Why don't you move abroad?
orkohunter.net
orkohunter.net
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 lots of time on my hobbies, never work any weekends. Live in a peaceful place with zero crime, everything is a 5 min walk from my home. Hiking trail is practically 50m from my doorstep. Family and friends live close by.
I did spend some time fighting FOMO of not living in a big city, which held me back from moving home - but COVID kind of accelerated that decision.
With that said, I always say to younger people that they should try to move out in their 20s-30s, see the world. I've never met anyone that regretted on "traveling too much".
I have traveled as lifestyle since my late teens and am now in my forties. (I went to uni in a country where lecture attendance isn't compulsory, so many students only come in for the exams, and then I began remote work already in the early millennium.) It is just who I am, and I wouldn't necessarily say I regret it. However, I and loads of people I know struggle with the negative consequences: inability to maintain romantic relationships since a partner will inevitably want to settle down; difficulties with connecting with the local people because conservative societies are suspicious of older men who don't have a conventional family life or focus on a career; and mutual frustration with your sedentary friends back home since your lives are now so different.
You don't see this discussed much on travel media, because the modern ad-supported internet wants positivity and rainbows. However, this is absolutely a frequent conversation topic whenever I meet up with other nomadic travelers.
I don't know it always seemed an obvious drawback of digital nomading. You can do this 2 years and then you need some stability. However the positivs of a 2 year DN stunt are great
but it also won't fix your life, and in many cases just punts the problems to be solved later -- while usually creating new ones.
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.
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
What happens most commonly is that after some time abroad you marry (usually a foreigner) and have children who belong where they were born. What now? I speak from experience.
I wish people would pause for a moment before universally recommending something that they either have not experienced, or they have gotten away from. Such as Terry Pratchett, who never even lived abroad!
ps. there's no reason for the pratchett quote to not apply to regular travelling, as pratchett must have done a little of since he apparently shot a documentary with a bunch of orangutans in borneo.
Sure. I may well have misinterpreted what they said. I hope they accept my apologies.
> This idea that someone should not recommend something if they are not actively doing the thing at this very moment is ridiculous
Is it possible you made a "not very charitable reading" of my post as well?
> They are, if anything by their own explicit example, vouching for the holistic experience of traveling a lot at one point in life and then settling down
...which is not always possible, as I have tried to warn people multiple times in these threads. Once you move to a foreign country, you often end up with professional, relationship, and cultural ties that it is not possible to "settle down" -- by which I think you mean "return to your country of origin", please correct me if I'm wrong.
And, in the meantime, you will progressively become estranged from friends, family, and your own cultural heritage. It creeps up on you and by the time you notice it's often too difficult to do anything about it, especially if you have built family ties in your new country.
Look, I am happy that things turned out great for the OP of this thread. I really am. But recommending it to everybody without caveats is a step too far for me.
In the end you can never really go home, because home as you knew it isn't there anymore, and you yourself have changed.
It can be very detrimental in more practical ways too - things few people pause to consider.
Edit:
Beware of the dreaded Ds such as death, divorce, debt, disability, etc. It's easy if you are young and consider a short stay abroad - but growing old abroad is another thing entirely.
Where did I refuse to acknowledge that, exactly?
Our choices indeed have consequences. And it is popular to paint "moving abroad" as a universally positive experience, so I want to counterbalance that with information about some of the common real-world consequences that come with that choice. How is adding some information and nuance a problem?
When was the choice to get married and have kids not an obvious choice with consequences. That happens when you get married and have kids in the city you grew up in all the same as it does if you find a partner abroad. It's not abroad that I read as your issue, its your marriage and family keeping you in a place. That's obvious.
Indeed, that is my point: their actions did not march their narrative. They eventually realized that it wasn't all that great and corrected course.
If being abroad was such a universally positive choice as they claim, they would have remained abroad.
1. traveling gives you experiences. You don't need to travel constantly to learn and gain from traveling.
2. Moving away from home (abroad or to a big city) gives you again a lot of new experiences. New insights, new world view.
If i move home today, i'm a complet different person than my friends which never left and while certain things might look the same from the outside, its not.
Of course I understand the upsides of traveling, and even moving abroad. I have done both myself. Here is the first comment I made on this thread:
>>> There are pros and cons to all possibilities, whether it is staying put, traveling as a tourist, or immigrating in a foreign country.
What most people who repeat these memes of "moving abroad gives you new experiences and perspectives" miss is all the negatives that can come with that. I have tried to inform people of some of the downsides that often come along with the positives, based on my experience and that of people I know.
