5 Wrong Reasons to Move Abroad (and the One Good One)

Nobody warned me about the reasons. Everyone warns you about visas, taxes, and shipping boxes. Nobody asks the question that decides whether the move works: why are you going?

I grew up in a village near Saarbrücken and have since lived and worked in Berlin, London, San Francisco, Barcelona, Milan, and now Lisbon. Moving abroad shaped almost everything good in my life, so this is not an argument against it. It is an argument against moving for reasons that cannot survive contact with an ordinary Tuesday in your new city. The destination matters less than the reason, because the reason is what remains when the novelty wears off. It always wears off.

Here are the five reasons I have watched fail, in myself and in people around me, and the one that keeps paying.

1. To finally become happy

This is the most common one and the most expensive. If you are unhappy where you are, the odds are you will be unhappy abroad too, because you are the one constant that travels with you. The frustration you feel at home rarely comes from geography. It comes from your work, your habits, your relationships, or the conversation you keep avoiding with yourself. All of that fits in carry-on.

The research agrees with the lived experience here. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed its participants for over 80 years, found that close relationships, more than money or fame, keep people happy throughout their lives. Its director, Robert Waldinger, gave one of the most-watched TED talks ever on exactly this. Notice what is missing from that finding: location. A move that cuts you off from your closest relationships, in exchange for better weather, trades the thing the data says matters for the thing it says does not.

Happiness is internal work. A new city gives you a stage for that work, not a substitute for it.

2. Because home feels mediocre

A word to my fellow Germans, though the pattern is universal: we take how well we live for granted. Reliable healthcare, functioning public services, safety, five weeks of vacation, and the ability to drink tap water are invisible to us because we have never lived a single day without them.

The mechanism is habit-blindness. You have adapted to everything good about home, so it registers as nothing, while everything about the destination is new, so it registers as wonderful. The comparison feels honest and is rigged from the start. We tend to overestimate the quality of life abroad and underestimate the quality of life at home, and no spreadsheet fixes that bias, because the bias sits in what you notice, not in what you count.

The test is simple: write down what your home country quietly does for you, then check, honestly, which items your destination matches. Move anyway if you want to. But move knowing the trade, not pretending there is none.

3. To make the holiday permanent

Two weeks in Lisbon feels like sunshine, pastel de nata, and evenings by the Tejo. Living in Lisbon includes finding an apartment in a market that does not want you to find one, registering with the tax office in a language you do not speak yet, and learning which pharmacy opens on Sundays.

We are animals of habit. Give us three months anywhere and we rebuild the same routines we had before: the same supermarket run, the same desk, the same evening loop. The holiday feeling is not a property of the place. It is a property of not having routines yet, and it fades exactly as fast as the routines form.

That is not a tragedy. An ordinary life in a city you chose on purpose is a fine outcome. But if the plan was for the honeymoon to be permanent, month four arrives with a bill.

4. Because someone else's move looks like the answer

Feeds are full of people who moved abroad and seem transformed. What you are watching is a highlight reel with the lonely evenings, the paperwork, and the missed birthdays edited out. I have lived versions of both reels, and I can tell you the unedited one is longer.

The deeper problem is not that other people exaggerate. It is that their reasons are not your reasons. A move that fixed their life says nothing about yours, because they were solving a different equation with different variables: different work, different family, different temperament.

No one can take this decision for you, and only you know what is right for you. That sentence sounds like a greeting card until you are the one deciding, and then it becomes the whole point. Borrow ideas from other people's moves. Never borrow the decision.

5. To have everything at once

There is a dilemma in living abroad that no amount of planning removes, so I will state it plainly: at home, you will crave being abroad. Abroad, you will miss home, your family, and the people who have known you longest. We always want what we cannot currently have, and a move does not end that tug-of-war. It only changes which side of it you wake up on.

Coming from a small town sharpens the dilemma further. The opportunities, the kind of work I do, and most of the people I have met doing it exist away from my village, which means going home in any permanent way now carries a price too. There is no configuration in which I hold everything at once.

If you need a life with nothing missing, do not move. If you can accept that something will always be missing, and choose deliberately which something, you are ready to think about it seriously.

The quick test for your own reason

If your reason survives its question, it might be the good one.

The one good reason: you are moving toward something

Every move that worked in my life was a move toward something specific: a degree, a job I could not do from home, people I wanted to learn from, a version of myself I could not become in the place where everyone had already decided who I was. Every move I have watched fail was a move away from something: boredom, heartbreak, a career that had stalled.

I believe growth requires big moves, and big moves are usually not made at home. Staying near my hometown for my bachelor's degree was the practical choice at the time, and it is one of my few mild regrets, because I now know what the later, bigger moves did for me that no amount of staying could have done. Leaving is how I learned English properly, how I stopped assuming my village's view of the world was the world, and how I ended up doing work that did not exist on my home town's horizon.

The distinction is direction. Toward means you can name what you are going to get, and you would want it even on a rainy Tuesday in February. Away means the destination is just "not here", and "not here" is a coordinate, not a life.

How to decide, without lying to yourself

The decision deserves better than a pro-and-con list written in one excited evening.

• Give it a season, in writing. I keep a weekly written reflection and it has caught more bad reasoning than any single decision framework, because a reason that appears twelve weeks in a row is a signal and a reason that appeared once after a bad day at work is noise.
• Test the reason, not the destination. The self-reflection questions sorted by situation include a set for exactly this kind of crossroads.
• Look at the whole board first. If the itch is vague dissatisfaction rather than a named goal, run a life audit before calling the movers. Often the area that scores lowest has nothing to do with where you live, and sometimes the honest answer is that the job is the problem, not the country, in which case the question is whether to quit, which is a much cheaper experiment than emigrating.

Moving abroad at the right time, for a reason that points toward something, was the best series of decisions I ever made. The same move, made two years earlier for the wrong reason, would have been an expensive way to learn that I travel with myself. Take the decision seriously enough to know which of the two you are about to make.