Your Dream Life Might Be the Problem
The reason so many people in their 20s and 30s are starting over abroad.
Imagine this: you’re in your 20s or 30s, you have your dream job or your dream relationship. Your life seems relatively perfect, but deep down within you, something feels different. It feels incomplete and you can’t explain it without sounding ungrateful. So you do something about it — you leave, you move, you go somewhere nobody has any expectations of you yet and everyone around you automatically thinks you’re “going through something.“
What this does is take your well thought out decision and make it into a problem. It says that you’re not thinking clearly, you’re running away, this is a phase, you’ll come back when you’ve got it out of your system. It never asks whether the problem was in the life you left behind.
One of the things I’ve noticed talking to people who moved abroad in their 20s and 30s is that, contrary to popular opinions, they are not confused. If anything, they’re crystal clear about what they want. They looked at what they were building — the career, the apartment they couldn’t quite afford, the social life that looked full but felt thin and they did something most people never do—they asked whether it actually fit. Not whether it looked right. Not whether it made sense on paper, but whether it fit.
Roamer 15 had a graduate scheme at a five-star hotel. He got good grades, graduated at the top of his class and landed a graduate scheme at a five-star hotel, rotating through every department for two years on a management track.
But he was also 24 and living in his childhood bedroom because buying anywhere in England alone requires two salaries now, and most of his university friends had scattered. He looked at all of that and he left for Australia with £4,000 and a suit he steamed in a hostel shower.
We talk about leaving like it’s purely emotional. Like it’s wanderlust, immaturity or an inability to commit to something real. We don’t talk about it as a rational response to a depleting economy.
Housing costs ten times what it did a generation ago in most major cities. Job security in most industries is imaginative. The career ladder that our parents described — start at the bottom, work your way up, stay loyal, get rewarded—exists in maybe three professions now and everyone is trying to get into the same ones.
Roamer 13 spent fifteen years in Norway making real money. She made three times what she would have made in Spain. She was financially stable by every measure.
But at 40 she asked herself what she actually valued and the answer wasn’t money. She came home to Spain. I think the “crisis” in this situation would be that she finally came to her senses. I’d say she finally became honest with herself.
When someone you know leaves and builds a different life somewhere else, their decision is implicitly a comment on yours because they looked at the same general set of options you were both facing and made a different choice. And if their choice came from clarity rather than confusion, then the natural next question is: what is your staying coming from?
Calling it a crisis is the defense mechanism. If they’re unstable, you don’t have to ask yourself whether you’re avoiding something. If they’re running away, you don’t have to look at what you are internally avoiding.
I’m not saying everyone should leave. Some people stay because they’ve looked at their life and it fits. Some people leave and find out they were running from something that followed them. The point is society thinks when young people leave, it means instability and when they stay, it means maturity. They couldn’t be more wrong.
I think about what it would take to make this easier. Like the part about the Visas, housing, paperwork, bureaucracy and more importantly—structure. I think about when someone in their 20s or 30s looks at their life, realizes it doesn’t fit and needs help with it.
The “crisis” was never about them leaving. For a lot of these people, the crisis was the years before where they knew something wasn’t right and kept showing up anyway because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Moving was the end of the crisis and not the beginning of one.
The Roamer series is an ongoing collection of interviews with people who have moved abroad; what drove them there, what the process actually cost them, and what they found on the other side.
Great piece, Sydney. I worry for the younger generation...