If people want to stick to overly simplistic ideas about living abroad, they are free to do so. But I would feel I'm doing them a disservice if I did not warn of the downsides -- I wish somebody had told me about them before I left.
In other words, I am trying to kindly offer a more nuanced take on what moving abroad entails. Not everybody is willing to admit that their past decisions had downsides -- we all want to make it look like we are successful and in charge of our lives. Our actions speak louder.
Moving abroad is often a choice. Moving back can be a lot harder once you have a spouse and children.
If they gave it a go and it didn't work out, then they know, and they would have plenty of time to course-correct. There wouldn't be any doubt.
Not in the common scenario where they have married and had children abroad.
I do know of some people who left their country for 10+ years and returned. In all cases they had married somebody of the same nationality as theirs and moved while the children were still too young to care.
In other words, the people who can easily return typically do so. Those who don't return often want but can't for one reason or another (usually their new family).
i spent 11th grade as an exchange student, so when i got a job abroad years later, i knew what i was getting into.
in between i volunteered for IAESTE, an organization that helps students get internships abroad because i believed that it would be a valuable experience more students should be able to benefit from.
i left when i was young and it was the greatest experience ever. i would not miss it for the world. but my motivation was not money, it was learning. when i stop learning where i am, then i move on.
eventually i may move back to where i am from, not because it's not working out or because it would have been a mistake, but because i have run out of places to go to and also because it's time to give back.
i am now old enough that i can use my experience to influence the next generation back home to open their mind more towards the world.
I beg your pardon? Let me quote the very first comment I made in this thread.
>>>> There are pros and cons to all possibilities, whether it is staying put, traveling as a tourist, or immigrating in a foreign country.
This is in contrast to some of the claims made by others in this thread, such as:
> I always say to younger people that they should try to move out in their 20s-30s, see the world
> in my opinion everyone should spend at least one year abroad somewhere just for the experience.
That said, I am glad things are working out for you. I am just trying to warn people that immigration also has its downsides in spite of popular memes.
Just for curiosity, did you marry abroad? Have children abroad? Did your parents die while you lived there?
(FWIW, I disagree: there is tremendous value in travelling, even if just as a tourist. The main issue is having the resources to do it, which I think is frequently underestimated. Where I personally call home is quite different from where I grew up, but unlike the OP I don't have any particular family ties to a single area, because my family is very spread around, having all settled elsewhere after travelling for work, study, or just for something different. I also have never found someone who regretted moving, even the case of two different people I know who went to the effort of moving the the US and then finding they really don't like it, and moving back within months, don't regret the experience, even if it was expensive)
This is how the thread went from my perspective:
> [Them] I used to do something and then stopped. My life is fantastic now. That said, I recommend everybody to do what I stopped doing; I have never met anybody who regretted doing it.
> [Me] If it is so great, why did you stop? There are pros and cons to both doing and not doing it
> [Others] But doing that thing is so great! Everybody should do it!
> [Me] Here are some of the common long-term downsides of doing that thing...
> [Others] Don't claim this happens to everybody! Doing that thing is so great! Everybody should do it!
My wife and children are foreigners; "moving back" would mean uprooting them.
Also, I have lived abroad for so long that my country of origin feels foreign at this point, in what is called reverse culture shock.
You reach a point where you are a foreigner wherever you are.
I'm not saying that it's all been negative; far from it. But I can't universally recommend people to try living abroad after what I've seen both personally and in other immigrants I've known over the years.
YES, absolutely. It happened to my parents and their siblings as well. And it's not something that people get into with a good understanding of the tradeoffs they are making -- it's easy to fool ourselves thinking that videoconferencing and cheap flights will magically eliminate the problem. It doesn't work like that in practice, and I made that mistake myself.
> I wonder if being forced to study nearer home therefore meet a partner from nearer, may lead to higher ultimate happiness. When our kids grow up, I 100% wouldn't wanna "clip their wings" or be selfish. But, also kind of hope they don't permanently move far away
Yeah, that mirrors my sentiment as well. Raising children while away from your extended family is tough. Rather than spending 10 years with extreme childcare responsibilities, I wish we were closer to family so that we could (a) get some hands-on experience with caretaking before raising our own kids, (b) get a couple of hours a week off from taking care of our own kids, and (c) allowing our parents to spend some quality time with their grandchildren without having to travel across continents with small kids to make it happen.
