At the time, my response was likely some variation of fuck off.

In 1998, I was failing miserably at a radio gig in Dallas. Long story short — I was about 23 years old and a complete idiot. I arrived in North Texas and proceeded to act like a complete Yankee. To an extent even worse than the stereotype Americans carry into their European travels.

Anyway, this guy I worked with in Dallas—Gordon Keith—was always trying to get through to me. One day sitting around the office, he—paraphrasing—said this to me:

One of these days you’re going to realize there’s more to life than radio. You’re going to somehow discover what the world has to offer and you’re going to devour it. You won’t be able to get enough.

It’s the last two sentences of that scolding that matter right now.

Those weren’t just words. There’s profound truth and substance in what Gordo said that has helped me connect the dots of my life.

I think Gordon saw the experience gap before I did.

I grew up in a place where we did things, but the range of what felt possible—and what actually happened—was always narrow and predictable. We took annual car drives to Florida from Upstate New York. We went to the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. But most of this was limited to scheduled vacation.

We had trips and memories and a family life that provided love, stability, routines, and good memories—but it was a childhood that kept my experiential world small.

The idea of waking up on a Saturday and taking a day trip to the Finger Lakes, or spending a weekend in the Adirondacks, or treating the region around us as something to explore, was never really on the menu. I have faint memories of a camping trip—maybe two—with my uncle and aunt.

I didn’t understand that not having these types of regular outings was unusual until much later in life—until I started seeing other people doing them without much thought or preparation.

A few years ago, when I visited the Finger Lakes for the first time, I asked my mother if we had ever gone when I was a kid. Her answer was basically: why would we have gone there?

For some people, the world is not something you casually go out and experience. It is something that exists elsewhere, for other people, under special circumstances.

This helps explain why I was so enamored with places like Toronto—we did go there a few times as a kid—and even Buffalo. When I saw city life happening, I always wondered—who are these people and why do they live here?

My wife’s version was even more extreme. She spent a significant part of her childhood off the grid in Puerto Rico, inside a strict environment where even television was forbidden. She learned things there that still shape her in useful ways. But she was also sheltered in the most literal sense of the word.

We both left at roughly the same age. I went to Miami for radio. She went to San Juan. Neither of us really looked back.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

When your early world is narrow, the first glimpse of a wider one can feel less like novelty than oxygen—just like Gordon said.

Two key points —

First, it didn’t happen overnight. I’d been away from home for several years when I received the scolding, and it didn’t even dawn on me then. I don’t think I fully realized what I’m talking about today until just a few years ago. It’s a process.

And, to be clear, in my upbringing shelter is not to be confused with deprivation. I’m saying I’ve come to discover that a life without a richness of experience—absent the idea that, yes, there is so much out there to see and explore—can create a particular kind of hunger once the shelter cracks.

When I look at my daughter or my wife’s daughter, I don’t see the same experience gap.

That might be one of the things I feel best about as a parent.

I didn’t do everything perfectly—nobody does. But I did try to give my daughter a wider experience set than the one I had. My wife did the same with her daughter. Between us, our daughters grew up seeing more cities, taking more flights, going to more restaurants, experiencing more neighborhoods, learning through more cultural exposure, and having more casual contact with the wider world than either of us had at the same age.

This isn’t to say they appreciate things less. It just means that the distance between what they knew and what’s possible isn’t as wide.

When you’re 22 and have already done so much—day trips, weekend trips, multiple visits to Europe, experiences with different people and different ways of living—the world can still be exciting, but there can be less urgency to see it all.

For people like my wife and me—and this is really another potential trademark of the Generation X experience—exposure arrived late enough that it came with urgency.

When you spend the first 18 years with a narrow frame, then the next 15–25 years figuring out what else exists while also working, parenting, surviving, building a life, etc., the desire can become more compressed and intense.

It’s not just “I want to see things.”

It’s more like: “I’m staring down the second half of my life and—suddenly—I realize just how much is possible and just how little time I have to do as much as possible.”

You leave at 18 because you suspect there is more. You spend the next decades figuring out what more actually means.

The hunger accumulates through practical and psychological trial and error, through seemingly unrelated successes and failures, through “scoldings” you receive and detours you take—planned or otherwise—along the way. At some point you realize that your early world—and even the worlds you created after leaving it—were not the only versions of life.

Eventually it comes together and you understand why you’ve always wanted more. You’re finally able to define the source of the hunger: the curiosity stops being casual and becomes urgent alongside the realization that you have much less runway than the 23-year-olds in your life.

This might help explain some of the difference between people who talk about big changes and the ones who actually make them. It’s not always courage—often, it’s accumulated urgency.

You finally understand what the world has to offer, how much of it you never knew existed, and how little time you have to experience as much of it as possible. Sitting still starts to feel like wasting what took you half a life to understand.

That image is part of the last “meal” my wife and I had in the United States — on January 2, 2025 at LAX—before moving to Spain.

This sandwich and its counterpart were disgusting. Both flirted dangerously close to twenty bucks.

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It’s telling that the sentence readers highlighted most in one of my recent Medium articles calls out a quintessentially American phrase.

The fact that Americans utter these words with such frequency speaks volumes to how brainwashed the society has become. And I’m not just talking about self-proclaimed patriots who continue to buy the American myth. I’m talking about everyone, including myself.

I used this phrase so much over my final four decades in the U.S. that I wanted to punch myself in the face.

That’s probably one reason why it is what it is has become such an American thing to say.

Count how many times you say that in a week. Or maybe you don’t. But you know people who do. And there’s no doubt that more than a few people — after searching for hours to save on travel expenses — have dropped too much money on shitty airport food. As they get fooled again, all they can say is… it is what it is.

Having this automatic response gradually became normalized on larger issues that matter.

Consider an example.

You have a drinking glass you really like. You drop it. It breaks. After the initial upset, you say, “it is what it is.” Because it really is what it is. What are you going to do — remain irritated for the rest of the week because a glass broke?

We’re hardwired to overcome things like this.

The problem starts when we apply the same logic to things that aren’t inconsequential in our lives and in the grand scheme of things.

How many Americans would respond with “it is what it is” if you said to them, isn’t it weird that you have to drive less than a mile to go to the supermarket? Or that you have no choice but to commute by car for an hour to get to work? Or that the only way to lower your monthly healthcare premium is to accept a higher deductible or copay.

A broken glass is what it is because you made a mistake.

But most of the conditions we’ve learned to shrug at came to be thanks to people and policy. Then, markets reinforced them on the slippery slope to societal acceptance.

Acceptance is healthy when reality can’t be reversed. Resignation is pathetic when the thing you’re accepting is a choice somebody made. And when — to top it off — you have someone either telling you it’s your fault or that it’s a sacrifice you should have no problem making. Or — if it could get even worse—when your wealthy leaders lie to your face and tell you that the reality you see in front of your eyes is fake.

Some Americans still kick and scream in resistance to all of this and the connected themes I’ve been writing about for 25 years. Then there’s the sizeable rest of us who know something is wrong, but ultimately use it is what it is as a defense mechanism. Sort of like the psychological need to get over the broken glass, a point comes when you feel like you have no choice but to get over the larger societal ills the United States has normalized.

That’s one outcome of hopelessness.

I’ve been hopeless over the state of the nation for a long time. I always knew something was wrong — politically, socially, culturally. I spent years imagining a better way and, when I could, hacking together pieces of one.

I lived in cities. I rode my bike — even in inhospitable environments. I studied urban planning long before I ever thought about leaving the United States. I advocated for progressive politicians and against chain stores.

I was hardly passive amid the dysfunction. But, at some point, our favorite go-to phrase took over. Fighting the good fight suddenly seemed futile.

That’s it is what it is in the shell of a pretty sad nut.

Then I spent time in Europe.

Actually living here has proven something important to me:

I wasn’t romanticizing day-to-day life in the continent’s urban places I’ve experienced.

City life really can be better.

From my bread-and-butter perspective — how cities function by design — the differences are impossible to ignore. And once you’ve seen various degrees of better, particularly in day-to-day life and the systems that support it, it is what it is falls apart. Because you’ve suddenly had it confirmed that it isn’t just what it is.

A city where you need a car for practically everything, a two-hour daily commute, a system that punishes you financially for needing healthcare — these aren’t just the hard facts of life.

These are choices.

And the United States has always and continues to make a lot of bad ones.

Much of Europe made better ones — not all of the time on everything. But often enough, particularly in the areas that shape day-to-day urban life, to prove that the American way isn’t destiny or some unavoidable reality.

Acceptance makes sense when the glass breaks. You can’t unbreak it.

But transportation systems, healthcare schemes, housing policy, urban design, and the thousands of decisions that determine how we experience life are choices governments made and societies accepted long enough that they eventually started to feel inevitable.

That’s the trap.

When it is what it is stops being a healthy way to accept reality and becomes a way to rationalize settling for less.

I still mean it.

I think too many people move abroad and suddenly become relocation consultants—putting together visa applications, scheduling appointments, and hunting for apartments for other people. They’re opportunists at best, grifters at worst.

They use fear, distortion of the reality on the ground in a place like Spain, and flat-out misinformation to charge people to do things they can do themselves or outsource to actual professionals. I moved to Spain nearly two years ago. That doesn’t qualify me to act as your facilitator or pseudo gestor.

What I do get—from readers, friends, and people referred to me—are questions about the decision behind the mechanics: Would I like this city? Does what I say I want match the way life there actually works? What am I overlooking?

Until now, I’ve answered informally when I had the time. Those questions recur often enough—and expose a real enough gap—that I think it makes sense to formalize the part I’m actually qualified to do.

So today, I’m opening three spots for something different: a paid, private, written second opinion on the thinking behind a move abroad.

This is for people who are seriously considering a move or have already seriously considered a move, researched it, and begun constructing a plan—but want somebody independent to examine whether the place they’ve chosen, the money and work supporting it, their expectations, and the life they say they want actually fit together.

You’ll begin with a short application. If I think I can give you $550 worth of value—and you decide to proceed—you’ll complete a detailed written questionnaire. I’ll use your answers to produce a private written assessment explaining what holds up, what I question, where you might be contradicting yourself, and what you should investigate before deciding.

I won’t merely identify a contradiction and move on. Where useful, I’ll use concrete examples from my own move, decades of living in cities, and nearly two years of writing about life abroad to explain what that tension could look and feel like in ordinary life.

There’s no phone or video call. I won’t select your visa, find you an apartment, explain how to register in government systems, or provide legal, immigration, tax, investment, housing, healthcare, or administrative guidance.

You do the research and build the plan. I interrogate the argument behind it.

If this already sounds like what you need, you can stop here and complete the short application. You won’t pay anything now. I’ll review it and tell you within three business days whether I think I can help.

A Written Second Opinion Application

For everybody else—or anybody understandably wondering why this isn’t a reversal of what I’ve previously said—here’s the longer explanation.

People considering a move abroad tend to encounter two sides of the same mess.

On one side, there are Facebook Groups, YouTube videos, checklists, masterclasses, and thousands of comments from thousands of random people. We take in all of that generalized information—some of it useful, much of it senseless nonsense, and some of it produced by people creating problems so they can offer their two cents or sell a solution.

Then, we aggregate all of this into themes and can easily convince ourselves that we’ve received a targeted assessment of our own move. That we’ve developed a good sense of what it will actually be like to leave the place we’ve called home and build a life in a new country.

On the other side, there are relocation consultants willing to execute parts of the move for you—often while funneling you toward other “experts” through referral arrangements.

Both can provide information or assistance. Neither necessarily examines whether the life you’re imagining can actually take shape in the place you’ve chosen.

That’s the gap I’m attempting to fill.

I know that gap exists because I experienced it myself. While preparing to move, I absorbed much of the same online noise, anxiety, and bullshit everybody else encounters. Some of it influenced me even when my own research, experience, and instincts pointed in another direction.

At the same time, I was doing the deeper work of examining our motivations, money, routines, expectations, and relationship to place. That process helped me separate the things that actually mattered from the fears and assumptions I had picked up online.

I think I can help other people make that distinction before they move.

So I have changed my mind about one narrow thing. I now believe I can ethically charge for a second opinion on a plan somebody has already researched and developed—without taking ownership of the move away from them.

I’m not putting a $550 price tag on a casual question I might once have answered in an email. The paid work is absorbing a detailed account of somebody’s life and plan, interrogating it, and producing a substantive assessment built around that person’s particular circumstances.

That isn’t the same as charging somebody to outsource their move. In fact, it requires the opposite.

