Let’s talk about some of the questions and considerations that arise when contemplating such a radical decision
A year ago I wrote an essay about how I had reached a conclusion that was somewhat shocking to me: I no longer wanted to live in the United States.
It turned out I wasn’t the only one who was contemplating such a massive change.
I was surprised when “The Way We Live in America is Not Normal” went viral and continued to attract readers all year. It’s probably what brought many of you here. Since Donald Trump won the election, there has been a noticeable uptick in people discovering and sharing the piece.
Obviously, when I wrote the essay, it was before the election. If Kamala Harris had won, I would have stuck with my decision to live outside of the U.S. because the problems I outlined had nothing to do with the specter of another Trump presidency, as stressful as that is for some of us. What has driven me from the U.S. are systemic problems that have been festering for decades, which neither party has clearly identified as the hair-on-fire crisis that it is.1
These issues include out-of-control health care costs, university price tags that lead to a lifetime of debt for graduates, mass shootings, private equity companies hoovering up industries and jacking up prices, and a third of Americans trapped in medical debt. We are bombarded with messages celebrating overwork and the constant search for more, more, more.
What I sense in the zeitgeist in the U.S., particularly among younger people, is that they have had enough. They are searching for simplicity and connection.
They are emotionally and physically depleted. They don’t want to work all the time and still barely be making it financially. They are isolated and lonely, living in a culture that prioritizes achievement and consumerism over community and connection. Depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation have become commonplace and it’s not a coincidence they have risen alongside the systemic economic problems and mass shootings in the U.S.
Americans don’t need more things; they need to feel safe. They need more time to spend with friends and family. They want to be able to afford the essentials of life: a home, education for their children, and quality health care without going into a lifetime of debt. They want this regardless of their race or gender or sexual identity.
What most Americans desire is what is considered a normal life in many other countries, including those with a fraction of the United States’ wealth, ingenuity, and power.
In fact, the life I describe was your average working or middle-class person’s experience when I was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, which is why I think many (not all) Baby Boomers don’t grasp the problem. They don’t realize how much the U.S. has changed since they were coming up in the world.2
The reason these changes occurred is because of decisions that were made by our government based on ideological and economic theories that were widely criticized as they were implemented. They were embraced by both political parties.
In terms of economic stability, Europe and the U.S. were not that different when I was growing up, and then suddenly, there was a divergence, and it became greater and greater until we ended up where we are now. (I am currently working on a book about this. I will share more about that in a later post).
Our current way of life is not due to the fact that we have a big military or a diverse society, because we had both of those things when I was growing up. And no, our health care is not more expensive because it’s better. In fact, it ranks dead last compared to peer nations. You can get excellent health care that is actually affordable in countries all over the world.
A 2024 report from the Commonwealth Fund examined five key domains of health system performance: access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health outcomes.
They noted:
The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the under-performance of its health care sector. While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic healthcare needs, including universal coverage.
The ability to keep people healthy is a critical indicator of a nation’s capacity to achieve equitable growth. In fulfilling this fundamental obligation, the U.S. continues to fail.
If you are in the camp that blames social media for our problems, I certainly won’t disagree that social media is a huge problem. But it seems sort of obvious that social media exists in other countries that aren’t having many of our problems. The suicide rate in the U.S. is 14 percent; in Italy, it’s 6 percent. Both countries have access to the Internet and social media.3
To put it bluntly, compared to our peer countries (and even some non-peer countries), our quality of life sucks.
In a recent survey by U.S. News & World Report, the U.S. didn’t even make the top 20 of the best countries for a great quality of life despite being the richest country in the world.
MyExpatTaxes, a company that helps Americans abroad navigate paying taxes, found in a 2024 survey that their clients overwhelmingly found a better quality of life in their new countries and were happy to pay higher taxes for all the services and support they received. (Apologies for the cut off text, this is from their site).4
Let’s Look At the Objections
Since I wrote that initial essay, I have received consistent and overwhelming gratitude from readers for helping people feel that they are not alone in feeling the way they do. I have also received criticism from a much smaller number of people who generally bring up the same objections, and who, if I’m being honest, I don’t think read the whole essay even though I’ve kept it outside the paywall.