It would have been a more gentle curve spread over more time, and a chance to spend time with our extended family. Now, I've also heard there's a flip side to that, where people get sick of their relatives being too involved in how to raise their kids, etc. It's all a tradeoff.
I left the US in 2009 to move to Singapore. After 14 years in SG, I moved to Australia. During my time overseas, my accent has picked up hints of Australian. When I go back to the US, one of the hardest things for me is being asked "where are you from?" I get the same question in Australia. The lack of belonging is tough.
We'd show up at the office at 9-10AM and then work until 6-7PM then go home and work more and work weekends as well. It was very common from small seed stage to FAANG. PIPs, stack ranking, and backstabbing psychopaths wouldn't be commonplace in SV if it wasn't for all the H1B indentured servants.
That is also probably why Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby while abroad in France. To me Gatsby is pretty much the quintessential American identity novel, and having been an American living in France (in the past, not currently), I feel like I understand the novel and “what it means to be American” more.
I hate you, Poland
I can't help it
I hate you, Poland
Because you have power over me
I count long months
I don't know how many in total
I'd like to return, but I can't
Because I can't love you
There, I was annoyed by stupidity
Poverty and misery, young and old
Here, I'm annoyed that I have everything
I could ever wish for
Maybe someday those will understand
Who left the country long ago
That there, poverty is real
And wealth here is just pretend
I'll tell you if I dare
Because it's a very silly topic
There, Sunday mass irritated me
Here, I'm annoyed that there isn't one
Here, pedants annoy me
There, slobs annoyed me
Everything got mixed up
And I don't know what I... feel!
I hate you, Poland
I can't help it
I hate you, Poland
Because you have power over me
I count long months
I don't know how many in total
I'd like to return, but I can't
Because I can't love you
I resent your heritage
Still alive within me
Because you are primitive
And I am a primitive
Someone wanted this
Someone had this in mind
There, I became a degenerate
Here, I'm becoming a patriot!
I noticed the same thing, the more I live abroad the more I love my home country. Then when I come back I hate and resent it again and miss my home abroad.
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 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 country nobody's waiting for me either. I know this sounds cheesy, but I think that in some way I'm just different from most other people, and no matter where I go, I'll always feel lonely and disconnected. This sucks, but the flipside is that I can follow the money and comfort of life without feeling like I'm sacrificing anything.
I'd love to temporarily move to the US, but definitely not permanently. I have noticed that almost all people I am on friendly terms with have a story "I grew up poor but now I'm rich", and obviously, citizens of the world's richest country won't be a good match here.
Autodidacticism and tech were also my combination of escaping generational poverty, and I had to be the first person in 2 generations to leave the country at all in order to do it. It hopefully strikes at a hint of irony that I am british.
However, unlike the author, I did not have a strong familial connection.
I miss my homeland but I have no wish to return, the living conditions for the lower classes or even the middle classes is so low that I see no way of living a comfortable life. I do still get bouts of homesickness- even after 10 years of living abroad.
It takes a lot of strength to really identify what is important to you, I’m quite sure that the author is content to understand that he is a success to all those around him and in the wider world- and that confidence will be something that he carries for the rest of his life. Fair play to him.
However I feel the main thing that made me move away from Brazil was not status, income or "success". It was the realization that no matter how "successful" I was my life was still going to suck.
Working in IT in Brazil means living in São Paulo and that is like living in SF, except all the bad parts are 10 times worse and a bunch of extra bad things on top (mainly crazy high air pollution levels and traffic). On top of that work culture in Brazil is terrible.
Even if I am "well off" (but not well off enough to stop working) I would still need to live in a cage in a São Paulo high rise enduring 2 hours of traffic every day and going every where by car. No amount of maid service, take-home delivery or stay-at-home wife (things you can get if you have a good job in Brazil) is going to make up for that.
I moved to Sweden in 2016, so things have changed a lot (remote work now being more common, work culture in the new wave of Brazilian startups is a lot better from what I hear). But now I have grown roots in Sweden and have no plans to leave. I don't have a car, 80% of my trips are done by bicycle.
It absolutely does not. Porto Alegre and Recife are 2 large IT centres where there's plenty of good jobs from large corporations to small startups. Florianópolis also had small but workable one though I don't know how it's evolved in more recent years.
Salaries are certainly better in São Paulo but so is the cost of living, and for many the quality of life can be a lot lower.
From my point of view moving from São Paulo state to one of those other Brazilian tech centers is not that big of a leap to just move to another country.
