Why Uncertainty Is the Real Cost—and Reward—of Living Abroad
And why most people try to eliminate it instead of taking advantage of it
Today is 6 January 2026—we’ve lived in Valencia, Spain for exactly one year.
Happy anniversary to us!
As we summarized the other day—
Over the last six essays, I’ve approached this from different angles—ego, competence, identity, discomfort—not as standalone stories, but as part of an organized flow derived from my daily life after one year living in Spain.
—so today, we take the next logical step.
We continue the arc with what’s left unresolved: the inherent uncertainty of life abroad—and of any persistently unfamiliar situation.
Dealing with a loss of your competence abroad is tough to tolerate, but not knowing when—or if—it resolves can be harder.
I want to be clear about what I’m doing here.
I’m not writing evergreen advice, relocation checklists, or tidy post-move retrospectives. I’m writing from the ground, while the experience is happening—without hindsight, distance, or a clean aesthetic packaged for social media or a turnkey move-abroad consultancy.
Very little writing in this space does that. Most writing smooths uncertainty into: there’s something wrong with them, not you—here’s how to fix it.
That approach may be comforting, but it often misdiagnoses what’s actually happening. It trains people to expect resolution rather than learn how to adapt, to interpret friction as failure instead of exposure.
I’m more interested in what happens when you sit with uncertainty long enough to understand what it’s actually asking of you. Some people freak out when confronted with “weird” food. Now imagine walking out the front door every day into a world where you’re closer to the exception than the rule. Where your instincts, assumptions, and reference points are no longer the default.
No matter how much “research” you do or how many “scouting trips” you take, you can’t fully anticipate that experience. Once you’re in it, you’re in it. And that’s often the moment people start thinking: this isn’t what I signed up for.
Not because the place is wrong, but because the reassurance they expected hasn’t arrived.
They don’t want fluency. They want assurance.
They want a timeline. A guarantee that discomfort has an expiration date.
At that point, a few paths tend to appear:
Retreat into an English-speaking bubble and let it dilute your experience.
Externalize the discomfort—framing it as something uniquely wrong with the country or culture—and complain accordingly, often without much basis.
Or accept the challenge for what it is: the struggle of life in an unfamiliar system. This is potentially more difficult, but exponentially more rewarding—especially when you compare it to the alternative of letting familiarity and comfort suck you into bitterness and stagnation.
These same choices show up everywhere in life, not just abroad.
The fantasy isn’t “life gets better.” If that were the expectation, the move was built on a misunderstanding from the start.
The realistic goal—and we don’t deal in fantasies here—isn’t merely improvement.
It’s capacity—which I’ve come to prefer over the vague, overused language of “growth.”
The rest of this essay is about how people actually respond to uncertainty—and why most responses fail quietly.
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