a disaster (ignoring little things like low unemployment), we have a cost of living crisis caused by the country doing so badly (apparently inflation is not a problem anywhere else) and our economy is doing terrible (which it is compared to the US, and even more so compared to much of Asia - but not compared to other big European economies).

Re: Why don't you move abroad?

#90

Post by viraptor »

david-gpu wrote: post #83
TrackerFF wrote: post #33

For some, home is where the heart is. I've lived in 11 major cities around the world for the past 25 years, but in the end I moved back home to my rural hometown, in my home country. Remote work made that possible. I make probably 20% of what I could have done in high-COL areas like the Bay Area. But I have a fantastic work-life balance. Make good money, relative to my peers. Clock in 9, clock out 4. Get to spend lot…

> I've never met anyone that regretted on "traveling too much". And yet you eventually decided that it wasn't for you and you chose to go back home. There are pros and cons to all possibilities, whether it is staying put, traveling as a tourist, or immigrating in a foreign country. People rarely grasp the true costs of immigrating until it is too late -- I've seen several remarkably similar examples.

They didn't say they traveled too much. Deciding to stop something doesn't mean you overdid it.
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