If I have to move somewhere where I know no one and it takes a plane flight to see family I might as well move to a place with a hot job market where I can make good money and have good work life balance.
That said, I did have a few interesting jobs there. And the quality of life was in many ways better, though I can’t complain much.
If you have any sort of ambition (technological or financial), you should get a government job, start your own business, or move.
I live in the UK now. Incredibly safe city in the countryside. Just can't imagine myself looking over my shoulder all the time, or wanting that. Even though I'd be "well off", by our standards, which frankly are not that high.
Brazil, without being actually rich, is a major decrease in quality of life.
After nearly forty years in Norway I have no wish at all to return to the UK to live. Every time I listen to BBC R4 I hear some horror story about poverty or poor health. 6 million people (almost 10% of the population) on hospital waiting lists, pre-school children having such bad teeth that they have to have them all removed; that's just a sample from the last two days.
I do enjoy long holidays there as a tourist though because there is so much visible history. And it's warmer than Norway in the summer!
Now I live in the south of Sweden, across the bridge from Copenhagen.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/feb/09/noki...
I made many friends with other immigrants from all over Europe. This suggested that the English were somehow uniquely challenging to befriend.
What I realized later in life is that this couldn't be further from the truth. The actual situation is that when you move to another country as an adult, most people your age already have established friendships from school and earlier life. They don't "need" a friend as much as you do. This applies to every country. The reason I got along so well with other immigrants was that they also "needed" to make friends, as their childhood friends were all left back home.
I'm not saying this to invalidate what the original poster was saying, but it's definitely something to keep in mind when you move abroad - it will be HARD to make true local friends and you will have to work for it.
I've been in the UK 20 years now and I don't have a lot of British friends, even now. I moved when I was 27 years old. The friends I have are from common interests and work. I was lucky enough to meet one great friend at a workplace who loved rugby and skiing and socialising, like I do. We spent a lot of after work nights getting drunk in pubs, and we played rugby and went on skiing holidays. I then met a few of his friends, some of whom I've now become very good friends with, all these years we're still friends. But I can count these on one hand.
I don't resent it, though I do lament it. It's just that bonds tend to form early in your life and it becomes a lot more difficult later.
On the other hand, it was easy to make friends with people from my home country because you have something in common and you are all looking to make friends. And it's easy to network, because you just need one connection to get into a social circle.
Don't let nationalism stop you. You were randomly born in your country.
Choose your country. Don't let randomness and some emotional baggage control where you want to live.
You have a finite live. Make most of it.
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. I realized this is no way to live life.
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.
What you find online tends to be the many people who spent a year or two abroad talking about what a cool experience it was, not long-term immigrants publicly admitting the downsides of their past choices. It is a very common feeling that is rarely spoken about outside of immigrant communities.
If you pay attention to the comments, you will find that the people who only talk about the positives of moving abroad either haven't done it, or did it but they went back to their country of origin. Where are the long-term immigrants --typically with spouses and children-- talking only about the positives? And for the many who return... if living abroad was so great, why did you move back? Why don't you tell people about that as well?
Here. I'm an immigrant to the UK. I've been here 20 years. I love it here, except for the weather, which I miss from my home country.
I do miss a lot of other things, but all in all I've made my life in the UK and settled here with children.
I think I'm one of many, many millions of people globally who have done this and speak positively. I'm not sure why that seems far fetched to you?
The self has a heritage even if the self refuses to accept it. You are your parents' child and not someone else, for the same reason you are also a human, a hominid, a mammal, not a fish or a tree.
If you're alluding to the existence of some transcendental self, can you at least accept it is inseparable from your corporeal self?
I have plenty of evidence that we're bags of chemicals wandering around a rock in space, and our consciousness is the results of electical signals passing through our synapses. If you wish to reduce the majesty of nature to "unknowable", you reduce your own position to unknowable too. If you're fine with that, I'm fine too, but I still like my position better than yours.
Oh wait, you changed what to who, didn't you?
Boom, thanks, and ouch... I guess.
Any decision I did not take; is random to me amd I am really mot responsible for it.
People who move abroad usually leave everything behind: family, friends, etc. Yes you can come visit regularly, but what was previously a daily or weekly thing now becomes yearly or bi-yearly in many cases.
Second it's the language barrier: moving to a country where you don't fully master the language (sometimes far from it) is really hard, too.
