Moving Abroad Has Become Popular at Exactly the Moment When the Traits Required to Thrive Abroad Are Becoming Rare

Life without the need for validation

A quick note on support.

I don’t run ads here. No sponsors. No harebrained consulting funnel hiding behind the essays—just me, writing in real time, while the experience is unfolding.

A number of you backed this project early, when it was centered on the Never Retire philosophy. That support bought me the freedom to fully develop that idea—and to actually move to Spain and live it.

After a year on the ground, the focus is even clearer now: work about uncertainty, adaptation, and what happens when the systems that once structured your life stop doing that.

If you’re still reading, this work clearly resonates with how you’re thinking—and how you’re navigating your own choices.

Supporting it is simply a way to keep it independent and ongoing.

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A reader who’s lived abroad for years commented after a recent piece and said something that resonated—and, honestly, made my day:

I am continually impressed by your insights. Every single thing you pointed out is spot-on. Anyone considering a move abroad to a country with a language not native to them would definitely benefit by reading through and thinking about all of these points (or even if the language won't be an issue). It is a choice on how to handle all of those challenges. That retreat portion is especially potent and important. I have made an effort not to do the shortcuts you mention, and I appreciate that you've helped me to think about that choice more consciously by writing about it and expressing it so well.

I’ve heard versions of this from people who’ve lived abroad far longer than I have.

And it’s the part most writing skips.

Not the logistics. Not the bureaucracy. Not the grocery store substitutions or the “surprises” you were allegedly never warned about.

Most content fixates on silly, surface-level inanity—the kind that shouldn’t even register for a functioning adult, is easily solved, and looks roughly the same no matter where you live.

What it avoids is the deeper problem:

The moment you realize you have no—or a foreign—feedback loop. Just choices—repeated quietly, without validation.

That’s the perspective I’m writing from. Today’s story builds on the themes I’ve been developing over the past few weeks—ego checks, competence, uncertainty, adaptation—and continues to push them into the place we all too often avoid.

Why This Is Harder Now Than It Used to Be

There’s a larger context here that we can’t ignore.

Moving abroad has become popular at exactly the moment when the traits required to thrive abroad are becoming rare.

We’re living in a time that rewards speed, signaling, certainty, and constant validation. Short attention spans. Loud opinions. Performative bull shit. Peacocking to the point where one or two people can suck the air out of a room. An egomaniacal need to be seen, affirmed, and responded to immediately. Even dissatisfaction has become baseline visible, narrated, and justified in real time—from your own personal social media soapbox.

At the same time, more people are looking for an exit. From politics. From burnout. From a sense that life has become hostile and soulless. Moving abroad has entered the cultural imagination as a form of relief—a way to opt out, reset, or reclaim what feels lost. To rebel against your culture and—maybe—right wherever you went wrong.

The problem is that thriving and getting the most out of living abroad demands the opposite of what much of society has become.

Sometimes, taking an exit from your home country—or wherever you’ve been hanging your hat—effectively addresses some or all of what dogs you. The problem comes in when you expect your destination to roll out the welcome mat or—in the most entitled cases—the red carpet for you. As if showing up with money automatically entitles you to accommodation.

Just like when you walk into someone else’s home, you shouldn’t touch the thermostat or move the furniture, you shouldn’t expect what is basically your host country to make things neat and tidy to your preferences. You can’t transplant the comforts, perceived convenience, and ways of doing day-to-day life and only embrace the new stuff you thought was cool on vacation. Plus, even with a good attitude, you’re not going to receive the constant reinforcement you experienced “back home,” especially if you’re American.

You don’t get smoke blown up your ass by servers, baristas, and store clerks. You don’t get phony smiles from strangers whose job it is to perform friendliness. People here are generally kind, curious, and willing to engage—but they’re not paid to pretend they’re thrilled to see you.

And that throws a lot of Americans off. You probably know a few cats in your family or friend circle who couldn’t hang.

Even more, if you bring the hostility you picked up—or started returning—in the U.S. with you, you’ll look wildly out of place. Treating every missed cue as a personal affront. Assuming bad intent when a waiter passes your table, a clerk doesn’t rush to you, or something at the airport goes awry. Taking what amounts to one big unintentional nothing as disrespect.

That frame of mind just doesn’t fly throughout much of the Europe I’ve seen, particularly Spain.

Not because people are “better,” but because the social contract is different. Interactions aren’t scripted. Politeness isn’t transactional. People will talk to you, argue with you, tease you, help you—but not on demand and not with the performative reassurance Americans are used to.

If you expect constant affirmation, Spain will feel cold.

If you expect efficiency to equal care, it will feel indifferent.

If you expect things to go your way because you’re frustrated, you’ll feel ignored.

And the truth is: none of that is actually happening.

What is happening is that life in a foreign system removes the validation you’re used to. The sense that you’re being seen, handled, and affirmed correctly—on your timeline.

This is where customer service and hostility collide.

In the U.S., people working in stores, bars, and restaurants aren’t just “nice” because it’s cultural. They’re nice because they’re trained to manage your emotions. They’re performing friendliness under the constant threat that you might be the person who explodes if they don’t.