Nonetheless, I don’t think the objections are without merit, but I generally find many of the claims overly binary and often too simplistic. Let’s look at them one by one.
- Moving Abroad is Only for Wealthy, Privileged Americans
In my experience, it’s actually the opposite. You have to be wealthy and privileged to live a normal life in the United States.
Most of the people I have encountered who have made the radical choice to relocate to another country have done so because the U.S. has become prohibitively expensive for them. I’ve lost track of the people who have told me that they are terrified of having a medical emergency that bankrupts them and leaves them with debt they will never be able to get out from under. Wealthy people don’t worry about these things. They may be wanting to leave now for political reasons, but this phenomenon predates Trump’s second term as president.
If you are working age, you do need to be able to work remotely or find a job with a company in the country where you want to move.5 If I was still at CNN, I would not be able to move to Italy. I am now a full-time writer, so I can do that from anywhere. Though it’s worth pointing out that if I had to stay in the US, I would not be able to live off of what I make as a writer. I’m only able to do it because of the decision to make a life in Italy which is more affordable than the US on a million different levels.
Yes, I’ll pay higher taxes, but I’ll never again pay $7000 for a root canal as I did a few weeks ago, which my expensive health insurance doesn’t cover. (A very successful dentist in my new home of Puglia told me that would cost around $300 dollars out of pocket in his practice).
I was arguably more privileged when I worked at CNN with a reliable income than I am now relying on income from writing, a vastly less stable and remunerative career choice than what I previously did for a living or what I would have to do to afford to live in the US.
- Stop Telling People to Move to Italy (or Europe) Because Those Countries Treat People of Color Badly
First, I’m not telling anyone to move out of the country, nor have I ever done so. I’m telling people why I moved out of the country and that they aren’t imagining that life is harder than it should be here and that many Americans find better lives in other countries. If or where they move is not my business, though I’m here to support them if they make that choice.
Second, there are people of color who have moved to Europe and find it vastly preferable to the U.S. In my interview with Zerlina Maxwell she shocked me when she said she felt more welcomed as a Black woman in Rome than in New York City. I know there are other Black people who have had a different experience. Every person will not have the same experience even if they live in the same country. There are many Americans who feel very happy, economically secure, and safe in the United States in a way that I and many others don’t.
All of these things can be true.
Finally, if you are a person of color who does not want to live in a mostly white country, that makes perfect sense to me. But there are many great countries to move to where there are Black or Brown majorities. My former therapist, Courtney Leak, a Black American woman, explained in an interview how much she and her Black son are thriving because they moved to Panama. I also loved this interview on the Quitted podcast with a Black American woman who moved to Grenada precisely because she wanted to be in a Black majority country. What she found there was a better quality of life and a regulated nervous system.
- Must Be Nice for You, But It’s Not An Option for Members of the LGBTQ+ Community to Move to Italy
I’m not a fan of Italy’s prime minister Georgia Meloni who is far right and anti-gay.
But it’s just not true that living in Italy is not an option for LGBTQ+ people. There are plenty of gay people living in Italy quite happily and who feel safe, including in the area where we bought land.
The couple who suggested we move to Puglia is a married gay American couple with four grown children. The couple that ran the Airbnb I stayed in all of September is also a gay married couple: one is Italian, and the other is British, and they think Puglia is a fantastic place to live. A lesbian British couple is moving in across the street from them after falling in love with the region, which has been referred to as a “gay mecca.”
From the New York Times:
For two decades, [Puglia] has been governed by leftists; Puglia’s current president, Michele Emiliano, “is very gay-friendly,” Etro says. The previous president, Nichi Vendola, who served for a decade until 2015, was himself a gay man, one of the first out politicians in Italy.
I’m sure there are other gay people who have moved to Italy from the U.S. who will report a different experience, just as there are gay people who can tell you horror stories about things that have happened to them in the United States, regardless of their official rights.
