Doesn’t your western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic country have a lot of problems? The job/housing/dating markets are demoralizing, the institutions are terrible, and the people are kind of deranged. And perhaps it’s hard to admit, but you’re also just not having a good time.

Go travel! You just might fall in love with Japan or Paris or Bali and now you want to move there. And why not, it’s cheap, nice, and you hit it off with some locals, and it’s soooo much better than where you came from. Things aren’t so shitty all the time and you’re really happy. You’re seriously thinking about moving here.

Well, you moved two years ago, you’ve been taking language classes since and steadily practicing and you can mingle at bars and don’t struggle in the workplace.

Amazing, pat yourself on the back. Maybe you have a bit of an accent but you can still communicate and connect right?

Not really, you’re only 25% of the way there.

Everyone who talks to you can tell you don’t know the language and they automatically remove any richness from their speech and dumb things down. Maybe you can talk about complex and abstract topics, but you’re still deeply missing something.

Instead of slapping the back of their hand to their newspaper and exclaiming “they’re still fucking fuck us!” they’re not even going to bother because you just don’t know anything about this battle that’s been raging for the last ten years over extensions to the local transit system. You weren’t there man, you weren’t there celebrating when the construction program was announced, and you weren’t there when everyone’s income got .78% smaller to pay for it. You lack historical context.

Or you’ll be walking around at night with a friend and they’ll suggest someone is “an agent of chaos” and make a wild face in a reference to a 2008 movie that was very popular and you won’t get it and they’ll remember to keep it simpler with you in the future. You lack cultural context.

They’ll never seriously talk to you about their relationship with their parents because you just won’t understand. Oh sure they’ll make jokes and complain about how crazy their parents are and how much they wish they had parents like from your country. But when they need to come to terms with their upbringing they’ll lean on a local friend. You lack the shared childhood experiences.

Your coworkers will know how to read the subtle shades of workplace relationships and expectations, informed by decades of cultural exposure and their own parents’ grumbling, but your frame of reference will be too western to understand. Your values are wrong.

Perhaps your life failed to launch, and moving to a new country could genuinely help you restart from a difficult situation. And maybe the culture and weather really are that much better.

And of course there’s a special psychological jiu jitsu move you can do on yourself if you move abroad. Before, you subconsciously felt something was deeply wrong (that’s why you blew up your life to live in a foreign country). But now you’re an expat, so feeling like an alien isn’t a personal fault, you’re simply an immigrant! It’s expected that you don’t fit in. You don’t have to blame yourself, and neither will the people around you.

A lot of expats you meet abroad complain that the people are kind of closed off and it’s hard to make friends because the locals stick with their high-school friend groups. Or they say the people are friendly and nice, but there’s always a wall. It’s because including foreigners in a friend group is a painful experience. So you really must be offering something exceptional for people to put in the enormous effort to include you.

Even if you grind it out for thirty years, even if you study their culture maniacally and speak perfectly and know all the rules, every time they look at you they will instantly know, and they will treat you as an outsider. Just because you look or sound different.

You will always be Other. You will never be Danish, you will never be Brazilian, you will never be Indian, and you definitely will never be Japanese.

Go travel, see the world, fall in love with a foreign culture—then go home and be a local!

If you’re reading this and you’re not from a nice western country, don’t despair. America and Canada are much more accepting of immigrants than most other countries. Worst comes to worst you can stick with the large local immigrant communities. This post is targeting dissatisfied rich westerners who move laterally or downwards (in economic terms) because of alienation.

Also if you move abroad and marry a local, none of this post applies. You’ll still never be one of them, but a wife or husband is a solid connection, someone who is willingly signing up to play lifelong cultural interpreter for you. And with a spouse, kids, and coworkers, that’s basically all the social connection you really need!

And I’m definitely overstating the case here somewhat. But I feel that there’s an excess of positive sentiment around moving abroad, and I wanted to counter this with a dose of negativity.