I know this because I worked behind a bar for several years—before the pandemic pushed public tension to all-time highs. Even then, it was bad.

When you’re used to being emotionally managed by strangers, neutrality starts to feel like rejection.

That expectation doesn’t survive abroad.

That’s where this becomes uncomfortable—not because things are hard, but because nothing confirms you’re doing them right. If you’re like me, you often worry if you made a fool of yourself in an interaction or what type of impression you made on the other person. This comes from a very human—but also very American—blend of insecurity and people-pleasing that many of us don’t love to acknowledge as part of our personality mix.

Without constant confirmation—without the signals you came to read clearly back home—you’re left with a different question entirely…

How do you decide you’re doing okay when no one is telling you so?

This is the core question I’ve been circling in How It Works—and it’s where the work really begins.

It’s the tangible, yet still difficult-to-touch shift living abroad forces. Not logistical. Not wholly linguistic. But psychological.

After spending the majority of your life in one country, most of us were swimming in feedback—subtle and overt. Smiles. Tone. Scripts. Efficiency dressed up as care. We learned how to read the room because the room was constantly performing back at us.

Abroad, that loop breaks.

No one corrects you—except maybe a little when you make language errors. No one reassures you. Very few reward effort with visible approval.

Interactions typically just… end.

And you’re left replaying them in your head, wondering whether you misread something, offended someone, sounded strange, or missed a cue you don’t yet know how to see.

Your brain fills in the gaps.

Did that land wrong?
Was I awkward?
Did I say too much? Too little?
Do they think I’m an idiot?

That internal noise isn’t weakness. It’s what happens when you remove the social scaffolding most of us learned to lean on without realizing it. I think some Spanish speakers might—I don’t know—feel likewise after a conversation in English.

I wonder when I sit in my local coffeeshop, English speakers rolling through, and baristas speaking (pretty damn good) English to accommodate them. They must go through at least a little of this as they learn to be more comfortable in their own linguistic skin.

Living abroad, this is where many people succumb to shortcuts. It’s tempting.

Some retreat. They shrink their world until it feels manageable again. Same language. Same people. Less exposure, fewer unknowns, minimal risk of embarrassment.

Others double down on control. They over-explain. Over-prepare. Over-correct. This is where I always have to catch myself so I don’t try to perform competence harder, hoping certainty will reappear if I just get everything right.

Both responses are survival mechanisms. But they’re also ways of refusing the very growth you came here to find.

Because the absence of feedback and external validation isn’t a problem to solve. It’s the challenge you signed up for if life abroad is something you’re doing for more than cheap groceries and “more house for your money.”

Thriving abroad doesn’t mean you eventually stop feeling unsure. It means you stop needing that feeling to resolve before you act.

You let interactions be incomplete.

You allow yourself to be misread without rushing to fix it.

You learn to leave a conversation without grading yourself afterward.

I’ve spent the last 12 months figuring this shit out. Catching myself in the act. Now, I’m way better at living in a state of constant ambiguity. This is the part of living abroad that makes you grow and evolve as a person. Expecting the discomfort, then naming and navigating, rather than defensively running away from it. It takes work—after more than a few meltdowns when you get back to your apartment.

The discomfort doesn't go away, because the discomfort is yours to own. The people across from you aren't performing for you; they’re just living. When you stop taking every interaction personally and start 'doing life' with them, the perspective shifts. You see that this friction isn't a setback—it’s the exact training required to remain engaged and vibrant as you age.

That’s the real adaptation most people aren’t prepared for when they move.

Learning how to function—how to keep showing up—without tying your worth to every interaction.

Once you can do that here, you realize something else:

This isn’t just about living abroad.

It’s about aging without applause—because who wants to draw attention to getting older anyway? Changing direction without validation. Choosing a life that won’t constantly tell you you’re doing it right.

That’s the trade.

And if you can live with it—really live with it and come to love it like a grueling workout or running a marathon—the rewards don’t show up as praise or certainty.

They show up as psychological and, yes, physical capacity. You get stressed. You get tired. But like the athlete who keeps going back, you recover effectively.

Enough steadiness to keep going. Enough trust in yourself to stay engaged. Enough clarity to know that silence doesn’t mean failure.

If this resonates:

I write How It Works for people who want to live abroad—or live differently anywhere—without fantasy, shortcuts, or applause.

Most of the work lives behind the paywall. This essay gives you a glimpse.

A quick note on what’s next

This spring, my wife and I will be spending a month in Paris.

Not as a move, and not as a project. Valencia is home. Paris will be a temporary change in context.

I’m interested in what shifts—and what doesn’t—when you drop into a different system without pretending you belong to it: language, density, neutrality, friction. Especially after having grown attached to Valencia. At heart, I’m creature of the routines I’ve established here.

Some of those observations will show up free. The deeper ones will go to paid subscribers, alongside the rest of How It Works.

No guides. No lists. No look at what we ate. Just field notes from inside the process.