You have to do the work before I can be useful. The detailed questionnaire is part of that work. Answering it honestly should help put your move into sharper perspective before I write a word of the assessment.

I’ve spent most of my adult life noticing things about places that most people overlook.

Shortly after moving to San Francisco in 1999, I enrolled in San Francisco State University’s Urban Studies program. I later studied Planning, Policy & Design in a graduate program at the University of California-Irvine. Between 2002 and 2008, I conducted independent research, presented it at conferences, and published it—including in peer-reviewed academic journals.

More than anything, my time in academia made me fall more deeply in love with cities and develop greater self-awareness around the relationship between place and daily life.

Most people don’t spend much time considering that relationship. But—as we prepared to move to Spain and ultimately did nearly two years ago—I realized it’s among the most important things to understand before starting again in another country.

The mechanics matter. So does questioning your impetus, motivations, aspirations, and readiness for the uncertainty, temporary loss of competence, disrupted routines, distance from people, and ordinary emotional friction that comes with moving abroad.

As you might know, my main freelance work is writing about finance.

Most city writers aren’t finance writers. Most finance writers don’t think seriously about cities.

A city writer might understand why a neighborhood works but not whether your work and money can sustain your life there. A finance writer might determine whether your spreadsheet works while completely missing what those numbers will buy you in day-to-day life.

And most move-abroad content never connects either side to the self-awareness required to understand what you’re really asking another country to change.

When I examine a plan, I’m not merely asking whether somebody can afford the rent or obtain a visa.

I’m asking whether the ordinary days they describe resemble life in the city they’ve selected. Whether their work schedule will allow them to experience what attracted them there. Whether they say they want density and community but dislike noise, smaller apartments, and encountering other people. Whether they want to leave American work culture while remaining economically and psychologically organized around it.

And whether they’re choosing an environment that fits them—or expecting geography to fix something that will follow them anywhere.

I won’t leave those tensions at the level of abstraction. I’ll show you what I mean with real-life examples. I’ll also tell you when I think the mindset you’re bringing to the move will make ordinary friction harder than it needs to be.

That might be uncomfortable. A useful second opinion shouldn’t exist merely to reassure you.

The point is to make your imagined move feel more like an ordinary Tuesday before you uproot your life to find out.

I also read and interrogate arguments for a living.

Your plan to move abroad is an argument:

This is the life I have. This is the life I want. This is what isn’t working. This is the place I believe will work better—and this is why.

I can read that argument and see where the evidence supports it, where the pieces line up, where you’re contradicting yourself, and where you might be making an enormous leap without realizing it.

You’re effectively bringing me a draft of a major life decision. I’m giving you editorial notes.

Ask me whether you’d like Los Angeles—as people sometimes do—and I’m not going to immediately answer yes or no. I’m going to ask where you’ve lived, whether you like driving, what you can afford, how much space you think you need, what you do on an ordinary weekday, and whether you want to encounter other people without planning it.

Los Angeles doesn’t produce one experience. The relationship between the person and the place—between the person and the neighborhood they choose in that sprawling mess—does.

The same logic applies to places I consider better, such as Valencia, Paris, Rome, Toronto, or wherever you’re thinking about building a life.

More importantly, I used this same way of thinking to pressure-test our move long before we made it—and I continue using it as we live it.

My wife and I didn’t pick Valencia because it appeared on a best-places list—best-places lists are bullshit—or because we like drinking wine in a plaza. We spent time traveling, thinking, talking, and writing about what we wanted our ordinary days—not our vacations—to look like.

The logistical preparation mattered and remains ongoing. But the more important preparation was understanding what the move could change, what it couldn’t, what we were giving up, and why the physical and cultural environment we chose fit the people we already were and wanted to continue being.

Spain didn’t make the move work.

Knowing ourselves—and knowing how to read a place—gave it a pretty damn good chance.

Our experience isn’t proof that Spain or any other place will fit you. It’s evidence that I’ve used this way of thinking when the decision involved my own money, relationships, routines, work, and life.

None of this qualifies me to submit your visa application or tell you where to live.

It qualifies me to examine whether the life you say you want resembles the life you’re actually preparing to build.

I sell nothing after that. I receive no referral fees, represent no relocation company, and have no financial interest in whether you ultimately move.

In many ways, this is the most concrete application yet of what this newsletter has become.

I write about how cities, money, work, culture, and psychology combine to shape everyday life. A Written Second Opinion applies that same way of seeing to one person’s actual decision.

A Written Second Opinion

You begin with a short application describing the move you’re considering, the preparation you’ve already completed, and what you want me to examine.

A Written Second Opinion Application

The first step is an application, not payment. I’ll review it and respond within three business days.

If I don’t believe my perspective can give you $550 worth of value, I’ll tell you. You won’t pay anything.

If I think I can help:

• The fee is US$550, paid through a secure Stripe link.

• You’ll complete a detailed written questionnaire.

• I’ll send you a private written assessment—generally between 1,000 and 1,500 words—within seven business days.

• I’ll explain what appears well considered, what I question, which parts of your plan may conflict, and what I think you should investigate before deciding.

• You may send one follow-up email containing up to three clarifying questions.

This does not include a call, ongoing access to me, emotional coaching, or legal, immigration, tax, investment, housing, healthcare, or administrative guidance.

I’m beginning with three people because each assessment will require substantial work. I believe I can add real value to the thinking behind a decision this consequential—and that I’ll enjoy doing the work—but I want to build it carefully before offering more.

If you want somebody to select a country, find you an apartment, choose a visa, or walk you through the bureaucracy, this isn’t for you.

If you’ve already done meaningful research and want somebody to challenge whether your proposed move fits your money, work, habits, experience, expectations, and idea of a good life, I might be able to help.

I won’t make the decision for you. I’ll tell you what I see in the case you’ve made for it.

That said, I’ve done some of my best thinking since moving to Spain—from Los Angeles—in January 2025.

It feels surreal to watch what I said I wanted from moving abroad play out in real time: forward motion through instructive discomfort.

I was convinced that—smack dab in the middle of midlife—it made sense to challenge myself out of a good situation. Comfort can lead to stagnation, especially when you’re in the neighborhood of fifty years old. If I stuck with what was familiar—in a physical and cultural environment that never quite suited me—I worried my mind could get stuck in a rut and eventually close.

I craved not merely new experiences, but a completely different way of building day-to-day life—one that forces my brain to keep testing and reorganizing itself instead of settling into the status quo.

So we picked up and moved. My wife and I changed our lives so that we would have zero regrets when looking back on the second half of them.

Living in Europe and doing our day to day in Spain has been everything we hoped it would be. For me, the most intriguing part is how I’m actually experiencing the discomfort I invited.

The longer you’re away from what became familiar, the more you internalize a sanitized version of your old reality, partly because your new home remains less familiar than your old one.

For me, this often happens through music. When I hear Tom Petty, it’s impossible to not feel nostalgia for LA. When I hear Third Eye Blind, it’s impossible to not recall the bar I worked at in LA or my time in San Francisco. This extends right through to so much else that was familiar, but has become less familiar and more nostalgic. From LA dive bars to hiking trails to parking lot taco trucks.

It’s easy to remember how those things made you feel. It’s more difficult to remember what you experienced—and how it made you feel—between the songs, beers, long walks, and al pastor.

The further removed from the reasons why you left, the easier it is to feel nostalgia for the reasons why you stayed so long.

The other day I was listening to one of my favorite Spanish songs—La misma mujer distinta by Amor a traición/Rafael Berrio—which opens like this:

Yo te llevo a una gran plaza en Salamanca
sólo por verte al trasluz helado

The literal translation to English loses a little, so I won’t spend time with it. But if Berrio gives me the Spanish version of place becoming feeling, Petty gives me the American one—like this in the iconic Free Fallin’:

It’s a long day livin’ in Reseda
There’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard

I’ve never been to Salamanca.

And—funny thing is—I’m not sure I’ve ever actually been to Reseda in any meaningful way.

I’ve undoubtedly driven through the sprawling San Fernando Valley mess around Reseda, but as a place I care about, it might as well be Salamanca—except I have zero doubt I’d like Salamanca ten thousand times more.

Still, when I hear Petty sing about the parts of LA that I absolutely loathed, I get chills.

Nostalgia is a state of mind. When things get emotionally uncomfortable, that’s what we do. We fill the gaps with what we know—even if we don’t actually know all that much.

We rearrange the deck chairs in our head.

Sometimes I feel nostalgia over the cold, foggy summers of San Francisco—and I haven’t lived there in 20 years.

That’s the mindfuck of nostalgia as it meets moving abroad.

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You don’t simply leave one life and arrive in another. The reasons you left become less immediate, in part because the familiar parts grow warmer because they’re no longer in your face every single day. In fact, when you move to a new place with a better quality of life, your new baseline can make it hard to believe that the place you left could possibly be that bad.

Los Angeles didn’t become better after I left. By all accounts, it has only gotten worse. It’s just that the pull of nostalgia can become stronger than the push of urban problems receding in the rear view mirror.

This process is well underway here in Valencia.

If I left Valencia tomorrow, I know exactly what would happen. I’d do to it what my mind already does to Los Angeles. I’d remember our daily coffee shop, the market, the rows of apartment buildings, and the routines that now feel ordinary because I’m living them.

I do this sometimes with Paris, and we only spent a month there.

That’s the condition that comes with being curious, eager, and enthusiastic about the world. Places get inside you and start becoming nostalgic before you even know it. Nostalgia is proof that you didn’t stay too long—that you didn’t render yourself stagnant—that you’re in the process of living a life that’ll go down as well-lived.

That’s the work.

Not to avoid nostalgia or to pretend the old life meant nothing. Not to keep moving every time a place becomes familiar or you experience discomfort. That would be a you problem, not a place problem. Because the lack of or, at least, less familiarity is a welcome feature—not an optional add-on—of moving abroad and doing other big things in life.

The work is to stay curious and introspective enough to know the difference between comfort and stagnation. To understand that the goal was never Los Angeles or Valencia or Paris or any other city as a final answer.

The goal is to keep choosing a life that keeps you engaged and on your toes.

I don’t miss Los Angeles.

I feel something stronger and stranger.

I feel nostalgia for a life that formed me, but no longer fit me — and I try not to confuse that ache with a reason to stop choosing the discomfort that keeps me moving forward.

I've lived in Valencia for nearly two years and I rub elbows with “grandmas” (nonnas or abuelas) every single day in my neighborhood. They're not paid extras giving tourists what they want. And there's nothing wrong with finding some type of joy in that. Not a day goes by when I don't think of my Italian-American grandma as I walk the streets of Spain or, even more, when I visit Italy.

It comes from an article you should read after you read this one.

In the shell of a nuanced nut, I argue that tourists are an all-too-easy target in the increasingly populist and simplified debate around housing and gentrification.

Sure, quite a few tourists suck.

Before we ban Airbnbs, we probably need to restrict suitcase-rolling Americans, loud beer-swigging Brits, and large groups of bike-riding giants from the Netherlands.

But that’s another story for another day.

Dime store anti-tourism activists who act as if everyone who isn’t “local” has means in a sea of locals who are all “poor” and barely subsisting on “Spanish salaries” have hit a new low. There’s something especially condescending about categorizing a swath of society as “poor locals” to be romanticized, then assigning that categorization to an easy-to-hate other.

And this whole tourists are bad and they’re the reason why my city is gentrifying nonsense takes the complex issues of gentrification and housing affordability and gives them Donald Trump-like treatment. Some of the same people who claim to hate the guy—and proudly walk on the polar opposite side of the aisle from him—use strikingly similar logic and rhetoric. But, again, another story for another day.

Today’s story cuts deeper than we’re all tourists sometimes. That’s important, and it’s true. Some of the loudest voices on overtourism also talk about traveling the globe to eat food. While they’re not stampeding from a cruise ship to the nearest all-you-can-eat buffet, I don’t see how they can exonerate themselves from being part of the problem they’re apparently so passionate about solving. Or—crazy thought here—are they just spewing hollow bullshit?

I’m often reminded that we’re all tourists when I’m sitting in the plaza anchored by a 17th-century church in our neighborhood. For every moron who stops, poses, takes a picture for Instagram, and moves on, there are dozens of people who stop and appear in awe of what they’re seeing. Sometimes, they stop and take a picture together—maybe as a family or as a couple—or take pictures of one another. And you can see it in their eyes, they’re genuinely enjoying and appreciating the moment.

Not long ago, I was sitting on the beach in Valencia. A Latin American family next to me was on WhatsApp talking to—presumably—a family member. This man—who looked like a grandfather—couldn’t stop talking about the water and the beach. He was bragging—in a good way—about being there. It’s just cool to see people genuinely appreciate things.

