The Hardest Part of Living Abroad Is Losing Your Excuses

Why life gets harder when the obvious problems disappear

Allow me a moment.

I don’t think there’s anyone with a better attitude than I have about moving abroad.

What I said in 2023 and 2024 about relocating to Spain has matched my experience of life here in 2025 and 2026.

I went in with a positive attitude about everything, including the stuff people incessantly warn you about in the Facebook groups—bureaucracy, impossible apartment hunts, and hidden costs.

And I have to think that my positive attitude played a key role in making 2025 run so smoothly. Bureaucracy in Valencia is faster and more efficient than anything I ever dealt with during my 31-plus years of adult life in the United States. We have a cool landlord. And the costs of getting settled here are about the same as the costs associated with moving—and doing life—in any other place I’ve seen.

I’m convinced that if you walk up to the ticket counter at the airport with an attitude, you shouldn’t be surprised if the person printing your boarding pass throws some flavor of the same back at you.

You get what you give—yes—but you also benefit from having a firm understanding of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

That’s where I think the trouble starts for more than a few people.

So much of what I see in the move abroad discourse online revolves around people coming from a place of anger, internal angst, or confusion. Sometimes all three.

For example, they have to get out of the United States because the political situation has morphed into something that’s too much for them to handle.

Or maybe it’s some other gripe.

Using me as an example—I don’t like cars. If I had to distill the reason why I wanted to leave the United States for Spain it would be for urban planning reasons.

But I wasn’t escaping car culture—and other things I don’t love about the U.S.—into the arms of the person standing in the boarding area at the end of a rom-com. I never treated the move as some fantasy or adventure I was about to embark on.

When you use any disdain your home country instilled in you to glamorize your perceived solution, you’re taking a big risk.

I think it’s amazing that the Socialist Government in Spain just moved to regularize 500,000 immigrants who lack authorization or that Pedro Sánchez seems to be one of the few leaders in the world to aggressively counter pathetic people like Trump and Elon Musk.

But that’s not what fuels how much I love life in Spain, with how content I am with my day-to-day here. If I was counting on my political affiliation for validation in a place that sort of, kind of shares my view of the issues, I’d be sorely disappointed. I would be setting myself up for a crash.

Because—guess what—no matter how progressive you are and how progressive you think Spain is, you’re not fist bumping people on the streets here about it. There’s very little virtue signaling unless—I assume—you insulate yourself in an “expat” bubble.

I exist in a pedestrian-focused environment. That’s fantastic. It has been an adult-long dream of mine to live in a city that truly puts people—not cars—first. But life still happens.

I don’t want to overstate it—because lots of people have it a lot worse than I do—but 2026 isn’t off to a great start. It’s a case of—oh 2025 was so great, 2026 can’t possibly be a repeat.

That’s my anxiety talking—hopefully. (As is the use an add-on adverb for psychological safety!)

To start the year, I lost a freelance client—a big chunk of my income. I’ve had some wins and am working on others, but they’re not operating on the timeline I want or feel like I need.

So, I’m a little stressed.

However, I’m not lashing out.

What I’m not doing is turning my stress into a referendum on Spain or my decision to move here. If you read online—articles, social media—you see this basic tendency to pin everything that goes wrong in life on the move you made abroad or “the honeymoon period.”

It’s as if these people never had or witnessed others deal with something they didn’t want to deal with—income loss, the death of a pet, bad Mexican food, loneliness—ever before in their life. Which is really kind of ironic when you consider that so many of these people left “home” because they were disenchanted with it—often practically and existentially.

Yet, suddenly, there’s something also deeply wrong with Spain—or whatever place you fell in love with, then effectively turned on.

That’s where I think the real divide shows up for people who move abroad.