Why I Didn't Join an Expat Group
Why trying to force belonging can distract you from actually settling into a place.
Yesterday I wrote about weak ties. Today's essay explores why I think we often misunderstand the role groups play in our lives.
When I listen to Tom Petty, I’m instantly taken back to Los Angeles.
For a moment, nostalgia takes hold. It’s impossible for it not to.
Even though I wasn’t born in LA, the time I spent there—and in San Francisco—carved out who I am today. If it weren’t for California between 1999 and 2024, I wouldn’t be in Spain today.
That said, nostalgia is an extraordinarily talented film editor. It keeps the Tom Petty montage and cuts the less cinematic footage of why the United States isn’t the epicenter for quality of life—which explains part of why we left.
It’s all so fascinating and gets straight to the heart of the ideas I wrote about ahead of the move and continue to explore today.
The idea that my wife and I challenged ourselves out of a good situation in LA. We could have stayed and tolerated the components of daily life we didn’t like. We could have stayed and maintained basically the same way of being—personally and professionally. But doing so—particularly at midlife—felt like the wrong choice at a time ripe for resisting stagnation and working the body and mind in ways that no longer felt possible within the confines of our familiar life.
As we knew going into the move, the reward for making the right choice isn’t permanent certainty or emotional peace. Sometimes it’s equal parts satisfaction, exploration, and disorientation. Ultimately, we’ve surrendered the comfort of being surrounded by our accumulated identities, even though that comfort had become constraining.
Some people structure their lives primarily around security, belonging, and a dense social circle. I’ve generally structured mine around freedom, movement, observation, intellectual stimulation, and the ability to follow my own instincts. I’ve accepted the costs because the alternative—a more socially prescribed, settled, group-oriented life—makes me feel more trapped than connected.
In the shell of an overthought nut, sitting with uncomfortable feelings, making sense of them without overreacting—that's the nonstop psychological work of moving abroad.
Which brings us to the sequel to Saturday’s post on weak ties.
When people move abroad, one of the first pieces of advice they receive is to join something. Find an “expat” group. Take a class, sign up for a club, or attend organized events where you can meet people and start building a community.
Perfectly reasonable advice. It might even work for a lot of people.
But it has never felt quite right to me.
I’ve also noticed that some “expat” communities become places where people endlessly process the move itself—what they miss, what frustrates them, how this country compares with the last one. I understand the impulse. It just isn’t how I want to spend my time.
I didn’t move to Spain to build an expat life. I moved to build an ordinary life.
I didn’t move to Spain to replace one predetermined social structure with another. I’ve never had a ton of close friends. I tend to keep a loose social circle absent the “coffee hangs” and scheduled lunches that populate so many lives. So much of that feels like going through increasingly performative motions.
It’s funny—you can be a good friend even if you don’t have a ton of friends. But much of the world seems to operate using the opposite logic. People assemble “tribes” and love to count friends, which is part of why they use making friends and having a sizable friend group as a signal of success in new endeavors such as starting a job or moving abroad.
I've never understood why we treat making friends like a performance metric. But that’s the American way—find a way to operationalize and optimize everything. If you can make friends you’ve proven to yourself—and others—that you’re competent and a likable person. I prefer to sit with myself and be selective, which I think benefits me in the more formal social interactions I do have.
So maybe it will come as no surprise that I don’t think integration—if even possible when you move abroad—necessarily happens because you assemble a group of friends, fill your calendar, or demonstrate that you’re “putting yourself out there.”
Each of those things can serve important roles in your life—it’s not as if I never hang out with others in social settings—but people do much of the above to simply delay dealing with uncomfortable feelings like loneliness. When you move abroad, loneliness can become even more complicated. Because admitting it potentially signals to yourself and the world that you made the wrong decision.
I was thinking about this the other day.
My wife was taking an all-day class. After nearly six years together, I still miss her when she’s gone. So I was sitting in the plaza feeling lonely. I had nothing on my calendar—as I really don’t keep one of the social variety. I like to confront, rather than stave off loneliness and treat it like any other feeling. As I sat there, I recalled the times I sat on a bench on Larchmont Blvd in LA, feeling lonely when she was at work.
Short periods of loneliness help you find proper perspective and not overreact to fleeting emotional states. Having a Larchmont-bench day in a Russafa plaza is a great example of using loneliness to situate place and my perspective, and to remind myself why I’ve chosen the life I lead.
I sometimes wonder how many people mistake ordinary loneliness for a problem that needs to be solved immediately.
They move abroad and join a group.
They still feel disconnected. So they join another.
They still feel lonely—that “problem” was supposed to be solved by now.
So—and you hear this all of the time from popular relocation gurus—maybe it’s that they just haven’t found their people yet.
While that could very well be the case, it’s probably also a common misread of the situation.
Joining a group can absolutely enrich your life. I’ve done it at different points in mine.
But groups don’t eliminate loneliness. They just help hide it for the time being.
Every group eventually develops its own dynamics, hierarchies, rituals, personalities, and informal structures. That's simply group psychology. It isn't a criticism; it's what humans do.
If your primary goal was simply to understand yourself in a new country, you've now added another layer of psychology to navigate. It’s one thing to need motivation to wake up at 8 a.m. on Saturday morning to go for a jog. But there’s a good chance that peacocking, cliques, and other social status posturing will emerge among your fellow run club members.
I know that sometimes people just join a running club to run or a knitting club to knit. It doesn’t always have to be seen through some lofty psychological lens. And—quite often—fulfilling individual friendships emerge from these situations. No doubt. But I also know that sometimes we go into situations with remedies for problems we only anticipate experiencing—and those remedies can sell us short when it comes time to actually deal.
Groups are tools, not cures.
So I keep going back to weak ties. It was love at first sight when I discovered the concept in or around 2004.
Weak ties matter more than trying to force yourself into friendships and achieve the goal of integration through joining groups. Weak ties matter because they ask almost nothing of you. You don’t need to become someone’s best friend or perform belonging. All you need to do is simply begin participating in the seemingly mundane daily rhythm of a place.
I don’t think moving abroad has taught me how to avoid loneliness.
It’s taught me something I guess I’ve known all along—not to misinterpret it.
A lonely afternoon isn’t necessarily a sign that I chose the wrong country, failed to integrate, or need to immediately reinvent my social life.
Sometimes it’s just a lonely afternoon.
Which is exactly why I don’t think integration begins with joining groups.
I think it begins with giving yourself enough time to let the ordinary rhythms of a place slowly become your own.
We don't let ourselves get lonely anymore, but we also don't know how to be bored. We've been conditioned to think that either of those are somehow failings and that we should be "doing something," and that something has to be productive. Lord help anyone that says they just want to go sit on a bench on Larchmont and watch the world go by (or watch people leave their cars in the median).
Down in South Africa we both decided we did not want to belong to the local “Swiss Club”. Too much of the same thinking.
Interestingly that club seems to be dying out. A driver is perhaps that the alternative of “adapting locally” is easier than 20 or 30 years ago.
English fluency is perhaps another driver.
I could imagine that in quite a few spots in the world, the pull of an expat community may well make sense.
And then there is personal preference, like in our case, of not wanting to or feeling any need to.