In the US, most people I have met who immigrated came via chain migration, with family members sponsoring other family members’ visas. And things also supplemented by family members in those families immigrating via student/work/spousal visas.
e.g in Nigeria most professionals hardly earn $500. Now compare to zimbabwe - the same professional earns 2x-4x the nigerian wage. Yet Nigeria has higher gdp per capita.
so yeah gdp per capita or gdp per capita ppp - might really reflect the african dynamic.
Or to give a rather poor analogy for lack of better one, India has premium-business-class experience migrating to West, compared to other APAC, which are put through economy-saver class experience.
[1] https://www.immigration.interieur.gouv.fr/Europe-et-Internat...
This essay was on someone who had the opportunity to live abroad (US, Japan, Sweden) and decided to live in India. The essay answers the question of why he, personally, has decided to not move abroad again.
The reason? "I think people should live where they are the happiest", which for him is family and friendship - or what you might describe as "emotional baggage."
That said, spending some time abroad (as OP has done) is a real benefit. I never realized how very American I was until I lived abroad. It gives you a different perspective on your own culture -- you can love your own culture more accurately, seeing both its strengths and its weaknesses in a different light.
Nothing wrong with moving back home afterwards though.
Or not. What kind of general advice is this. It depends on so many factors - your age, marital status, how close you are to your family and culture. For many people, I think for the majority even, unless they live in a war torn area then staying put makes a lot of sense.
> Don't let randomness and some emotional baggage control where you want to live
Yes family and culture is an emotional baggage and we are emotional beings, we are not robots. Most people care to a certain degree about those things.
No I was not.
WTF, is this really the reality of living in San Francisco?
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAfVNkSRSM4 [video][51 mins]
like the area immediately around city hall, and enclosing half the BART stations & good chunks of MUNI?
-------------------------------------- Just like many Indians of my generation, I spent my childhood in a single bedroom rented house. Every evening, my brother and I would sit in front of an oil lamp and study, mostly maths and science. -----------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------ My father has been a software engineer since the 90s and my brother is an absolute rockstar with computers. We didn’t have cartoons in TV back in our childhood but had our hands on keyboard ever since I could possibly remember. ---------------------------------------------
So you operated the computer / keyboard using oil lamp ?
Thanks Sherlock.
The golden key to is to learn the language at least to conversational level, that will make your access to society and connecting with people tremendously easier. Next and quite important is to adopt their culture, that will without question make most welcome you into their hearts.
Still accept the fact that you will always be the foreigner, for when push comes to shove, you are the outsider, especially in difficult situations like conflict.
People asked me why moving out. i said: to see how it is like - Living elsewhere. (i was thinking only geography then, but.. happened culturally it is even farther). They did not accept that as answer.
Fiancee came (after 18 months instead of 3, thanks to usa bombing belgrade). We stood in oz further 1.5 years. Got a newborn baby.. and Then decided to call it over and move back home - kids needs dense society to become a person, and there wasn't much of it in oz. Or so we thought was the reason.
People asked me why moving back. i said: to see how it is like - Going back. They did not accept that as answer.
10 years later, 2012, one day i went to oz again. Trying to fullfill that then-paused dream. Took me 3 months to grasp the new (harsher) reality - which was actually an uncovered unglittered same old one - and one day, after watching Sacrifice by Tarkovsky, abandoned the oz-dream alltogether. It's not worth it, it's really like living upside-down - for me. Or inside-out.. Cultural differences are staggering. Moved back home.
(same) People asked me why. Answer - i am choosing where to live, by my standards. Not somebody elses. After being to quite few places@continents.. would try only 1-2 of those. The rest.. aren't for me. People would nod. Maybe we all got wiser..
My advice to young people: go around the world early enough. Check Different places.. Culturally. Find what your values are. Decide where you fit best and want to be. Who to become. May check Hofstede's cultural dimensions [0] below - but remember some values stay, some change, and you do not know which, beforehand. Values are like a skyline.. the further you go, the more you see and understand which is really high/low and which is just a hill/puddle.
A friend told me that there's an inscription on some Amsterdam bridge which can be translated as "coming back is not the same as staying". It is really so.
And.. Money are the lubricant, NOT the fuel. Wish/motivation is the fuel.
[0] https://www.theculturefactor.com/country-comparison-tool
It's reasonable to wish to leave Canada; but generally speaking its the rest of the world seeking to move to Canada.
