Never Retire: The Uneasy Privilege of Living Well While America Falls Apart

Feeling lucky—and a little bit guilty—watching the U.S. unravel from afar.

When the world is running down you make the best of what's still around…

A song by The Police from 1980. Great lyrics I want to call ahead of their time, but really they weren’t—just an accurate reflection of the times.

It borders on objective fact that what we're seeing in the United States right now is as bad as it’s been in my lifetime and—if you're a little older—since the days of the Civil Rights Movement. The times, they are a-changin’—in reverse. That's what makes today feel worse—the intentional, illegal, misguided, and flat pathetic rollback of so much of the progress the US has made over the years.

As someone approaching 50 who ended up moving to one of the few nations doing the complete opposite of the United States, I feel an unease in my satisfaction with life and the place where I feel super lucky to be living it.

Never Retire: Spain Feels Like Home. The U.S. Doesn’t Anymore.

Never Retire: Amsterdam Was Lovely. It Was Also Boring.

There are some people unwilling to leave their birthplace. It's their homeland. They feel more than a connection, but a responsibility to it. It's pretty incredible to watch YouTubers travel to places such as Iraq and Syria and talk to folks unwilling to leave—out of a healthy (non-hateful) patriotism rooted in loyalty. It makes the folks looking to flee the United States seem understandably—but relatively—disillusioned. And it also proves that in life, so much really is all relative to your experience.

Undoubtedly, more than a few of you living well in the U.S. feel a similar kind of—what is it?—dissonance.

My wife and I didn’t leave the United States for political reasons. While politics makes the list, it would be there no matter who is in charge. But it still feels weird to have left just before wildfires ravaged parts of Southern California that we know so well. It felt weird to feel the tension and stark contrast between quality of life in Valencia, Spain and San Francisco, California. It feels weird to send your kids back into places you wouldn’t willingly live in again.

It’s a bit of an internal struggle I never anticipated upon leaving America. While things have always been bad from social and economic standpoints in a country that no longer even comes close to living up to its ideals, I never expected things to end up as bad as they have become. I knew they would get worse, but the stuff happening on the ground to the people who helped build and keep the country running is something I never thought I’d live to see. This makes the immigration raids I used to protest against seem mild.

I wish I had a strong conclusion—a resolution. But I don’t. This is just how I am feeling on another warm and humid day in the Mediterranean with a full slate of activities scheduled for the weekend.

True story—I wanted to see The Police play (at the Aud in Buffalo) when I was maybe 10. My uncle wanted to take me, but my mother—for some unknown reason—wouldn’t let me go. So—that night—I opened my bedroom window in Niagara Falls to see if I could hear the show some 30 minutes away in Buffalo.

Ends up that the first live show I did see was with the same uncle. The Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot in a small theater. Fast forward 40 years and I’m a Canadian (and US) citizen (hopefully dual citizenship remains a thing because I am considering applying for the passport) living permanently in Spain.

Go figure.