Cobblestones, Castles, and the Carrot That Keeps Moving
Why more Americans are imagining life abroad
While it’s fair to say that I circulate in online spaces where you’ll find expat/immigrant communities, I have noticed an uptick in interest in life abroad over the past few years, especially from U.S. citizens. The reasons are varied: millennial midlife crises, U.S. politics, and affordability, among others.
My own reasons for wanting to move abroad were multi-layered. Mainly, though, I had carried dreams of living in Europe from the time I was old enough to read a novel about England or France. I wanted to experience a new culture, language, cobblestone streets, and a slower pace of life. To venture out to the countryside and see castles dotting the landscape. To challenge my perspective on life through a lens outside of the one I inherited as a U.S. citizen.
What’s the impetus behind this sudden mainstream interest in moving abroad?
No doubt, some of it is driven by social media. Who can help but be drawn into scenes of cafés lining cobblestone streets, markets full of produce and handmade goods, and architecture dating back centuries? And then there are the endless articles from Business Insider and CNN detailing what it took for their subjects to move abroad.
The current running joke online is, “The new American Dream is to move to Europe.”
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work was still a fringe concept. It was out there. People did it. But there weren’t many people doing it. During and post-COVID, remote work transformed into a new normal, one that allowed nearly anyone who was once chained to a desk in an office to work from practically anywhere. “Going to work” came to mean something else: traveling from your bedroom upstairs to your home office or driving to the nearest Starbucks — even an Airbnb on the beach.
You’ve probably heard the stories of workers who packed up their lives and moved to remote locations when their offices were indefinitely closed. They took the opportunity to slow their lives down and ditch the soul-sucking commutes. Suddenly, hustle culture didn’t require so much hustling.
What did life look like without the constant grind for more?
For our family, it meant more dinners together, more time together as a family because Will wasn’t commuting two hours a day anymore, and it meant reconnection. Practically speaking, we ate at home more and spent less on gas and vehicle maintenance. Like many families during this period, we learned we didn’t like the constant busyness of our lives. And Will and I both decided we didn’t ever want to work in an office again.
Gradually, businesses began requiring workers to return to their offices, although Will never did. We heard the grumblings from our friends and his coworkers, though, and we knew that if he were required to return to the office, he’d be looking for another job.
Remote work has shown us all what is possible when we aren’t chained to our desks in shiny glass towers in downtown city centers. We could have lunch with our spouses and meet our kids at the bus stop. We could throw a load of laundry in the washer on our lunch breaks and put a meal in the slow cooker for later.
American society, in my opinion, is burned out. Charred. Crispy. Housing continues to rise, wages cannot keep up, and inflation makes a trip to the grocery store feel like you need to donate plasma just for a buffer in your checking account. Hustle culture teaches us that if we just work a little harder, grind a little longer, we can reach that pinnacle point we all dream of — except the carrot keeps getting moved just a bit further out of reach.
If you ask me, Americans are tired of the hustle. That looks different for everyone. For some, it means moving to the mountains of Utah. For others, buying a farm in South Carolina feels like the answer. For us, though, it was moving abroad.
Moving abroad allowed us to slow down even more. No longer did I spend every afternoon in the car for an hour, waiting for school to let out, so that I could drag my kids to their afternoon activities. No longer did Will spend an hour in the car trying to get to Nashville from our suburban home when that trip should’ve only taken 35 minutes. Moving to Valencia was like resetting our family's operating system and clearing out the cache of old files that we no longer needed for browsing.
I watched stories similar to mine play out online before we moved. I knew people could move abroad, but I had no idea how that worked when you aren’t retired or in your 20s. But I was inspired and wanted to find out.
And when I thought about what my kids could take away from living and learning in another culture and how that would shape their lives, I knew I wanted to give it a try.
As a Xennial, I watched my Baby Boomer mom collect and save things she should’ve let go of — items my siblings and I didn’t want and had to dispose of when she passed away. Will and I have never allowed ourselves to collect a lot of “stuff,” having watched our parents fall into that trap. We’ve placed more value on experiences like many from our generation and younger. When you don’t value “stuff” (other than my iPhone), it’s easy to look around and go, “Yeah, I can get rid of it all and move abroad.”
Yes, dear reader, the romance of living abroad exists. I see it every day from my apartment terrace as I look out over the cathedral steeples, the carefully designed parks, and the cobblestones beneath my shoes in El Carmen. The beach is just a stone’s throw away, and so are the mountains. But underneath the romance is the paperwork, learning a language (if you don’t already speak it), and realizing that there are cultural nuances you will never understand because you didn’t grow up here.
Spanish castles surround me, and yet I live real life here. I pay bills, get up every morning to send my kids off to school, and I have to contend with all the everyday life issues you have to deal with anywhere else. It is not a vacation, but it is the life I’ve chosen and desire. And I understand why people look at what I and others are doing abroad with longing because I have been in their shoes.