Australia? Lots going really well for them. I do have family in WA. Their government debt is good, economically still a powerhouse, despite government's efforts to kill their domestic industry. At least in WA, their driving laws are some of the dumbest ive seen in the world. 1km/h over the speed limit and you get a maximum speeding ticket? They have roaming speed trap cameras? Speed limits adjust multiple times in under a km. Speed limits are artificially low to produce ticket revenue. The only place ive ever been pulled over and forced to blow a machine. Nanny state problems big time in australia. Australia's gun laws eliminate the consideration of ever moving there.
Finland, norway, czech, switzerland, estonia, lithuania, look like great options, but language barrier concerns. But worse... you folks have a nutjob neighbour to the east with nukes. I currently live out of reach for everthing except their ICBMs, im not moving into range.
It would seem to me the only place for me would be to move to the USA.
Right off the top, I'd never move to any stop and identify state. Which eliminates most good states to live in. Do the same again for constitutional carry. Texas, Idaho, Wyoming, missippi, are still options. Long story short, it seems Texas is the place to go.
As I said, I very rapidly ruled out moving to Europe. I could have gone deeper and ruled out even more eu countries using other factors.
As for moving for constitutional carry. It's not that im moving there for it, I know the majority of states have it already and im rapidly disqualifying all states which dont have it. California would be idiotic to live in for countless reasons; but i can make my job easier by ruling it out quickly via constitutional carry.
I likely would not carry, or quite rarely. But constitutional carry is a fantastic measurement tool on how good the state is; how up to date on science they are.
Interesting to see how people filter. From my perspective, that would be a plus point of moving there. I love that you cannot own a gun in the UK.
>Interesting to see how people filter. From my perspective, that would be a plus point of moving there. I love that you cannot own a gun in the UK.
As a Canadian, I legitimately didnt understand the value or brilliance of the 2nd amendment until the last few years.
If you live in a country which doesn't have civilian ownership of guns, you dont live in a free country. You may have been misled into believing it is a free country but it's not. That's black and white.
You mention UK.
How about your "Snoopers charter" where the UK government has a full copy of every text, comment, or phonecall. The only thing they dont collect is video chats. They have an extensive database log of you and they know more about you and your personality than you do.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-60707646
Howabout major civil rights violations and disallowing of protests?
How about that windrush scandal? The rwanda deportations?
How about all the arrests of journalists? David Miranda was killed by MI6.
https://www.mygov.scot/police-stop-search
The scot police can just stop and search you and your vehicle whenever they please?
In the USA, 1st amendment auditors are all over youtube because police in usa think they can get away with this, but apparently stop and search your papers in the UK is real?
The USA has Terry-Ohio but the UK has never had that i guess?
How about the UK's "non-crime hate incidents" which straight up is just anti-free speech. But then again the UK has no affirmative right to free speech.
How about that guy who said mean words online, was anti-migrant. 3 years in prison for speech.
Lets be realistic, the UK isnt a free country and there's literally only 1 reason why. The lack of civilian ownership of firearms.
There is no such thing as a free country. Ever since the first few homo sapiens pooled their resources and formed a tribe, they had to compromise their freedoms and agree common rules.
I agree that there are a lot of undesirable things about the UK, but I we don't have much worry about being shot. I like it that way.
> and there's literally only 1 reason why. The lack of civilian ownership of firearms.
I don't agree with that conclusion.
I am an italian guy coming from deep south. After many years working far away from home, friends and beloved ones I now settled in south again working remotely
I prefer to have much less money but be close to people I love
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).
Spaniards favorite hobby is complaining about Spain. They live in a bubble and don't realize quality of life there is one of the best in the world.
Whenever I go back I'm marveled even by simple things like roads without pot holes which are everywhere in Mexico.
Forgive me if I'm being elitist here, but this seems like a strange example of outrageous admission requirements. I would have thought knowing about radiocarbon dating (which I'm assuming this is a reference to) is common knowledge (I believe it's in the standard curriculum for grades 7-9 in my country), so it doesn't seem like a completely unreasonable test question. If this is an example that the author uses from his or her own experience, it seems stranger still.
>Every evening, my brother and I would sit in front of an oil lamp and study, mostly maths and science.
"vestibular" in Brazil, "gaokao" in China, the JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) in India. Those are the keys to upper middle class and they are guarded jealously. In my case to get in CS at a top university in Brazil there were 30 students applying for each spot in the Major in that year.
It is often used as a measurement "X per spot" for different majors to say how hard it is to get in. Some majors like Medicine can reach 200/spot. And trust me since most people have to pay to get those tests the less prepared students don't even bother because they know they won't pass. A lot of people also go for an easier-to-get-in major than the one they want hoping they can do an internal transfer after getting in (people apply for Pharmacy major in order to transfer to Medicine for example). Pretty much all majors at the top universities have at least 5 per spot, even the useless ones (which won't get you a job either).