When I saw the Eiffel Tower for the first time, I cried. Not because of the structure itself, but because I couldn’t believe my life had taken me to where I was that day. I’ve lived near major landmarks all of my life—Niagara Falls, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hollywood sign—and I’ve always had an appreciation for them. There are people whose life’s dream is to see these things. Some never get to. Others save, travel thousands of miles, and then experience an emotional moment in front of something they’d only previously seen in photos or on television.

There’s a power in this stuff we can’t—or, at least, shouldn’t—deny. Realizing all of the above—and seeing some concrete variation of it in yourself—doesn’t mean you’re ignoring the problems of gentrification or high housing prices. Or even overtourism.

As much as one thing—the tourist taking a picture—has something to do with the other, it also doesn’t. Tourism and housing are connected. But they’re part of a complicated dynamic with multiple moving parts. We’re busy fighting with one another over a series of rational and well-intentioned individual choices we all make, when the real problem sits with our leaders.

Paris had a mayor—Anne Hidalgo—who wanted to drastically reduce automobile traffic. She spent more than a decade using public policy to take space from cars and give it to pedestrians, cyclists, and public life. She had the political will and some support. Nobody was going to stop her. And they didn’t. The result was a smashing, against-all-odds and assumptions success. And it made Paris what should be the world’s urban planning model.

Likewise, if cities really wanted to crack down on tourism and lower housing prices, they could and would. They’d implement restrictive policies that capped tourist accommodation inventory, increased long-term housing inventory, and put a hard cap on prices.

But governments don’t typically do those things. Even the relatively good “social democratic” governments in places such as Spain. Because they have economic conditions to mind. They have interests they’re—for better or worse—beholden to. From corporations to businesses to property owners. As they attempt to strike a balance, they’re always going to err on the side of caution. And the side of caution resides with the bigger money as it scales down from the corporations to your mom-and-pop landlord.

So, left feeling helpless in the matter, the easiest person for everybody else to yell at is the tourist rolling a suitcase down the street. You can make the case that many of the suitcase rollers are idiots—maybe even bad tourists—but they don’t deserve the brunt of the anger on gentrification and housing. The negative effects of neighborhood change have been taking place in cities around the world for decades. And they won’t get properly fixed until governments act the way Paris did against cars. Tourists going home and staying home isn’t the answer; in fact, it might prove counterproductive.

Isolationism and keeping the other out doesn’t work; just ask the United States.

This and all of the other messes the world is in are enough to make even the most optimistic feel helpless, bitter, and jaded. The last thing we need to do is remove the simple joys we all experience at one time or another from the equation of life.

Most of the time, individuals aren’t actively trying to hurt one another. They’re merely doing their best inside a system designed to have—that needs—winners and losers with local, regional, and federal governments ultimately deciding who’s on either side of that divide.

Fight over the system that makes shitty and seemingly impossible rules for society. But let the family take the picture. Let the grandfather brag about the beach. And let the guy from Niagara Falls cry in front of the Eiffel Tower.

You can keep reading for free if you’d like. However, I’d appreciate it if you pay. This is what I do for a living—writing is not my side hustle.

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But we often lose sight of the fact that a shitty tourist is not all that different from your garden-variety asshole in just about any situation.

I recently saw somebody on Substack argue that tourism in 2026 has become a kind of cancer, particularly mass tourism built around the fantasy of “living like a local”—a fantasy, in their telling, that romanticizes poor peasants in supposedly lesser countries rather than the wealthy people who live there too.

What bothered me wasn’t the criticism of tourism; much of it is justified. It was the populist-style simplification—the merging of an ordinary vacation, mass tourism, billionaire privilege, housing speculation, and displacement into a single offense committed by the person walking around taking pictures of cool buildings.

There’s something uniquely condescending about assuming that tourists who want a taste of ordinary local life are necessarily fetishizing poverty. We’ve reached a point where the same anti-tourism lines circulate so freely that repetition has beaten us into a type of cognitive submission. We’re willing to accept basic nonsense as fact without scrutiny. Nuance, firsthand experience, and useful analysis matter less than saying whatever an echo chamber is prepared to reward.

It’s content; it’s a “post!”

Once the tourist becomes the entire causal story, everybody else disappears.

Local property owners participate in gentrification alongside tourists and foreign residents renting short- and long-term apartments. Being Spanish—or otherwise European—doesn’t exempt somebody from the consequences of charging market rate for an apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood.

But I don’t automatically blame local property owners for doing what they do, any more than I automatically blame somebody for taking the vacation they can afford. In both cases, people are making individual-level choices within systems they didn’t create.

Understanding why individuals make these choices doesn’t require pretending the aggregate consequences are harmless. It means recognizing that regulation—not moral purity from millions of separate people—is how cities protect housing and neighborhood life.

In my experience, loud, entitled Americans and others like them are the exception rather than the rule. Most of us—regardless of national origin—go on vacation when we can and when we can afford it to do things like walk around and eat. Many of us have to save for a long time to be able to pay for the privilege. And who doesn’t hope to find at least a slice of romanticized life in the places they visit?

I've lived in Valencia for nearly two years and I rub elbows with “grandmas” (nonnas or abuelas) every single day in my neighborhood. They're not paid extras giving tourists what they want. And there's nothing wrong with finding some type of joy in that. Not a day goes by when I don't think of my Italian-American grandma as I walk the streets of Spain or, even more, when I visit Italy.

I'm not sure what people expect from tourists other than civilized behavior and respect for others and their surroundings. Should they have to take a part-time job at their destination to see how it feels to make minimum wage—after, quite possibly, saving for a year to pay for that one or two weeks their soul-sucking job back home bestows upon them? Nobody has a problem with people who take beach vacations and “live” on the beach all week. So let urban tourists enjoy old Italian women making orecchiette in the street—or the woman I photographed folding dumplings in the window of a Chinese restaurant in Paris.

Even if you think it's all bullshit. Who cares?

I have no illusions about Americans—the country gave us Donald Trump more than once—but even the most seemingly clueless American tourist isn’t stupid enough to think that everyone “lives like this.” Let them have their fucking moment.

The people who fail to accept this and seem incapable of understanding that we’re dealing with complicated issues and a whole host of villains might be making matters worse.

That kind of simplification—especially when it glosses over the speaker’s own privilege—is part of what makes so much American commentary on the rest of the world unbearable. And you don’t have to be American to do it.

Cities around the world have a longstanding problem of gentrification and displacement. I had one of my first encounters with it in San Francisco in 2000—a city I likely couldn't afford to live in again. So I get it—we have a problem. But it didn't happen when you discovered your bullhorn.

Tourism contributes to the mess so many cities are in, but it also creates jobs, income, and opportunity at multiple levels. The more powerful forces include housing scarcity, short-term rental platforms, investment capital, local property owners, and governments that market their cities to the world while failing to protect the people who live there. Turning the tourist into the singular villain lets everybody else disappear.

Most of us are tourists at one time or another. Expect people to behave decently. Regulate the systems that turn homes into vacation inventory and neighborhoods into investment products. And let ordinary people have their fucking week off.

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Point well taken.

As I noted in a reply to Trey, “the problem isn't with individuals as much as with the collective environment all of these individuals combine to produce. I feel like I go out of my way to make that point.”

I almost always start with things that a meaningful number of individuals say. Things that have been said so many times that they’ve been accepted as fact or, at least, an objective version of reality. But—in my experience—they’re untrue and more a reflection of individuals projecting whatever unease or discomfort they’re experiencing onto an entire culture or country. It’s not as if I haven’t caught myself doing just this in all sorts of life situations.

At this juncture, we have a real problem that doesn’t receive enough attention.

Writing as you experience some form of culture shock is not the same thing as reporting on a culture. Most of us who write for fun—or for a living—write to talk through things. For as much as I feel like I’ve remained consistent on the larger themes pre-move and post-move, I’ve definitely changed what I write about and how I write as I navigate life in Spain.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s good.

I also appreciate Trey’s comment because—I presume—he was a little annoyed when he wrote it, but he presented his thoughts in a way that helps advance and add nuance to the conversation. A dynamic often absent in general discourse these days as well as this specific moving abroad conversation.

Someone can write something emotionally honest and factually wrong. This doesn’t invalidate their discomfort, fear, loneliness, or whatever is going on. Those feelings are real. Their worry that they made a mistake is real. But their explanation for those feelings might be completely wrong.

If you’re struggling with something, I think you should write about it. However you choose to go about it, that belongs to you. But “Spain is slow, inconvenient, and unresponsive” is a claim about a country, its people, and its institutions.

This is where a sense of personal clarity—if not responsibility—needs to enter the picture.

Are you complaining about doing laundry, using a small oven, or needing the right paperwork—or is something bigger going on? Because—as I tell my wife every single time our kitchen sink clogs up—if this is all I have to deal with, I’m one pretty lucky guy.

Minor inconvenience is part of life. I really think a lot of it does come down to city versus suburban living. Dealing with apartment quirks isn’t an inconvenience to me. It’s just how it is—and beats the hell out of true inconvenience like having to drive 20 minutes to go less than two miles.

Maybe there’s no association between urban quirkiness and perceived suburban convenience, but enough Americans have a warped sense of what city life as day-to-day life actually looks and feel like that I think there’s something there, particularly when these Americans plop themselves in an urban environment, in a different country.

There’s an analogy here between people who do yoga at room temperature and those who do Bikram Yoga with 104-degree Fahrenheit heat and 40% humidity. To me the heat and humidity isn’t a problem to be solved, it’s part of the somewhat demented joy and the glaring and never-ending challenge of the process.

I really believe people have fundamentally different relationships to discomfort and that there are many different types, different levels of complainers. Those folks who despise density and those who crave and thrive on it. Those who would never—who think it’s crazy—to enter an extremely hot and humid room to exercise and those who can’t wait to go back in. I think the people who invite environmental attributes such as density, heat, and humidity might be more prone to seeing city life not merely as charming in theory, but the only way they feel like they can do life in practice.

It’s the difference between a little discomfort—a departure from what you’re used to—and real pain—which often feels like what many “expats” are expressing when they complain about how “inconvenient” life is in Italy, France, Spain, or wherever.

Do they realize how good they’ve got it?

I’m busy working my ass off to enjoy and keep this life as full and alive as possible. I don’t have the time or inclination to complain about what’s missing or go on a hunt for American food products.

People sometimes choose another country as though they’re accepting a new job. They compare the benefits, imagine the improved lifestyle, arrive expecting some form of onboarding, and then evaluate whether the “culture” suits them. If it doesn’t, they effectively write a Glassdoor review of Spain.

They fail to realize that Spain—or wherever they’re living—was a society already in progress before they arrived and it will remain a society in progress long after they leave.

That said, the standard cannot be that somebody should know exactly how moving will feel. Nobody can, and demanding this would make my argument unfair. But there’s considerable territory between knowing exactly how a move will feel and showing up with little more than a visa and a fantasy.

I’ve spent years thinking, talking, traveling, and writing our way toward Spain. I had spent decades studying cities and living in dense urban environments. After my wife and I visited and reflected, we knew exactly why we wanted Valencia, understood what we were giving up, and approached the move as an enhancement to an already good life—not a cure for a bad one. We researched the visa, taxes, housing, healthcare, and the basic machinery of daily life.

Emotionally, we understood wherever you go, there you are so thoroughly that it never really came up. That’s another one of those things people repeat when it’s really just…life. Moving wouldn’t eliminate anxiety, work pressure, missing people, or the ordinary difficulties of being alive.

None of that meant we knew exactly how Spain would feel. It meant we arrived with a strong basis for interpreting what happened once we got here. Preparation doesn’t eliminate culture shock, but it can keep you from misidentifying every surprise as a failure of the place—and help you differentiate between pain and discomfort.

The standard should be humility about causation: when something feels difficult, ask whether the problem is Spain, city life, culture shock, inadequate preparation, personal preference, or simply the ordinary anxiety that follows any enormous decision. Is it the routine discomfort of life anywhere at any time—or genuine pain caused by something place-specific?

Sometimes it really will be Spain. Cities and institutions don’t always do things well. People can be exclusionary. I’ve made criticisms about Valencia. But I investigate and compare what I’m seeing here to what I’ve seen before and how I’ve felt at those different points before deciding what the complaint proves.

None of this makes me immune from making the same mistake in reverse.

The fact that Trey’s comment made me feel like a dick probably means that, while criticizing the collective environment, I flattened some of the individuals inside it. If I turn my overwhelmingly positive experience into evidence that everybody struggling must be unprepared, ungrateful, or wrong, I’m doing a version of what I’m accusing them of doing.

