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Change Your Location, Change Your Life

When moving to a new place–in or outside the US–is the best solution to your problems

When I was in my twenties, living in Washington, DC, and working in the Clinton Administration, my boyfriend and I took the train to New York City for the weekend so I could see my first Broadway show and meet some of his college friends.

Within hours of setting foot in Manhattan, I knew I had to live there. I couldn’t believe a place like this even existed. From that day on, all I did was strategize how I could make the Big Apple my home.

Fast-forward a few years, and I was working at America Online, Inc., which had purchased Time Warner, headquartered in New York City. I pitched my boss on a move, and she gave me the green light. Within a month, I had sold my house and moved into a sublet on the Upper West Side.

I knew only one person in the city outside of work. You would think I would’ve been lonely, but quite the opposite. Every morning, a few seconds after opening my eyes and realizing where I was, I would jump out of bed, thrilled to start the day and explore my new city.

I was madly in love.

It would be hard to underscore how much moving from Washington, DC, to New York City changed my life.

My social life expanded well beyond anything I had before. I became a person who regularly went to plays and art galleries. I attended fashion shows and saw movies in theaters just steps from my apartment multiple times a week. The new friends I had quickly amassed lived mostly within walking distance or a quick subway ride away, so socializing was easy, and I felt more connected than I ever had before. For the first time in my adult life I didn’t have a car and I walked and walked and walked, which was good for my mental and physical health.

Looking back, it is amazing to me how quickly my happiness and life satisfaction level rose. Just weeks before, I had been bored and lonely living in a city that left me feeling cold.

All it took was a change of location and I had an amazing new life.

This topic is on my mind because I read a wonderful essay by Brian Wiesner, Europe Will Change You,¹ in which he expounds on how moving from the US to Spain has changed his life in all sorts of wonderful ways and underscores how much the place you choose to live will determine the kind of life you have.

His piece is a bit of a rebuttal to a post called Europe Won’t Fix You.² The American author, Elizabeth, who lives abroad laments, “the untold alcoholics, lost souls, and troubled ex-pats I’ve met during my decades abroad—most of them running from something, rarely to anything.”

No matter where you decide to live, she claims, at its core, life is the same. If that sounds familiar, you may be thinking of the popular maxim, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

It’s both catchy and, as I think my New York City story demonstrates, not really true.

This notion, popularized by meditation guru Jon Kabat-Zinn, is meant to underscore that you can’t outrun your problems. No matter where you go, you will still be there, and I guess it’s supposed to be profound to claim that we are the cause of all of our problems.

If your problem is that you are impatient and get testy when standing in line, then Zinn can probably help you. If you notice a pattern of being commitment phobic, then perhaps therapy could sort that out. But if your problem is that you have to work seven days a week to afford rent and food and don’t have time to see friends or family and have understandably become lonely and depressed, you are not the problem.

You don’t need Europe (or anywhere else) to fix you, because you aren’t broken.

You are living in a place that is grinding you down, and the solution just might be moving to another place, in or outside the US.

If your problem is that you live in a violent country where mass shootings are background noise, then moving to a country like Italy, which has never had a mass shooting, will actually solve a problem that has nothing to do with you.

If you live in fear of being bankrupted by medical debt even though you have health insurance, then moving to a country with free or very affordable healthcare will solve a major problem for you—which, again, you did not cause.

If you decide to move to another country where life is affordable and you don’t have to go into debt for life necessities, then you won’t have to work so much, and you will have more time and more connections—well, look at that.

It wasn’t you, after all.

As I’ve written before, we don’t need self help; we need support.³ No amount of inner work, meditation, therapy, or yoga will make any of the things I just mentioned not problems.

In Europe Will Not Fix You, the author notes:

I was amused and then horrified by Kirsten Powers’ popular piece lamenting how we live in the US as “not normal” in contrast to her idealized, fairy tale version of life in Europe. Life here is full of problems—not the ones you’re used to, sure, but life at its core is the same no matter where you decide to live it. Bills must be paid, food must be cooked, and your kids and elderly parents will still need you.

It’s noteworthy that the issues I raised in my piece—affordable health care, no mass shootings, a culture that values personal connection more than acquiring possessions and accolades—are cast as an “idealized fairy tale version” when it’s just a description of how the society operates in the country I chose to move to.

I’m talking about the most basic things people should expect—not some magical fantasy land.

Moving away from the place you know best is hard for many people, even if it’s within their home country. To relocate to another country is daunting, and it is important to be aware of the various hurdles you will come up against, as I wrote in the essay, How to Move to Another Country.

But if you are struggling in the US and feel compelled to move to a place with more social support, affordability, access to nature, or whatever it is that your soul feels pulled towards, then please know that it’s not true that you will struggle wherever you go. Much of what is called mental illness in this country—epidemic rates of anxiety and depression—is caused by the toxic way we live.⁴ And if systemic factors do not cause your anxiety or depression, that’s no reason not to find a better quality of life for yourself.

If moving to another country is not an option, then it might be worth considering if there is a way to move within the US.

I have friends who have left DC to find affordable housing and more community—one went to Cleveland and the other to Philadelphia—and they are so much happier. A former neighbor who was miserable in DC relocated to Charlottesville and is over the moon to have more space for her kids and easy access to nature.

When I was 18, I boarded a plane by myself and flew thousands of miles from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to attend Marquette University. I was leaving a small, isolated, town in the interior of Alaska that was a three and a half hour flight to the closest US city. Many of my friends chose to attend school in state, but I knew I wanted to explore the world. Even so, I loved where I grew up and was terrified when I left.

It’s hard to imagine how different my life would have been if I had decided to stay home. Considering the life I’ve led since then, the idea that I would be the same person had I never left doesn’t seem possible.

The fact is, if you want to really change your life, you just might need to change your location.

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1

Europe Will Change You by Brian Wiesner

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Europe Won’t Fix You by Elizabeth

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You can listen to my interview with therapist Courtney Leak about how much better her mental health is in Panama or political commentator and radio host Zerlina Maxwell saying the same about Italy. Zerlina notes in the interview that after being in Italy for a short while, she noticed she no longer needed to take something to sleep, as she typically did in the US. Both of these women continued doing their high-stress jobs in their new countries, so it’s not like these improvements came from being on vacation or a sabbatical.

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