It is grueling, it is not uncommon to see people crying in the hallways after the exams and occasionally suicides directly linked to the exams. There is such a glut of graduates and such a lack of jobs that unless you go to one of the top schools you won't get a good job or you will have to endure years at bad jobs to get experience before moving on to a good job.
Oh yeah, also student loans? Forget it, you have to pay for yourself, so hope you live close to the uni or daddy can cover your living costs. At least in Brazil (and I believe in China and India as well?) tuition is free at the top unis.
The thing is, in those countries your uni name is everything. Imagine that if you want to have a career you need to go to harvard, otherwise good luck.
It might also be a check against rote learning.
I think there's a big step from that knowledge to say that means I know the basics of nuclear physics. If anything, it's a better test for the basics of archaeological dating.
Or, as I learned recently, the 12C/13C/14C ratios are used to help determine the source for the increase in atmospheric CO2, since fossil fuels have essentially no 14C. (TIL it's the "Suess effect", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suess_effect ). So it can also be a test for how well one understands the evidence behind the causes for global warming (while also making carbon dating trickier - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1504467112 ).
I also know that nuclear power plants split the uranium atom to generate power, as do atomic bombs. I also know that radioactive materials are used in smoke detectors and as power sources for some space probes, that bananas are radioactive, and that radon is a radioactive gas that can build up in houses and cause cancer.
That still doesn't mean I know the basics of nuclear physics, which starts with how the nucleus contains protons and neutrons, and is incredibly tiny compared to the nominal size of the atom.
In hindsight, it's funny that we use radioactive decay as one of the filters for an entrance exam for University. [2]
1 - https://ncert.nic.in/textbook/pdf/leph205.pdf
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination
The only way physics helps with computer science, is by being a convenient source of coding challenges.
In this regard, it's like treating programming languages as "languages" and only allowing people to study them if they can also master French or Spanish.
Also:
Common knowledge is much, much less STEM-y than most commentators I've seen, seem to think.
Back 24 years ago, the final mandatory exams I had at school (UK GCSE), one of the questions in the higher level biology exam was asking me to… count ~ten dots within a rectangle and none of the dots outside.
Most people have no motivation to care what carbon dating is, or that it involves radioisotopes, even if they're smart, hence (though I think things have improved since then) The Two Cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Instead of STEM, culture: Soap operas, Harry Potter, Pokemon, ball games, etc. — I have no idea what the "offside rule" is, as despite having heard people explain it, I have no motivation to care and therefore don't remember it.
The one exception here is that this person was unhappy at the first stop in San Francisco, but otherwise in other places yes.
I don't wake up every day feeling mad that we're supporting a genocide and starting WW3. That whole terrible psychic load is gone. I was pushed out of a well known firm for posting on social media in support of Palestine.
Once my freedom of speech was assaulted, I had no reason to be in the U.S. I had immigrated to the US (from London/UK) in '88 and watched the U.S. get worse every passing decade.
The upside of having been in the US is the good qualities of the people who built the country and carried it on their now-tired shoulders. We still have very good friends who have no desire to leave, and we respect their choice.
But for us, it was time to move on.
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.
That said, nowadays, I always advise young people to stay here so we can develop our tech industry and not go abroad to be mistreated and make foreign companies richer!
Debt is another factor. If you're born in the US, odds are you have accrued some debt, be it student loans, credit card, housing or auto loans, etc. this requires you to have a job offering a wage that can (barely) keep up with paying off said debt. Keep in mind debt is an industry here, so once you're in it, you're in it unless you are lucky enough to have been born into some level of moderate or higher wealth.
Oh, and income? Yeah, you need to know to how code to get a remote job with the flexibility to work anywhere in the world. Maybe you get lucky with a sales job, but for that you need to be bilingual. If you grew up in the US, you were not encouraged to pursue either of those skills until very recently. Couple that with your competition in a global job market is going to be a lot steeper that what you might find in a domestic market.
If we take a Moon-eye view of the US, it's almost as though a system has been created intentionally to keep people stuck there. Many of us would love nothing more than to experience the world beyond our borders, but by the time we are 30, we are so shackled by this system that it leaving for anything more than our allotted 2 weeks annual vacation seems like a crazy risk.