Their culture shock isn’t Spain. My largely successful adjustment isn’t Spain either. They’re different experiences taking place inside Spain.

The responsibility isn’t to arrive with every feeling anticipated and the whole experience figured out. That’s not possible. It’s to remain clear about the difference between what you’re feeling and what you think caused it. And I consider it a responsibility to investigate whether the place actually produced those feelings—or merely provided the setting where you experienced them—before writing that Spain is isolating, dysfunctional, or inconvenient.

Because if you don’t, you’re merely contributing to unproductive folklore.

Your feelings are evidence of what you’re experiencing. They aren’t necessarily evidence of what caused it.

That isn’t an argument for writing less honestly. It’s an argument for writing more precisely.

Point taken, Trey. I don’t think the larger argument was wrong. But I’m glad you pointed out what was missing because it made me think harder about what I’m thinking and saying—which is another part of the larger point here.

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It reminds me of San Francisco—at least when I lived there, circa 1999 to 2006.

In both cities, laundromats have both washers and dryers. Every laundromat I’ve encountered in a decent-sized city in the United States, Canada, France, Italy, or Spain has had both—and I purposely only listed places where I have firsthand experience.

In San Francisco, I didn't have a washer (or dryer, obviously) in my apartment. And even if I had, I never had a suitable place to line dry my clothes.

In Central Los Angeles, where laundromats seem to outnumber bicycles, my wife had this now-legendary, but pretty lame portable washing machine that we'd have to awkwardly wheel out of the closet and hook up to the kitchen faucet, breaking the terms of our lease. We dried our clothes on a rack in front of a window. Sometimes they'd take more than 24 hours to dry.

It got to the point where it was just easier to go to the laundromat if we had more than a small load or if our landlord seemed suspicious.

In large cities in the US, in-unit washers and dryers are luxury amenities for many renters. They actually add to the cost of rent.

In urban Spain, you’ll typically find a washer in the kitchen or, as is the case in our apartment, inside a closet on the back terrace. We dry our clothes on plentiful outdoor clotheslines just like almost all of our neighbors.

In suburban or otherwise low-density, “apartment complex” type settings in the US, many people have a washer and dryer in their home. If not, they often throw their clothes in the backseat of their car and “do their laundry” at their parents’ house.

I'm merely detailing cultural and geographic differences. While I like to think I add at lrast a little something to the conversation, who really cares? The last thing we need is another person who moved talking about the way they do laundry in Spain. Like they got the idea to move from Good Housekeeping magazine.

Plus, I’m a little weird. I like doing laundry—and other household chores. I prefer doing the laundry here.

And pursuant to our conversation earlier this week—I think many people who lead with laundry and mindlessly repeat this myth that life in Spain—relative to the US—is inconvenient are suburbanites or low-density apartment complex dwellers.

Many of them only know the experience of having a washer and dryer in their home. They've never lived in a city where this isn't the norm. So they turn up in Spain—with noisy suitcases and white jeans—and say it's inconvenient when, in reality, it's just city life. In fact, doing your laundry in urban Spain tends to take fewer steps than doing it in the few American cities that still function relatively well as dense urban cores.

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After Tuesday’s post, a reader left the following comment:

On Notes, I replied with:

It’s incredibly unfortunate.

I’m doing my best to counter it.

I feel like I used to feel as an urban cyclist in the United States.

That last line has a dual meaning.

But the best introduction to what follows is that my instinctive reaction to a majority of the complaints I hear Americans make about life in Spain—particularly urban Spain—is:

Haven’t you ever lived in a city before?

More often than not, the answer is no—or they lived somewhere legally classified as a city, not in a genuinely dense urban environment.

As far as the urban cyclist analogy goes, in the move abroad discourse I feel like that one cyclist navigating through a sea of motorists who, if they even notice I’m there, treat me like an obstacle.

The second meaning goes deeper.

In both situations, the majority mistakes a system designed around its preferences for the natural—and righteous—order of things. Motorists don’t see the traffic lanes, parking spaces, signals, gas stations, drive-throughs, and public money required to position driving and make it feel like the natural way of life. They see the cyclist—the one person operating outside that system—as the obstacle that needs to stay out of the way.

The same thing happens in move-abroad discourse. Many Americans don’t see the physical, economic, and cultural machine required to make their version of convenience feel natural. They notice only when familiar components are missing, then treat that absence as a Spain-specific problem.

People no longer blink when Americans who have moved abroad hang onto their American tendencies and attitudes and brand their host country inconvenient. They say things about people and institutions—that they’re slow, they never respond, the bureaucracy is terrible—that are flat-out false and borderline offensive. Much of the audience accepts these claims as fact.

I think this shit slides because it has taken on a life of its own. People repeat what they hear because it sounds familiar, and familiarity easily passes for truth. Agreement also becomes a form of social desirability and currency—a form of belonging. Repeating the accepted complaints signals that you’ve been here long enough to understand what life in Spain is really like—even when you’re simply repeating something somebody else said.

The echo chamber spreads such nonsense, which quickly becomes folklore.

Spain is slow. Nobody responds. The bureaucracy is terrible. Nobody owns a dryer. Life is inconvenient.

After a while, nobody feels obligated to establish whether any of this is actually true. These have simply become the things people say. And when seemingly everybody says them, they must be true.

Repeat a claim often enough and somebody whose actual experience contradicts it starts wondering if they’re the crazy one. It can feel like being gaslit by the expat echo chamber—not because everybody is consciously lying, but because repetition has replaced evidence.

You can count 15 laundromats with dryers, watch Spanish institutions respond and act, and solve administrative problems in hours—only to be told that Spain has no dryers, nobody responds, and the bureaucracy doesn’t work.

So we’re reduced to hearing about how inconvenient life is—something these “expats” have had to “get used to”—alongside tutorials on getting visas, keeping your US phone number, and finding the one acceptable version of ranch dressing, peanut butter, or some other American junk food. The funny thing is that the exact products from back home are actually usually painfully easy to find and, when they aren’t, the local alternatives are almost always higher quality and taste better. (Four words in a row ending in -y is worth the price of a subscription.)

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But I’m not interested in repeating the same old tired lines so I can fit into this strange “expat” content community. I’m out here trying to counter the nonsense with some nuance.

I’m not trying to defend Spain from criticism. I complain all the time. I just want the complaint to be true—not presented as a uniquely Spanish problem.

That requires going several layers deeper than accepting Spain is inconvenient at face value. Who considers it inconvenient? Where did they live before? What did they expect? Are they actually describing Spain—or are they describing the discomfort of discovering that the suburban American way of organizing everyday life isn’t universal?

That seems to piss some people off. Fine. But there’s a difference between examining life abroad and producing another version of the same shallow content that created the folklore in the first place.

Laundry is only the easiest example.

Americans tend to turn ordinary Spanish city life into exotic spectacle. Eating dinner later, buying only what you need for the next day or two, hanging clothes outside, and stopping at several nearby shops aren’t quirky rituals performed for newcomers. They’re just life—really city life in many cities around the world where it still exists in its pure form. But move-abroad content packages lifestyle as a set of adorable novelties—or inconveniences one must bravely learn to tolerate.

And it sells because Americans come from a country that fetishizes simulations of urban life—places like Downtown Disney and sterile “main streets” you have to drive to.

The fixation on apartment size—often expressed as a complaint—exposes the suburban operating system. People want the historic neighborhood, balcony, market, cafés, and plazas, but judge the apartment against a home designed to contain everything privately: laundry room, storage, enormous refrigerator, garage, entertainment space. They want city life outside and suburbia inside—and bemoan not being able to fit all the shit they brought from the US in their closets, even though they claim on social media to have only moved with three suitcases and two backpacks.

Then there’s what actually makes an urban neighborhood great: nearly 24/7 activity. Not sensory stimulation for its own sake, but the sights, sounds, and smells of people living their lives in safe, looked-after, well-functioning urban neighborhoods. Cooking smells, constant bar and restaurant chatter, garbage trucks, delivery trucks, street cleaning, neighbors talking, people coming home late, and businesses preparing to open early and slamming their gates and recycling their bottles as they close late.

If all of that registers primarily as a defect rather than vibrancy, you must hate the sound of your own heartbeat. Urban activity—often starting around 6 a.m. and going strong to at least 2 a.m. (later on weekends and holidays) is evidence that the city is alive and well.

Many Americans move to Spain for “so much life,” then complain that life talks, cooks, smells, makes deliveries, and produces garbage. Density makes the city life people say they crave possible—from the walkability to the crowded terraces and abundant local commerce.

If you can’t get used to these things—if you constantly complain about them or treat them as weird, exotic, or defective—you don’t have a problem with Spain. You have a problem with cities—or, at minimum, a lack of familiarity with and experience in them.

There’s nothing wrong with preferring suburbia.

If you want a private laundry room, enormous refrigerator, extra storage, quiet street, and the ability to complete most daily tasks privately, go for it.

But don’t move to a dense Spanish neighborhood and turn the absence of that life into a national defect. The clotheslines, smaller apartments, daily shopping, smells, noise, deliveries, and garbage trucks aren’t evidence that Spain is charming until you actually have to live here.

Your reaction to these things might reveal that you don’t like cities nearly as much as you thought you did.

Maybe Spain isn’t inconvenient. Maybe you just prefer the suburbs.

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The problem turned out to be that I left one comment, so the algorithm bombarded my feed with more of the same, which tempted me to leave more comments. I did leave another comment on another article, promptly deleted it*, then was promptly blocked by the author. I deleted the second comment as I recalled that I do indeed have a longstanding Substack of my own and have been living in Spain—American attitude-free—for nearly two years.

I'm not one to leave comments unless they're wholly positive, encouraging, and in praise and support of consistently good work, which is why I comment regularly, for example, on ’s stuff. I'm also not one to give much of a shit about other people spewing nonsense. I took Billy Joel's advice in “Angry Young Man” and stopped getting into pointless social and political debates (leaving comments) a decade or so ago now.

But this is what I do for a living. It's what I've been doing for a living for the majority of my adult life—observing, reporting, and sometimes editorializing. I'm a professional writer, not an “expat” with a blog. And I have a sweet spot of resistance to people parroting the same things they've heard others say, leading these things to circulate freely and take on unchallenged lives of their own.

Because, left unchecked, we accept nonsense as fact and lead people down false and fruitless paths. If you're moving abroad and believe half of what you read, you're going in with an inaccurate view of what's about to be your reality. Because so much of what you're reading comes not only from an American perspective, but fully colored by a quintessentially American attitude. It’s akin to a strict diet of Fox News before you enter the voting booth.

You think you know so much—and you do—but it comes from one and only one very shallow perspective and way of seeing the world. However, the thing is that you’re not actually seeing the world. You’re merely maintaining your American perspective on a world that might as well consist of only the United States—minus large cities and college towns.

What blows my mind is that some—thankfully, not most—people who move abroad often fit this description almost, if not exactly to a tee. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to figure that one out.

What really bothered me this weekend was seeing—for the hundredth time—someone make the claim that life in Spain is “inconvenient” relative to the United States. You hear that all of the time—with things like dryers and fast food drive-throughs 100% guaranteed to enter the conversation. While that last part tells you about all you need to know, I’m going to tell you just a little bit more.

Then, we’ll chill with two new newsletter features—music that relates to what I just wrote and my attempt to translate some of what I wrote to Spanish without the help of technology or a book, or anything. The music part was inspired by a college professor who was a huge Dylan fan. He’d often begin or end—or stop in the middle of—class to ask if we just wanted to “chill” with a Dylan bootleg recording. And you know damn well that if we weren’t in that classroom we would’ve been chilling while passing a joint. The language thing is a feature I abandoned because—a year ago—I think it actually stunted my Spanish language learning progression.

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Americans love to trot out the inconvenience line. And let me tell you firsthand that it’s pure unadulterated bullshit.

We’ll tackle it from two different angles.

One, more concrete. The second, more abstract, but no less true. The unifying theme here is that difference—as in, different ways of doing things—doesn’t equal inconvenient.

Concretely, I deal regularly with both the Spanish tax agency and Social Security bureaucracies. Bureaucracy, stripped of the baggage we’ve attached to the word, is simply an administrative system managed through fixed rules, clear hierarchies, and standardized procedures. We have to get that out of the way because it directly relates to the issue at hand.

