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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Regarding point 6, I wonder how much a decent expat community from your own country, or at a minimum native speakers of your language, might help. For example, I imagine living in Hong Kong might be alienating after a while (I suspect this is because you may feel like you are a member of your own culture less as time goes by, but never quite feel fully integrated into your host culture), but if you have a core group of people with a shared original culture around you, that might go a long way towards staving off feelings of alienation.

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English, an official language, and British culture are still pretty strong in HK though declining. Still, I get your point. I live in China and I while I don't work remotely, I just don't interact with the expat community. It's much easier if you have local friends and co-workers. I can't imagine being here as a remote worker -- China can feel pretty isolating. I just find your reference to HK odd because I go there when I don't want to feel isolated/alienated. HK is an extremely "western culture" place.

I used HK specifically because I have a friend (one of my my Fiance's best friends from highschool) that moved there a few years ago to marry a HK native. She lives there and works in the family store now. She's noted more than once (but not often) that she's somewhat lonely there, even though there are some people that live in the same building that are Americans, as she feels somewhat disconnected from them (although it sounded like this may have had something to do with them being wives that didn't work). She mentioned that in the store, her humor often falls flat with the other employees, so there is some cultural disconnect there.

She is Chinese, speaks the language fluently, and I believe she was born in HK, but she was raised in Northern California, and identifies completely as an American. It's entirely possible this confluence of attributes may cause more problems for her than if she was obviously Caucasian and living in HK.

That's a good consideration too, but I think he's chiefly talking about unhappy people, who believe that if they could only move to Elbonia where everything is wonderful, they will automatically be happy.

Alienation is one aspect to expat depression; another is the realization that other countries aren't magical fairylands that have everything figured out- they are full of ordinary people with ordinary problems, just like anywhere else.

This is a quite big problem as well, I have lived for a while in a city with virtually no expat community, which made things even harder.

I suspect that living in a more expat-friendly city will make the transition easier, however my point remains, won't be like living the dream.

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