1. You don’t need to know how to code to get a remote job. Plenty of jobs in marketing or support are remote. I’ve worked in many such jobs for the last decade (while abroad.)
2. It’s not as if people elsewhere just take vast amounts of time off work because they feel like it and aren’t dependent on healthcare from their job. Most people elsewhere are tied to their jobs because they have bills to pay, making them no different than anywhere else.
3. In terms of “good countries to emigrate FROM”, the US is probably the single best one, barring the ever-present income tax. Salaries are higher than basically anywhere, which makes saving easier. And the passport is stronger than most, making emigration and travel easier too. If one’s life plan were to earn a bunch of money then escape abroad to a cheap country, there is literally no better place to start than America. Maybe Singapore or Switzerland are close competitors, but they have far more institutional and cultural barriers to an average person acquiring wealth.
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.
Personally, I am not a fan of the whole PTO system we have here, mostly because it is used against us. We are expected to be at work unless we request PTO, and we end up having to use PTO for things like doctor appointments and seeing our kid graduate, or whatever. It's an absurd joke.
I don't want PTO, and I realize that's an unpopular opinion, but it comes from years of seeing its abuse by employers who think they command our time (and the employees who allow them to).
What I want is simple; if I am at work, pay me, if I am not at work, do not pay me. That's it. That would keep both sides honest. I need to plan/budget for days off and can't game a system. Employers can't hold me hostage and need to look for better ways to incentivize employees to choose to be at work.
We don't need much and are both fairly handy (in all forms of life) so we are considering a run down property in Europe. We could literally buy a dump,do it up and go off grid with solar and still come out ahead for 50% of the price for a avg crappy property in aus. It's absurd. I just want somewhere to live and grow some food. It's near impossible to do in aus without working like a slave and being massively in debt.
I'm an Aussie living in a relatively low cost region in the EU, I moved here for career and networking/ecosystem reasons. That aspect of the move have definitely paid off in multiples but there's no doubt that QoL is significantly lower here and the tax rates on income are double what you are used to (a lot goes to social programs that as an immigrant you have limited entitlement to).
Sounds like much of Europe.
People emigrate TO Australia for similar reasons!
Its probably a lot easier and lower risk to move to a different part of your own country. No visa required, you know the language and legal system.
I did however choose to stay living abroad. As I married a local and had kids, I created a bit of my own family here too.
Depends where in Europe - not just country but area.
I moved back to the UK seven years ago and have lived in several places since and I have had one incident of overt racism - a dodgy door to door salesman I turned away called me a "Paki". I rarely even feel that there is any underlying feeling of racism.
A lot will depend on who you are and where you live - there are more racists in generally bad areas.
Its not as simple as big cities are better either. I live in an edge of town area with a village feel and a predominantly ethnically English population and its very friendly.
Family
But a few points: * The magnitude of shit some people are putting up with for visa-status is mind-boggling. Their entire life is oriented around visa-status, to the point where I would think they should do the research on whether their quality of life will be improved back home due to the lower stress, even with the much lower salary and the growing pains of a developing country.
* A lot of people have successfully FIREd and then come back to live what I call the America Return Quasi-Suburban life - basically a copy of the McMansion life of the states inside a gated community in one of the major cities.
* New grads nowadays don't try to move abroad immediately (at least in the top-tier colleges). They do get good jobs and are paid very well, considering both historic trends as well as the purchasing power of the average Indian.
* There is a ton of FOMO and moving abroad is still a very strong sentiment, even among people who make more money than what I was making back when I worked in the states in a MCOL city. Considering the extremely poor management of most Indian cities (at a civic admin level) and the bling of social media, I expect this feeling to persist well into the future.
* Indian start-ups and venture are more short-sighted (in terms of path to revenue/IPO) than US venture. AFAIK no company in India has the equivalent of a Goog funding 20% projects or a VC like Thiel willing to fund research ideas. I don't think it is a money problem (going by the amount of money being pumped into quick-commerce or quick-anything) but a culture problem and also the people funding the start-ups. Again, I hope this will get resolved in the future but as of now, India still bleeds most of their higher-science and PhD crowd to the US. The Indian PhD scene is quite dim, with funding issues and what-not. So your contingent of PhDs who go on to start-up is not gonna happen here.
* OP here came back because he couldn't miss being close to family and close friends. There is a strong contingent of immigrants who can't stand living with or even close to family. For them, the visa and distance barrier is a plus.
That was the main reason I didn't even try to move to the US. Had plenty of visa-stress in Sweden with a work permit and helpful employer.