In the move abroad discourse that dominates online, Americans, Brits, and a few equally entitled others have turned bureaucracy into a bad word. You don’t have the right paperwork or you do something otherwise wrong and they don’t let you complete your task. That’s good bureaucracy in action. Often, it’s the system functioning exactly as advertised. Bad bureaucracy is opaque, arbitrary, unnecessarily slow, or practically impossible to navigate.

If you’ve ever dealt with the IRS in the United States, you know it’s slow and antiquated with many basic tasks only happening over the phone or through the mail over the span of weeks, if not months. I’m in the middle of one right now. Similar issues with Spain’s tax agency take between hours and days—in person or online. When I show up early to my in-person appointments with all of my requirements in hand, I often leave before my originally scheduled appointment time.

More abstractly, you can complete life’s tasks in many different ways. Because the way you’ve become accustomed to doing something feels easy to you doesn’t make it objectively more convenient. It’s more convenient for you, but not necessarily inconvenient.

I also suspect a lot of this starts when Americans move from suburban or otherwise low-density places — where they’ve adopted a warped definition of convenience— to urban Spain, then mistake their lack of experience with city life for evidence that the city itself is inconvenient.

It’s fine to be used to doing something a certain way. It doesn’t sit well to extrapolate your comfort with one way of doing something into the claim that another way is inherently inconvenient.

That’s the American attitude. You’ve lived and done things this way for so long that you can no longer distinguish between inconvenient and different. I know it’s all fun and games, particularly at the individual level. You can probably even joke with your Spanish friends about this stuff. Nobody cares.

But it becomes a problem when you and your expat friends all move abroad with the same attitude. That attitude quickly turns into a personality trait—and ultimately distorts and disrespects reality in the country you have graced with your presence and gives your home country a bad, but well-deserved name..

I circled around this in Sunday’s post and many others—but I’ve never really had an American attitude. At least not in this context. I have always thought that the prevailing way Americans do most things is kind of dumb. Most people don’t know that dumb has a ‘b.’ I’ve been rejecting many of these things—through my words, and whenever feasible, through my actions—since about 1999 when I moved to San Francisco and… you can read details in Sunday’s post.

So — needless to say — it should come as no surprise that moving to Spain didn’t suddenly make everything even slightly different feel weird or inconvenient to me. What continues to surprise me is why so many people decide to move with entrenched American attitudes they don’t even realize they carried with them across the border. As it turns out, it’s probably that very lack of self-awareness that gives us the answer we need to make better sense of this uniquely American attitude.

They don’t think they’re carrying an American attitude abroad. They think they’re simply describing reality.

And now, something quintessentially American—in the best of ways—for us to chill to.

En español—sin ayuda

First, the original English:

I read so many things this past weekend on Substack that illustrate the uniquely American inability to leave their attitude at the border that I almost went on a comment-leaving spree.

The problem turned out to be that I left one comment, so the algorithm bombarded my feed with more of the same, which tempted me to leave more comments. I did leave another comment on another article, promptly deleted it, then was promptly blocked by the author. I deleted the second comment as I recalled that I do indeed have a longstanding Substack of my own and have been living in Spain—American attitude-free—for nearly two years.

I'm not one to leave comments unless they're wholly positive, encouraging, and in praise and support of consistently good work, which is why I comment regularly, for example, on Kevin Alexander’s stuff. I'm also not one to give much of a shit about other people spewing nonsense. I took Billy Joel's advice in “Angry Young Man” and stopped getting into pointless social and political debates (leaving comments) a decade or so ago now.

And now my attempt—without technology, a dictionary, a book, or anything else:

Leí muchas cosas de Substack el fin de semana pasado que descubrieron the uniquely American inability dejar su actitudes a la frontera que casi dejé tantos comentarios.

El problema era que dejé un comentario, así que el algorithm saturado mi feed con más de el mismo y tempted me dejar más comentarios. Dejé otro comentario en otro articulo, pero lo borré de inmediato y luego el autor me bloqueo. Borré el comentario segundo cuando recordé que tengo un Substack a mismo de largo tiempo y he estado vivido en España—sin actitud de Americano—por casi dos años.

No dejo comentarios a menos que son totalmente positivos, inspirados, y de apoyo de consecuentemente buen trabajo. Por eso, dejo comentarios con frecuencia, por ejemplo, en las obras de Kevin Alexander. También, me da igual una mierda de otras personas spewing tonterías. Tomé el consejo de Billy Joel en la canción de “Angry Young Man” and paró teniendo debates de política y social sin un punto (dejando comentarios) hace una década, más o menos.

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Ever since, I’ve been thinking about acquiring my Canadian passport. And—this month—encouraged by geopolitical events, primarily European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s proposal that Canada become the EU’s first associate member—I filled out the form and gathered everything I need for my application. I’ll send it off to the Canadian Embassy in Madrid before the end of the month.

When I was a teenager, all I knew was that my father was born in Toronto and moved to the United States when he was six months old. I was born and lived in Niagara Falls, NY—right on the US-Canada border—until the spring before my 20th birthday. So we visited often.

Plus, my grandmother was a Toronto Maple Leafs fan and my grandfather was a Montreal Canadiens fan. How that happened—I still don’t know. But both of them harbored a deep hatred for the Buffalo Sabres—and, really, all Buffalo sports teams. Especially my grandmother—who was always my favorite, so I sided with her as a child and became a “die-hard” Leafs fan.

The thing about hockey in Canada is that it’s a deep and meaningful part of the culture. It’s not enough to compare hockey in Canada to baseball in the United States or the Saturday night ritual Hockey Night in Canada to Monday Night Football.

In the United States, sports feel more like pastimes and passions for a nation with nothing better to do. In Canada, hockey might as well not even be a sport—it’s a cultural institution. Or at least it was when I was paying attention. Over the last decade, I’ve pretty much lost touch with that aspect of the nation.

It’s truly if you know, you know type stuff.

Tying things together, my first memories of fully feeling the energy of a city were in Toronto. Once in 1998 when I came to town for Ontario-born Wayne Gretzky’s final game at Maple Leaf Gardens as a member of the New York Rangers. And again—a few months later—for the final game ever at Maple Leaf Gardens. I was in my early 20s then—and that’s when I think I connected the dots for the first time.

On childhood visits to Toronto—and, to a lesser extent, Buffalo—I was always intrigued by the city. But it was akin to visiting outer space. There was never even a thought that we’d live in a place like that, rendering those who did alien others. But—somewhere in my preteen and teenager brain, I knew that these were people producing an energy I couldn’t quite begin to understand.

Shortly after those Toronto visits, I was about to experience Boston. I went there for work—for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game—in July 1999. For the week I was there I couldn’t get enough of that city. Long story short, I ended up moving to San Francisco in September 1999 after ending a temporary gig at a sports radio network in Las Vegas.

The first time I walked in the cold fog on a summer night in San Francisco, I caught the city bug and I knew I’d live in a place like that—or, at least, hack it as needed—for the rest of my life. I fell so hard that I decided to take up urban studies at San Francisco State University. Lots of long stories to keep short—plus, you have access to all of them in the archives if you’re a paid subscriber—but I spent about eight years taking college seriously. I was conducting original research on cities, publishing it—twice—in peer-reviewed academic journals, and presenting at conferences.

That’s from a 2006 conference in Montreal.

No coincidence. Being in Canada—as I was about to head to graduate school—connected even more dots that had been coming into focus for years.

A unifying theme in my urban planning studies was that European cities were better—by objective planning measures and from most quality of life perspectives—than American cities. I’d never been, but felt pretty confident that—with experience—this is what I’d come to discover.

I didn’t make it to Europe until 2022—at 46—but the second I set foot in Rome, I knew I hadn’t been misled by my professors and what I was reading. Shortly after that trip—and a couple others—my wife and I decided to move to Valencia, Spain.

We’ve been here for nearly two years.

I knew I belonged in Europe not only because the cities are better—though that’s a big part of it—but because of something I heard an American woman who lives in Norway say the other day on ’s YouTube channel, as articulated by Joe in this video:

Gabriella hit on something there that really resonates with me as a fellow American immigrant to Europe.

I too was drawn by what I perceived as a kind of Pan-European spirit and the values that come with that. And it’s interesting running this channel because I interact with people who both see and celebrate that and those who think I’m a dumb American because I’ll talk about Europe as a single place…

But generally speaking, Europe is a place that despite current events, mostly celebrates its diversity, its social welfare systems that help protect people and honors their history by preserving the walkable cores of their cities instead of leveling it all for another parking lot.

And—focusing on current events—Canada, along with Spain, is exemplifying these values. Despite the typical fits and starts, Canada always has.

In many ways, Canada doesn’t feel like a different country when you visit from the United States. However, as we’re seeing now, Canada more closely resembles the social democracies that tend to prevail in a significant number of European nations. These shared commitments help create—with inherent fragility—the “Pan-European spirit” Joe describes.

Canadian pride and patriotism are real; they’re not a marketing pitch or indoctrination tactic like in the United States. When you tell Americans to “buy American” you’re just giving them another bumper sticker to deface an already soulless Walmart parking lot.

When Canadians come under attack, they respond, as we watch American isolationism and abject foolishness backfire in real time.

The response has been more than rhetorical.

Canadian travel to the United States fell 22% in 2025. After several provinces removed American liquor from store shelves, sales of U.S. spirits fell 66.3% within the first couple months of the boycott.

These and other data reflect what actual national unity looks like. Not every Canadian made the same choice for precisely the same reason. But enough people—and their governments—moved in the same direction to produce real economic consequences, not another marketing campaign or bumper sticker.

Could you imagine Americans doing anything even close in magnitude?

What has happened between the United States and Canada—and now between Canada and the European Union—didn’t create any of this for me. It reinvigorated something that has been a going concern for most of my life.

Whatever ultimately becomes of the still-undefined possibility of a closer formal relationship between Canada and the European Union, it didn’t suddenly make me Canadian. Legally, I already am—and the affinity has been there since I was 15. It made something I’ve felt for decades newly relevant and finally pushed me to turn my citizenship certificate into a passport.

Europe didn’t create the other major through line in my life either. It didn’t make me love cities or become skeptical of the way the United States organizes everyday life. It gave me more experience, better reference points, a wider and better-informed perspective, and daily contact with the things I’ve spent more than 30 years obsessing over, studying, and trying to understand.

Look again at the conference program from Montreal.

In 2006—when I was 30—I presented research titled Sense of Community and the Urban Environment in San Francisco. That title could almost serve as a description of the work I’m doing today.

Canada. Cities. Community. San Francisco. Nearly 20 years before we moved to Spain, these weren’t disconnected interests I would eventually turn into a story. They were already defining elements—even if I couldn’t yet see how clearly they were connected or where they would take me.

I didn’t stumble into what I’m doing or where I’m at today as part of some bandwagon hop.

I didn’t move to Europe and then work backward into a set of beliefs that made the decision look smart. Spain isn’t the origin—it’s just a logical next chapter that continues to produce long stories to make short or—when time permits—to keep long.

The same applies to my Canadian passport. It won’t create my connection to Canada any more than living in Valencia created my love for cities. Both give tangible form to things that were already there.

Most of what you believe at 15, 20, or 25—or even 45—fades. Some of it should. But when a few core convictions survive education, work, relationships, moves, contradictions, and decades of additional experience—and come into clearer focus along the way—they’re telling you something that’s just… cool and fulfilling.

At 51, recognizing this feels pretty special.

Not because it proves I was right all along. I’ve changed my mind about plenty and will continue doing so. It’s special because I can look back and identify themes that endured, evolved, and ultimately helped me build the life I’m living today.

And that makes me even more eager about what comes next.

I want to do as much as possible with the next 51 years. If I’m lucky enough to look back on them when I’m 102—when the end will, unfortunately, be a hell of a lot closer—I hope I see another collection of beliefs, experiences, and decisions that sustained one another and came into focus over time.

At 51, I’m celebrating that I’m still excited to see what the things I believe today will become over the next 51 years.

Trader Joe’s quietly papers over a storefront in Valencia—not Barcelona or Paris because those cities are too obvious. It only tells people who need to know what they’re working on—and those who need to know sign ironclad NDAs. I really think—if done right—they could keep the cat in the bag.

One morning, the paper comes down and—without any warning whatsoever—Trader Joe’s opens on a busy corner in the heart of urban Spain. Within hours the place would be packed—a viral sensation with a line spanning a block or more.

It almost makes too much sense if you occupy that orbit and like or love Trader Joe’s.

There are no Trader Joe’s stores in Spain—or anywhere else in Europe. But the bags are everywhere.

So my idea comes back to me every time I see a person carrying a Trader Joe’s tote in Europe. I see them weekly in Valencia. And I saw them regularly on recent visits to Barcelona and Paris.