I do think it’s important for people who belong to marginalized groups to choose a country where they feel safe and accepted should they decide to move. These are valid concerns. All I’m suggesting is to not rely on generalizations cast as being representative of the experiences of all people who belong to a group—good or bad—or generalizations of entire countries, where the cultures differ wildly by region. The fact that I know gay people who love living in Italy does not prove that every gay person will have that experience. It merely shows that it’s not true that Italy is off limits to gay people, should it be a place they want to investigate.
I also think there is an argument to be made that more gay people living in Italy would be good for Italian members of the LGBTQ+ community who are the ones being oppressed by the Italian government. They not only are denied the right to marry but also to adopt or use surrogacy to have children. If I learned anything watching the gay rights movement in the U.S., the more people are exposed to gay people and their families, the more accepting they become and the more likely they are to support legal rights for the community.
- It’s Wrong To Leave the United States Now; You Should ‘Stay and Fight’ Like Me
This is the kind of binary thinking that makes U.S. discourse so hard to be around. I can’t say I’ll miss it. The view is, “Either you make the same decision I have, or you are morally suspect.”
There are people who care deeply about the United States who will choose to live here and others who will choose to leave. There will be some people for whom leaving is not an option, even if they want to do it, for a variety of reasons.
There is no moral conclusion to be drawn from any of these kinds of choices.
While many are seeking to leave the U.S. because of the election, it weirdly had the opposite effect on me. For a moment, I thought that perhaps I should be living in the U.S. during this period. I didn’t feel this way because I thought it would be wrong to be living somewhere else. I just wondered if I might be more helpful stateside. Then I remembered that I am a writer and that I can write from anywhere. I can interview people from my computer on Zoom, just like I did all through COVID.
I also plan to be involved with Democrats Abroad to do what I can to help get the millions of Democrats who don’t participate in elections to vote in the coming elections. They could have made a difference in this last election because they come from all over the U.S.—including battleground states. This is just one example of how to stay involved. I met a woman at a party a few days ago who left D.C. to live in Florence and does her progressive political consulting from there. If you are a Republican you could choose a different way to be involved.
The fact is, if you want to stay active in American politics or support American democracy, you can do that from other countries. You can vote from other countries and volunteer from afar thanks to the Internet.
But just as importantly, there are other ways to be helpful in the world. Perhaps you are an artist, and your art is inspiring or healing to others. You might be a meditation teacher and can teach your students from wherever you choose to live, or a therapist who can support you clients no matter your location.
Or you might be someone who doesn’t want to be involved in anything in the United States and that is actually your decision to make with no judgment from others. Your only reason for leaving may be due to fears about the political situation. That is completely legitimate. Everyone is on their own path, and we need to learn to accept that it might be different from what we believe is the “right” thing to do is.
In my next essay, I will share what I’ve learned about the logistics of moving to another country from the U.S., including addressing some common questions such as:
- How do you start researching life in another country, including focusing on places that need more people and investment? For example, in Italy, there are many regions that are begging people to move there due to a population drain, and they offer logistical support, tax incentives and extremely inexpensive homes.
- How do you gain legal residence in another country? I will use specifics for Italy that will be generally applicable to other countries.
- How do you make friends and find community in a new country?
- Drop specific questions into this post and I’ll do my best to address them next week.
Bernie Sanders, AOC, Pramila Jayapal and a handful of other leaders grasp the magnitude of the problem, but unfortunately they are not in charge of the Democratic Party and the media treats them like wild-eyed communists when all they are suggesting is that the government take care of its people. Even if you don’t like their solutions, at least they understand the problem.
Life was not perfect in the 1970s and early 1980’s but it was more economically stable for most people. The US has gotten better on other measures—racism, sexism, homophobia, though there is still a long way to go.
Globalization is hurting Italy, and younger generations are having a harder time than previous generations. But the scale of what is happening in the U.S. is on a completely different level.
Life in these other countries is not perfect. They sometimes have dysfunctional governments (though no more dysfunction than the US) and their own economic issues. I urge people to resist the pull to be hyper binary, which unfortunately is an aspect of the US that drives so much of our division. Another country doesn’t have to be perfect to be more livable and less crazy making and draining than the US.
Finding a job with a company that is based in or has an office in the country in which you want to live is hard, but it’s not impossible. I know people who have done it.