While there’s no doubt I’d visit Trader Joe’s once the spectacle died down, you’d be about as likely to find me shopping there as you would be to see me with a Trader Joe’s tote slung over my shoulder.

In a forthcoming article about baseline standards of quality in Spain, I write:

Sometimes we’ve even seen people turn their noses up when produce comes from the supermarket rather than the municipal market or a local frutería (which, typically, sells fruits and vegetables).

I could go on. But suffice to say many people here have standards that can come off like complaining. Or even, in some cases, pretentiousness.

As an American, it has taken me a minute to make sense of this. I guess I had to live the experience enough to not only understand it, but to recognize some of the same instinct in myself.

Now that I do, it’s clear that the food didn’t suddenly get worse — my baseline got better. What once felt exceptional — relative to where I’m from — became normal.

Trader Joe’s is a prime example.

It’s a classic illustration of, as I also write in the article—“When you’re forced to constantly settle, you’ll take shitty avocados and poor excuses for bike lanes all day long.”

When I lived in the United States, Trader Joe’s looked good if I was willing to look past—and, obviously, I was—the excessive packaging, products produced and presented white label courtesy of large American conglomerates, and shitty avocados. Plus, the fact that—even in the heart of Central Los Angeles—it was the saner and more logical choice to drive rather than walk to your “neighborhood TJ’s,” as the company calls it.

Unless you live within a few blocks of Trader Joe’s in most of LA, it’s a nervous-system-rattling pain in the ass to arrive on foot. This is the case throughout much, if not most of America.

People who live outside of LA’s core or in some other far-flung suburban or otherwise low-density environment have it bad, as I chronicled in 2024 before we moved to Spain.

As we drove back from the beach and decided — on the fly in our car — to “stop” at Trader Joe’s, we found ourselves in an inane mess of classic car dependency, waiting to do a u-turn around a median to get to the store just across the street.

So I issued a challenge to my wife:

I bet it will take less time for you to jump out of the car, cross the street, get what we need at Trader Joe’s and come out than it will for us to take our turn at the left turn arrow, make a u-turn, park and go in.

So, she got out of the car so we could test my assumption.

The point of the article wasn’t really Trader Joe’s.

I used that ridiculous experiment to illustrate how car dependency can make something physically close so absurdly far away. The store sat within spitting distance. Yet, while I waited for the arrow, made the u-turn, and parked, my wife crossed the street, bought two bags of stuff, and was walking out by the time I arrived.

It’s comical—an abject failure of urban planning made possible by the raging success of American indoctrination, packaged and exported for international consumption.

That’s what I mean when I say Trader Joe’s might work better inside the kind of city America stopped building. Unless you’re in a handful of still-functioning urban environments in the U.S., the idea that anything is your “neighborhood” store is little more than marketing nostalgia. Trader Joe’s could stock virtually the same store in Valencia, but the surrounding environment would transform the experience before Trader Joe’s changed a single product.

That said, Trader Joe’s might need to change a lot to thrive in a place like Spain. While I can see the store catching on—with some locals, but particularly with Americans who just can’t let go of “home” and self-soothe with symbolic gestures like ranch dressing and Philly cream cheese—a European venture also risks an outcome dangerously close to Domino’s failure in Italy.

Just as you have to have something seriously wrong with you to eat Domino’s pizza in Italy, you’d have to be equally nonsensical to buy even one tomato or avocado at Trader Joe’s given the multitude of local and far superior options. We have enough American chains littering the landscape here—my number one complaint about Europe—and Trader Joe’s probably wouldn’t be any different.

It would become just another tourist attraction. With well-placed signage or branding—another selfie destination.

And Trader Joe’s sure isn’t going to tell me what the lady at my favorite fruit and vegetable vendor in the market told me the other morning: We don’t have lettuce today because it didn’t look good this morning.

That’s reason enough to kill my own idea.

No matter what it did, Trader Joe’s would still be trying to scale and standardize a version of neighborhood shopping in a place where the real thing remains alive and well.

So Trader Joe’s shouldn’t secretly open in Spain after all.

The frenzy would be real. But once the spectacle passed, Spain would be left with another American chain occupying space in a place that already does much of what Trader Joe’s approximates—for real and better.

European cities are far from perfect. But across much of the continent, the larger movement is toward fewer cars, more public space, stronger neighborhood life, and higher standards for ordinary daily life. Despite setbacks and outliers, much of Europe is doubling down on what works from an urban planning perspective. So much of this is simply public policy meets urban planning.

The current trajectory—when European cities are at their best or getting better—is away from American influence, not toward it.

The United States should be importing concepts and lessons from European cities, not the other all-too-typical way around.

Trader Joe’s has built a business selling Americans a Disneyland version of neighborhood life. In Valencia, I can walk downstairs and live it.

Seeing the tote bags here and there is enough.

Part of the reason why it’s so bad is because the nation has failed to properly define the term, opting to confound it with the runaway American dream.

I know because — once upon a time — I was one of the Americans who believed the myth. And now — living in Europe for nearly two years — I’m experiencing something completely different. But it’s not simply that quality of life is better here — in Spain and other parts of the continent.

Even without the comparison cases, America trained people to accept what much of the world would consider an unacceptable baseline of daily life.

The key components of the American way directly contribute to the cold hard reality that the US is going backwards while other nations around the world have seen the writing on the wall and are acting accordingly.

That’s what this article is about. How one thing — sadly, the centerpiece of American life — gave the country a perverted sense of what it means to live a good life.

I didn’t move to Europe and suddenly decide car dependency degraded American life. Moving to San Francisco in 1999, studying urban planning, living in Los Angeles, traveling, and eventually moving abroad shaped that worldview over decades.

What Europe changed was my perspective. The more time I’ve spent in places where everyday life isn’t organized around the automobile, the more clearly I can see what Americans have been trained to tolerate.

Car dependency is one of the clearest examples of how government policy, corporate interests, and American culture conditioned people to ignore and even proudly reject the ingredients for high quality of life. Reliance on the automobile — and the suburban development it enabled — helped put the United States in the mess it’s in.

Important side note: I was going to cite surveys showing that actual Americans think quality of life is declining or at all-time lows, but then I stopped. Because the core problem is that many people in the country have a warped sense of what quality of life is in the first place:

Quality of life is infrastructure.

It’s geography, transportation, housing, and public space.

It’s how difficult ordinary life feels on an average Tuesday.

A disturbing segment of the country still measures quality of life on the basis of how “nice” their car is or how isolated their home is from the city.

And that’s really the problem. For decades, politicians and citizens — on both sides of the so-called aisle — have really only been able to agree on one thing almost unanimously. And that’s that it’s a good idea to perpetuate a car-dependent, suburban existence as the country’s majority identity.

This national consensus on suburbia and/or the private motor vehicle — the one thing it seems Americans can come together on — hasn’t worked out so well.

The United States has fallen 14 places in the global Social Progress Index since 2011, declining in rank across every component the index measures. The EU passed it in 2019. Meanwhile, in The Wharton School’s 2026 Best Countries Index, European nations represent 20 of the top 30 countries on the quality of life metric. At 27th overall, the US is lowest among all G7 nations.

America remains extraordinarily rich. It’s simply getting less quality of life for the money.

In these conversations, many Americans like to bring up exceptions. That sort of misses the point.

I’m not arguing that there aren’t places where you can enjoy life in the United States. My life in California wasn’t hell; in fact, it was quite the opposite. In big cities and small towns, you can find and settle into your groove.

However, even in these places, the baseline quality of life is objectively lower across multiple measures than it is in many other parts of the world, particularly across Europe. Focusing on exceptions ignores the reality that when you prioritize cars—even in cities that also have relatively good public transit, walking, and cycling infrastructure—you create a wrapper around daily life that automatically degrades collective well-being.

The worst part about where the nation is at now is that — for decades — loads of smart people have been sketching the writing on the wall. They sounded alarm bells and not enough people — decision-makers or large swaths of the citizenry — cared, listened, or did anything meaningful about it.

The social-political environment has gotten so bad that when a candidate runs on ideas such as free public transportation, clean energy, or a living wage they’re branded by many as “communist” or an enemy of the state. What has happened to people that they go along with such self-sabotaging nonsense?

The alarm bells rang — and are ringing — in a ton of areas. I can’t discuss them all in one Medium article so I chose to focus on one of the areas I know and care most about — the automobile.

Car dependency taught Americans that it’s perfectly normal for a three-mile trip to require 20 minutes and be a sedentary pain in the ass. It taught parents that children shouldn’t be able to get around independently until they “get their license.” It taught older people that losing the ability to drive can mean losing access to a vibrant and fulfilling life. It taught us that streets can be hostile, neighborhoods can be dead, and seeing another person requires an appointment and complicated transportation.

It taught us to accept tens of thousands of traffic deaths every year as non-negotiable cost of the American way. The automobile not only changed how most Americans get around, it changed what they’re expected and — unfortunately — willing to tolerate.

And then Americans started spending enormous amounts of money trying to replace what this form of development stripped away with bigger houses, bigger yards, home entertainment, home gyms, delivery services, second cars — private solutions to a public environment increasingly incapable of making ordinary life worth bragging about.

That’s why the rest of the world should pay attention. The tragedy isn’t as simple as The United States chose cars. Cars are useful. Even though I don’t have a driver’s license, I still use them several times a year.

What’s tragic is that America organized life around needing a car — and then spent generations mistaking the consequences for prosperity.

Eventually, a degraded quality of life stops feeling degraded when it’s the only one you know.

It goes a long way to illustrating what I mean when I say I don’t believe in the honeymoon period in the way most of the world attaches it to moving abroad or doing other big things. I think many people accept the honeymoon period as fact because it’s an easy way for them to burst your bubble.

Well, you’re excited now, but that’s your emotion and excitement talking. Just wait until real life starts!

We’ve both been soberly assessing and anticipating every step of the process of making this move. Assessing the moments as we live them — after 19 months in Valencia — and anticipating what would come next and how it might feel.

For me, a constant has been a rejection of the typical way people frame the honeymoon period — which leads us to my thoughts from 2024:

I also feel like we have already lived the so-called honeymoon period and will hit the ground running (and living) right away in Spain…

Time has a way of creating certainty or leading you to realize that you really don’t want to do something as bad as you thought you did after all. Giving yourself time and space between making a decision you can still change and the point where you can’t or would have a harder time turning back is probably a good idea…

Time has mellowed out the excitement from post-vacation euphoria — which feels great so there’s no reason to suppress it — to something decidedly practical. To the notion that as much as we’re changing our lives, we’re really just enhancing — upgrading — our existing lifestyle and — subsequently — our quality of life.

Put another way, the more euphoria-like excitement came and went with the decision to move in the first place.

We didn’t move to experience a rush.

We moved to continue doing life in a place where we recognized the advantages immediately because we knew the environment we were leaving. Because that’s pretty much all we had to concretely compare it to — that and our accumulated knowledge of places, how they make us feel, and how we operated inside of them.

This is the critical part for anybody considering a move abroad or any other decision where people like to say the novelty will wear off. Such as retirement, starting a new job, or even — to reluctantly use another well-traveled phrase — following your passion.

Within the context of moving — 

You arrive. Really, you know very little. All you have are your recent reference points. For us that was the United States and, specifically, Los Angeles. Then as that reference point fades and you accumulate experience and time on the ground in your new place, you know more and build new baseline reference points. So you start to expect more from your environment, especially when you see and experience what exists in your environment relative to what you see happening elsewhere as part of your accumulation of new experiences.

So, for me, part of that is seeing what Barcelona and Paris have done from an urban planning perspective and comparing them to similar things Valencia has done — or stopped doing thanks to a political shift to the right.

If you subscribe to the conventional honeymoon narrative, you might interpret any criticism of Valencia as evidence that my original enthusiasm was naïve. But recognizing that this city has work to do doesn’t negate any of the reasons why I love living here.

Just because it’s better as a city from urban planning, quality of life, and other standpoints than what you’re likely to find throughout most of the United States doesn’t mean it’s without problems or progress to make.

As time creates more space between where you came from (LA) and where you are now (Valencia), and you have new and diverse experiences (day-to-day living, seeing other places for the first time or from fresh perspectives), your old reference point fades.

Somewhere around this juncture, I stopped comparing Valencia to Los Angeles and Spain to the United States as much as I used to. I changed my baseline because my field of vision and experience expanded.

So I “complain” about things here more now. That’s not the part of the honeymoon narrative I reject. The recalibration is real.

It’s a recalibration in which ‘better than the United States’ stops being a sufficient or helpful standard. When you see how things are done elsewhere in relation to where you came from, hopefully you evolve to expecting the place you live in now to meet its own possibilities. You don’t sit around the table with other “expats” bemoaning “bureaucracy,” complaining because the clerk didn’t speak English, or noting where you can find Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

Your life exists in your new setting.

You see Valencia’s incredible bicycle infrastructure. Then you see that progress stunted at the same time as you witness more great strides in Barcelona and Paris. Criticism becomes something you contribute as one type of insider, not commentary delivered from an outside perspective living in the past that has very little to do with the present.

You know you’re becoming part of a place when you stop treating its problems as local color and start caring whether they get fixed.

To me, this is integration.

It’s not the moment when everything feels completely familiar — because it still doesn’t. It’s the moment when you start to feel like you have a dog in the fight because you’re walking and riding your bike on these streets and sitting in these plazas and supporting these local businesses. And doing this life right here and right now.

When my wife read an early version of this, she told me I was basically describing the end of the honeymoon period while insisting I don’t believe in it.

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Except she was out of context.

Not in uniform, she was pushing a stroller with—presumably—her child inside.

We both did a double take and exchanged a quick greeting in passing.

I'm not about to create a story for this woman. I don't know where she lives or how she views her place in the community. I don't even know for sure if that was her kid.

But I can make the observation that it's pretty fucking cool to have your mail carrier acknowledge you when they’re not working. Little things like that combine to make a place feel like a neighborhood. And, because of the weak ties I've established in our neighborhood, I have this type of “relationship” with a couple dozen people—maybe more.

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It’s not as if people argue with you when you speak with them or criticize your decision. But there’s absolutely something happening beneath the surface in many of the conversations you have after moving abroad.

The questions stop. Not just about your new home, but about you — about things that would’ve invited follow-ups and check-ins if you were still living in the U.S.

Not everyone does this. And the ones who do don’t do it all at once.

Some people move on from you because that’s what people do — it’s expected. Friends become acquaintances. Acquaintances become people you used to know. Distance does what distance does.

This makes sense, but only to a certain extent.

Because, in my experience, having left home in 1995 — on the verge of 20 — I spent the next 30 years of my life living away from home. During this time, my relationship to family and friends changed in many ways, but — at its core — it largely stayed the same.

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Moving abroad appears to have changed everything

I’m an overthinker. So this might be an unfair example, but it keeps bothering me.

The other day, I mentioned to someone close to me that I hurt my back in an exercise class and was taking it easy for a few days. Normally, this would have triggered a follow-up call the next day. Instead, nothing — not even follow-up questions on the call where I mentioned my back.

It could be that they’re simply dealing with their own life, as all of us are. It could also be that they still measure proximity in miles even though we live in a world where actual physical distance matters less.

In their mind, because I’m farther away, I’m further away.

It’s a small thing. But it fits a pattern. When I call, the response almost feels like —oh, it’s you, calling from that life over there. The one who left, then left again.

When you don’t choose the life people expected for you, they don’t always know what to do with your experience.

I felt this type of thing long before I moved to Spain.

Working-class Gen X kids might get it.

The people around you rooted for your success. Your parents wanted you to do better than they did — which, as it turns out, was probably more like do exactly what they did.

What everybody really wanted for you was to go out into the world, then come back, and replicate their success by living the American dream in your hometown or within easy driving or flying distance.

They wanted a trophy to place safely on the mantle — a badge of honor and affirmation. They wanted you to go out into the world, but not so far that your life stopped validating theirs.

So it’s not merely the act of moving abroad. That’s the lens only because my wife and I moved to Spain nearly two years ago. Right now, it’s particularly relevant to my life and work.

For many of us who veered from the script, abroad might as well be California if you grew up in the South, Midwest, or Northeast.

Or pursuing an advanced degree. Or reading a book. Or eating sushi.

Anything that challenges the assumptions people inherited and the experiences they’re comfortable with because they’ve never had much reason to question them.

This is not some conscious thing. In fact, the subtlety is the point.

Although I heard close variations of this shortly after I left home as a young adult, nobody has to say, you think you’re better than us now. The feeling comes through when they stop asking what daily life is actually like.

At some point, to them, even ordinary details start to sound like criticism: that I don’t need a car because I walk or bike everywhere. That public life here actually exists — and happens naturally, day and night, without the same need to look over your shoulder. That so many things Americans treat as inevitable — daily hostility, isolation, low-quality food, dead streets, the exhaustion of getting anywhere — feel far less inevitable after you live somewhere else.

This isn’t bragging — it’s just the illustration of a new baseline, a new reality on quality of life that many Americans have trouble processing. Even the ones who “get it” — the ones who travel and think the United States needs to change — often discount what you’re saying as if you’re exaggerating. When they encounter what you’re relaying firsthand — on vacation — they often instinctively characterize it as “weird,” rather than different.

The general attitude feels something like: it’s great that you’re seeing the world and experiencing a different way of living — as long as you don’t come back with empirical conclusions.

I don’t feel especially wounded that some people don’t know what to do with the fact that my wife and I moved to another country.

I expected this — and even experienced it before we left.

A full life costs you things.

Proximity, familiarity, and the comfort of being easily understood might be the top three. But I’ve never been willing to trade a fuller life for geographic closeness, routine, and the same conversations forever.

I left because I wanted more life, not less.

And part of wanting more life is accepting that not everybody will be fully onboard, let alone curious.

That’s fine.

Getting the most out of the years I have on this planet was always going to require tradeoffs — sometimes uncomfortable ones.

If that sounds like criticism to some people, I can live with that.

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I think this helps explain a certain defensiveness among people who write about moving abroad.

Even as I sat down to write this, I felt a twinge of discomfort. Simply because I’m sharing my thoughts and feelings as they exist from moment to moment. But we’re all so worried about what others think—how they’ll perceive us—that we don’t express what’s happening as it’s happening.

Moving to another country—or doing similarly big things in life—contains an incredible amount of emotional complexity. I’m sure retirement does as well, particularly if you left a job you’d been at for a long period of time. You’re happy you left and you sure as hell don’t want to go back, but as you navigate your new life, you grieve the one you lost—at least a little.

Right there—again—I hesitated a second to even write that part.

That said—and this isn’t a qualification or a walk back—I have zero desire to return to the United States. In fact, I literally can’t even imagine it. I could see myself living elsewhere in Europe—maybe even some place else in the world—but the US isn’t on the list.

After experiencing our well-designed and unabashed urban neighborhood here in Valencia, anything but the equivalent or better would be a letdown. While you might find fewer cars and more bikes in places like Paris, from a day-to-day flow, public life and public space standpoint, it doesn’t get much better than the core of Russafa.

Bottom line—we like to think we have it all figured out, even if we say we don’t. This is part of why true emotional complexity rarely enters the move abroad conversation. And it’s also part of why move abroad content tends to get stuck in the how to do this and that and five things I miss, love, or hate mode and never leaves, leading to a sea of all of the same content with little variation.

Most people would rather be number 1,045 in line to tell you how to get the digital nomad visa or among the thousands who say they can’t find ranch dressing only to be told repeatedly in the comments section exactly where they can find it than talk about the stuff that matters and might actually help prepare other people for their move.

Maybe “rather” is the wrong word, but that’s where the vast majority of content creators get stuck—in the safe spaces—because any complexity at least can feel like it gets converted into a verdict.

That’s the part I’m interested in.

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But, after 49.5 years in the United States—the final 25 or so in California—I escaped.

At the time it mostly didn’t feel like escape. It felt like an upgrade on daily life that my wife and I were in the position—that we were lucky enough—to make.

After nearly two years in Spain, it still feels like an economy-to-premium cabin upgrade, but escape describes the move better now than it did before.

I’ve spent enough time living in Valencia and seeing other European cities to more completely understand just how much American cities lack on infrastructure, social policy, public space, proximity, convenience, vibrancy—which, taken together, is quality of life.

Even against this backdrop, I can’t shake a few key points about America.

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For several months, the bench in front of our apartment was not bolted into the ground. This had been the case since March when the falleros on our block unbolted it in preparation for Las Fallas celebration and never bolted it back in.

Sort of annoying, but ultimately no big deal.

Because the bench was in need of some love—and, in my opinion, needed to be replaced—I decided to do something I've never done before in my life (that I can recall): I sent a letter (via email, er, actually, an online form) to City Hall.

I'm actually sitting on the bench as I write this. It's not new, but it is bolted to the ground again with its arms and legs repainted. The city requested images by email the day after my complaint. Two or three weeks later, it acted.

In the past, I never would've complained. It was a mix of not wanting to be that person (I didn’t go into urban planning because of those people) and being conditioned in California to believe that the cities where I lived—San Francisco and LA—would’ve laughed at me as they ignored me. Whether or not that’s true should be left an open question. If I’m going to rail on people stereotyping places like Spain with little, if any experience, I probably shouldn’t do likewise in reverse.

That said—I know what I know.

Quality of life, particularly in Los Angeles, became so low during my tenure there that I didn’t have it in me to complain. In LA—and in other parts of the US—much of the disrepair and interpersonal public hostility reflects segments of society that have simply given up.

Toward the end of our run there, Los Angeles felt more every man, woman, and child for themselves than ever. Everything from people running red lights long after the signal change and thoughtlessly turning into crosswalks to trash all over the streets amid scant maintenance and crumbling infrastructure illustrated a top-to-bottom failure of government and society. It’s a wonder that the place still managed to not be the absolute hellhole the American right attempts to portray it as.

That’s the crazy thing about American cities these days—they’re bad, but they’re not nearly as bad as Fox News makes them out to be. It’s unfortunate that straddling the middle ground as I do seems to give the right more ammunition, but seldom results in actual change from people who might actually give a genuine damn about cities.

And that’s really the thing—in Europe, there’s still respect for cities. Even though many people here aspire to the suburbs, there has not been systematic disinvestment in the center. In dozens, if not hundreds of cities across the continent, the infrastructure is above average or considerably better, the innovation is so good it bewilders many Americans, and there’s a vibrancy in the air and a sense of safety on the streets that I seldom experienced in the United States.

Maybe that explains a significant part of the reason why I complained and why the city responded.

Integration after you move abroad might be at least partly that simple. You stop treating public space as scenery and start acting as though you have a stake in what happens to it.

The bench is still old with some graffiti. But I’m sitting on it now, and it doesn’t move.

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We’re planning to make our way through Spain’s north entirely by train, then fly back to Valencia from our final stop. A Coruña is one possibility, so I checked whether there’s a direct flight between the two cities.

I expected to find that an airline had decided there was sufficient demand for a direct flight. Instead, I found a public procurement process intended to help create or secure that demand.

The public debate about tourism usually begins when somebody steps off a plane.

But the story begins before the route exists.

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The municipal Tourism and Congress Consortium in A Coruña has tendered five route-linked tourism-promotion contracts. Bidding closes August 21.

In practical terms, the government is offering public financial support to attract airlines to the city. That’s not unusual, but it is intriguing amid the persistent focus on overtourism throughout Europe, particularly in Spain.

The base budget is €4.93 million through 2029 and can reach €6.62 million if extended through 2030. The routes are Málaga, Valencia, Bilbao, Sevilla, and Alicante.

The Valencia portion requires 208 annual flights and at least 37,440 available seats, with spending capped at €302,500 annually. Across all five routes, the tender seeks approximately 186,000 seats initially and more than 203,000 in later years. Those are two-way seats, not 203,000 incoming tourists.

Legally, these are tourism-promotion and connectivity contracts—not straightforward payments for individual passengers. But the promotion and the flights are inseparable.

Winning airlines must operate specified routes with specified frequencies and capacity while advertising A Coruña through their websites, search engines, social media, newsletters, aircraft, and airports. They must also provide seats for media and tourism-industry familiarization trips.

A Coruña isn’t literally buying airline tickets. But it is buying tourism promotion from airlines on the condition that those airlines operate the routes the city wants.

No route, no contract. It’s all aboveboard and regulated by the European Commission aviation-aid framework.

For some context, low-cost carrier Volotea stopped flying from A Coruña to Valencia and Málaga in April after its previous municipal agreement ended. The airline wanted to continue negotiating; the mayor said the airlines’ financial demands were unaffordable.

Several months later, the city introduced this new tender to restore those routes.

Like most Spanish cities, A Coruña has talked about “quality” and sustainable tourism. It began charging a tourist tax in September 2025 because officials said increasing hotel occupancy, cruises, and visitor numbers were creating additional costs and “massification” in some neighborhoods.

Yet the city also calls tourism crucial for employment and wealth and is now explicitly trying to increase its attractiveness and accessibility.

That’s an economic reality that I don’t think even the most hardcore activists would deny. The friction begins when cities aggressively expand tourist access—often through low-cost airlines—then treat the resulting volume and behavior as though they developed independently of those choices.

A Coruña says tourist-tax revenue can support services, preservation—and the promotion and development of sustainable tourism. But the stated policy reveals that the tax is intended to manage and support tourism, not discourage it.

During the tax’s first three months, A Coruña collected more than €400,000 while overnight stays rose more than 14 percent. The city presented the increase as evidence that the tax had not hurt tourism.

Of course, it didn’t.

In my experience, tourist taxes feel like pesky but acceptable add-on fees. My wife and I paid them on recent trips to Barcelona and Granada—just like any other tourists, including Spaniards.

They’re not going to stop a trip, particularly if you’re getting a “deal” to fly between cities on low-cost airlines.

For the record, we took the train for all legs of that trip.

In my opinion, more countries should follow France’s lead and put meaningful restrictions on short-haul flights. France prohibits certain flights when a satisfactory train alternative takes under two and a half hours. Even that policy could go several steps farther.

But at least it addresses climate change and the decision to fly rather than take the train. A tourist tax adds a relatively painless charge after the decision has already been made.

If you want “high-quality” tourists, your policy needs to be more than encouraging cheap flights then charging arrivals between €1.00 and €2.50 per person, per night on top of the cost of their accommodations, as A Coruña does. That’s not a lot of money within the context of a trip.

Barcelona goes considerably farther—roughly €6 to €12 per person, per night, depending on the accommodation—but I can’t imagine the tax has stopped a significant number of tourists, of any quality, from coming.

A Coruña isn’t trying to reduce tourism. It’s trying to increase it while using a modest tax to manage the consequences.

Which brings me back to Valencia.

Over the last several weeks, a local activist I follow has been documenting a considerably less abstract version of this story.

He has been highlighting a social media hashtag—Valencia is calling—used by young people from across Europe taking advantage of cheap airfares to come here and party.

It’s relatively inexpensive to reach Valencia, stay a few days, and eat and drink—or get drunk—here. So they’re choosing to go all-in amid one of the most beautiful backdrops in the world.

On social media, this could look like an effective advertisement for the city.

On the ground, the activist documents what can come with it: public drunkenness, people walking through residential neighborhoods shirtless or half-naked, noise at all hours, and tourists staying in street-level Airbnbs who drag furniture onto the sidewalk as if the space outside their temporary apartment is an extension of their living room.

I’m the first to advocate for lively and vibrant neighborhoods. We live in one where I have few major complaints—maybe because I sleep with earplugs and have a longstanding preference for a little urban grit and chaos over suburban soullessness.

That said, you’d have to be blind not to see the effects of low-quality tourism.

I could list them all day so I’ll just go with the latest micro and seemingly meaningless example.

The other day, as I rode in the street-level bike lane alongside Turia Park through Valencia’s Old City, I came upon a dozen young Dutch girls taking up both sides of a two-way bike lane. The Dutch—at least the young party-tourist variety—are often among the worst offenders.

I admonished them in my best Spanish and moved on.

One incident means practically nothing. Hundreds of versions of it every day start to affect how a place feels and functions.

Has tourism ruined my quality of life in Valencia? Not even close. But waiting until it does would be a ridiculous standard.

To be clear, Valencia is calling isn’t an official City Hall campaign. I have no evidence that the city created it or has anything directly to do with the people posting under it.

It’s a bunch of kids selling Valencia to one another as a playground—sometimes as travelers and influencers, sometimes as drunks.

Once a city becomes cheap and exceptionally easy to reach, the government no longer controls how it gets sold. City Hall can advertise culture, gastronomy, sustainability, and Mediterranean quality of life. TikTok can turn the same place into an inexpensive weekend-long party.

The city can target the tourist it wants. It can’t decide who buys the €39 ticket.

Valencia’s government says it wants “quality, not quantity.” Mayor María José Catalá has gone as far as saying, “We don’t want low-cost tourism that doesn’t respect the city.”

At the same time, the city-backed Fundació Visit València actively works with airlines to increase connectivity. Through its Fly València program, it participates in route negotiations, promotes new connections, and conducts joint marketing with airlines and travel platforms.

I haven’t found a Valencia tender directly comparable to the one in A Coruña. The machinery isn’t identical.

But Valencia is hardly sitting back and waiting for tourists to discover it.

During the summer of 2025, the airport offered 3.6 million seats on arriving flights—4.3 percent more than the year before—with 37 airlines connecting the city to more than 100 destinations. City Hall described those numbers as the product, at least in part, of coordinated work between the Fundació Visit València, airlines, and other destinations.

The airport ultimately handled a record 11.85 million passenger movements in 2025, an increase of 9.6 percent. International traffic—which represented three-quarters of the total—rose nearly 13 percent.

Recently, billboards around Valencia boasted about all the new places you can fly to directly from here.

Every outbound route is an inbound route, too.

This past week, Valencia took its “quality tourism” rhetoric another step forward.

Catalá announced a proposed new convivencia ordinance that would impose fines of up to €3,000 for the most serious forms of so-called uncivil behavior.

The highest penalties would apply to full nudity or clothing that leaves sexual organs exposed in streets, public spaces, or public transportation. Other serious and minor violations would carry smaller fines.

The mayor presented the measure as part of an effort to protect residents and reinforce Valencia’s reputation as a respectful, quality destination.

I’m fine with the fines.

I don’t want people pissing in the street, getting wasted outside somebody’s bedroom, doing drugs in a playground at three in the morning, treating residential sidewalks like the patio of their Airbnb, or walking around my neighborhood as if they never left the beach.

Punish that behavior.

But don’t confuse punishing it with addressing the system that helps produce more of it.

Cheap tickets don’t automatically create bad tourists. My wife and I use low-cost airlines. Most people who do arrive, enjoy themselves, and leave without dragging an IKEA table onto the sidewalk or walking around in a bikini when they’re nowhere near the beach.

Likewise, somebody who spends €500 a night at a hotel isn’t necessarily a good neighbor or somehow less implicated in the pressures tourism places on public space and housing.

That’s why quality tourism is such slippery political language.

It combines spending, behavior, length of stay, choice of accommodation, and cultural interest into one imaginary visitor who spends heavily, behaves perfectly, and barely leaves a footprint.

Valencia is expanding access while trying to filter the consequences through restrictions on tourist apartments, behavioral rules, and fines. Some of those responses are necessary.

Yet all of them operate downstream from the machinery still working to bring more people here: airline negotiations, promotional campaigns, record airport capacity, cheap fares, tourism platforms, social-media algorithms, and the public and private institutions that benefit every time another visitor arrives.

The drunk, ass-out, or shirt-off tourist is tough to miss. So are the Dutch girls blocking the bike lane, the bike tours crowding plazas and otherwise calm neighborhood streets, and the people dragging furniture out of their Airbnb or clattering enormous suitcases down the sidewalk—just travel with a backpack for fuck’s sake.

This is all easy to photograph, easy to mock, easy to fine, and easy to blame.

The procurement contract and the route-development program are much harder to see.

If the A Coruña–Valencia route returns, anyone who uses it to visit A Coruña won’t be arriving against the city’s wishes.

They’ll be accepting an invitation it spent public money to send.

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The conversation started with me complimenting them on the combinations they come up with and noting that the morcilla (blood sausage) is my favorite. On any given day, they have up to 10 or 12 varieties. And they’re always coming up with something new.

What’s even more incredible than how good these burgers are is that the lady who creates them says she has never come up with a mix of flavors that she ended up not liking. When she goes to another stand in the market to buy ingredients, she can already see the combinations in her head. Then she puts them together, and they come out exactly as she anticipated—ready for sale.

What’s even more interesting is that the owner of the stand who passed away several years ago was opposed to anything other than chicken only or chicken with vegetables. So, when he went on vacation, they’d roll out some special burgers. When he returned, customers were left asking for the specialties, which apparently warmed him up to the idea.

The conversation moved to food shopping habits—people, especially young people, want everything fast because they don’t have time—GMOs, and probably a few things that I missed.

But still I was able to follow along, understand most of what was being said, and contribute meaningfully here and there—in Spanish.

A year ago, I couldn’t have had this conversation.

Sounds like a victory. And, in some ways, it absolutely is.

That said, the realization that I couldn’t have done this a year ago—even a few months ago—didn’t make me feel fluent. It actually accomplished almost the opposite.

At first, I was trying to catch words. Then sentences, followed by basic meaning. Eventually, I started understanding a good chunk of what I was hearing around me—people passing by on the street or having conversations within earshot. Not everything, but enough to feel like I was making real progress—and enough to no longer feel completely shut out of the urban theater I love so much.

Around the same time—and I’m probably on the front end of what I think is a long process—I started to pick up on tone, personality, and tiny changes in direction and mannerisms that indicate an actual conversation is happening, not just a transaction or friendly small talk.

Don’t get me wrong—I still get lost every single day and have to ask my wife what happened or, when she’s not around, leave a conversation not knowing what happened. That happens less often—or, more accurately, I leave more situations with a reasonable understanding of what just happened.

I’m thrilled to have come this far. However, when I understood almost nothing, I couldn’t distinguish between what I was missing.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s fast forward to what it means in the present day at my present level with a micro example.

Over the weekend, we went to a museum. At the counter to get our tickets, I just assumed the woman asked for our postal code. That wasn’t me missing Spanish; it was just me not paying attention and operating on auto-pilot. Which is actually a win—I’m comfortable enough now to interact without thinking or, sadly, to ignore people.

So I started with our postal code and—turns out—she asked for something else. I forget what.

When I perked up and explained myself—He creído que dijiste (I thought you said, which I think is understood, but far from grammatical perfection)—the woman replied with what we thought was:

Me vale largo.

What both my wife and I heard was me vale largo. The problem is that, as far as I can determine, me vale largo isn’t actually an expression. Maybe she said me vale (fine by me), meaning the information I gave her was sufficient. Maybe there was another word we both misheard. We’re still not sure.

Which, of course, is precisely the point.

Whatever—the point is that I was expecting what I know. Something like no pasa nada (it’s okay) or no importa (it doesn’t matter). But the response I received—even if it was just me vale—wasn’t what I expected in that context and underscored my reality.

When I understood almost nothing, everything I missed blended together. I knew my Spanish was limited, but I couldn’t perceive the extent of those limitations.

Now I understand enough to recognize far more—and, intimidatingly, how far I remain from understanding all of it.

The gaps haven’t necessarily grown. They’ve always been there. They’ve just become visible, thanks to an increase in knowledge and capability.

This is the crazy thing about setting out on new and ultimately lifelong experiences and accumulating new knowledge. At the beginning, what you’re looking to experience, accomplish, or learn feels finite.

Learn words. Say sentences. Have conversations.

Arrive. Get an apartment. Start going to the same stands in the market. Talk to people.

Live in your dream neighborhood. Travel to other places. Do it again—and again.

We always think there’s a point of arrival when we’re trying to learn a language, move and get “settled in” abroad, or live our best lives.

But once you get far enough inside these experiences, you realize there is no clear point of arrival.

This extends well beyond learning Spanish.

I started formally studying cities and writing about them nearly 25 years ago. You might think that after all of that time, I’d feel increasingly certain about what makes them work. To some degree, I am.

But underneath that certainty, there’s something more important. The more cities I experience—and the more closely I look at the one where I live—the more conscious I become of everything I haven’t seen, experienced, or considered. Or what I have only just been exposed to.

Moving abroad works similarly. A change of scenery won’t solve every emotional or psychological problem you bring with you. But if you move with a clear sense of yourself—for reasons that pass the sniff test—and you remain willing to challenge yourself, getting what you wanted doesn’t close the loop. It expands the range of what you can see and imagine.

We tend to frame goals as destinations. Really, they’re often just entrances.

That doesn’t mean the original achievement disappointed you or wasn’t enough. It means you can now perceive possibilities you could never have considered from where and how you experienced life before.

After five years of writing this newsletter, that might sum up its entire point.

At the market the other day, I learned more about people I see every day. They told me a great story, and I understood enough of it to tell it here. But I almost certainly missed part of it.

A year ago, I would have missed almost all of it.

Spanish hasn’t become harder. I’ve simply learned enough to hear how much I still don’t understand. And to realize that almost everything you open yourself up to ends up being a vast landscape where full arrival and comprehension is just a fantasy.

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