Americans love moving.
One of my first big life dreams, back when I was 11 or 12, was to move.
All I wanted, at that age, was to get out of the Arizona desert.
This was the 90s, and the coolest place on earth at that time was Seattle, Washington, where everyone was a famous grunge musician.
I hadn’t really been anywhere outside Arizona, at that point, so I was just guessing at what other places were like.
But I wanted to live somewhere with real trees instead of pointy shrubs, where you’re not shaking scorpions out of your shoes in the mornings. Seattle seemed to fit the bill – at least I assumed it did.
Nirvana didn’t have any songs about cacti, after all, or about rattlesnakes. Neither did Soundgarden.
I figured as soon as I was old enough to catch a plane, I’d just head up to the Pacific Northwest, and start a new, grungy, flannel-wearing life in the shade.
But those were just pre-teen fantasies. I never did anything about the Seattle plan.
Later, though, I managed to get out of the Arizona desert.
I made it all the way to New Orleans for my brief attempt at higher education. That was better than the desert wasteland, for a number of reasons.
But the university was full of people who’d moved there from elsewhere, too.
Mostly, from places much better than the outskirts of Phoenix. What were they all doing?
What were we all doing… here in a strange city, so far from home?
Home is where the jamón is.
After 9 months of higher education, I ended up back in Arizona. But everything was different now.
My parents had split up while I was away, and it was just my dad in the old house. He was trying to fix it up and sell it, as part of the divorce.
Was this home?
In a sense, it was. And I had never liked it much. The new family situation just made it worse.
I was young, and full of energy and intense emotion. I wanted to have an experience of being alive… and sitting in the desert, watching the occasional truck throw up dust on the dirt road out front wasn’t it.
Neither was the job I got, working as a cashier at Safeway. I felt like the life was being squeezed out of me with every week I stayed “home”.
Glossing over a couple of years I’d rather not talk about, I finally got out of Arizona for good in 2004, when I moved to Madrid.
I had no compelling reason for this, but there was a girl out there I wanted to see more of, and I thought that “Europe” might be a good place for a poetic young person to have adventures.
For a couple of years I kicked around in Madrid, working under the table and living in rented rooms. But things didn’t go anywhere with “the girl”, and everybody I else I met kept leaving.
I’d meet some new group of students in September or October of every year, and by June they’d be gone without a trace. My social circle would be back to zero.
My temporary friends had mostly “gone home”, back to the US, or somewhere else in Europe.
I was still there… in a foreign country, where I was technically illegal.
Should I stay or should I go?
After a couple of years I was tired of it. Maybe I could go somewhere else.
I though about Italy, and France, and Brazil. Places a guy like me could have adventures. But I didn’t really have the money to move. And I was just going to be illegal in another foreign country.
Who’s to say it would be any better?
I started an online business around 2010 so I would have a plan B if I ever got deported. I figured that if things went south in Spain I could use the passive income to set up a new life somewhere cheap, like Costa Rica.
Around that time, people started using the term “digital nomad”. Maybe I didn’t need a home at all. Maybe my home could be the global network of airports and AirBnbs.
Meanwhile, I moved a few times within Madrid.
Eventually I got a girlfriend, and decided to stick around for a while longer.
But what really convinced me to stay in Spain long-term was the “path to citizenship”.
After several years of illegality, I was able to get a work permit and start paying taxes. That put me on track to someday get Spanish nationality. Some distant day. But it was better than nothing.
Finding my place in the world
I’ve always been an introvert, so making friends was difficult. What happened in Madrid is that I met few well-networked extroverts, and ended up as part of their social groups.
That was a big improvement over wandering the cold streets – lonely, broke and hungry – as I’d done for my first few years. I eventually split up with the girlfriend. But by that time, Madrid was home.
I’d finally found my place in the world.
Then I met Morena.
She was studying for a PhD when we met. After a few months, she quit her job in the lab. A few months after that, she decided the job market for English speakers was better up in Barcelona.
She did an interview for a company here in Poblenou, and got the job. Suddenly, she had to move.
We were together, so I went along, begrudgingly.
This was, in my mind, a temporary situation. Morena would learn enough Spanish to get a job in Madrid, and we’d come back. Madrid was home. And besides, I didn’t like Barcelona at all.
I figured six months, tops, and we’d be done with Catalonia.
Eight years later, married and with a mortgage, we’re still in Barcelona. Morena has a good career up here, and I’m legally Spanish, and Catalan. I didn’t see it coming.
Maybe this is home.
Searching for a “feeling of home”
People move abroad for all sorts of reasons. Some are just having an adventure, like I was. Others are fleeing something in their native countries.
Still others are looking for a place to call home.
I guess they’re looking for a certain feeling.
And I’m not sure what that feeling is, exactly, or how they’ll know when they find it. I imagine the Americans on their “scouting trips” in Andalucía, looking for a village with a certain quality to the light that makes them think “This is it… home!”
Or maybe they’re evaluating places based on the beauty of the landscape, or the “niceness” of the locals.
It all seems a bit vague to me.
In my case, I was never planning on settling down and doing adult things like marriage and home ownership. But even so, I always understood that “a feeling of home” was something you had to work for.
Originally, here in Barcelona, I just avoided doing the work. I assumed we’d be back in Madrid soon enough, so I stayed out of local culture. I didn’t want to see the sights, or care about any of it.
This was just a temporary adventure in digital nomadry.
Years later, though, I’m taking my integration more seriously. I’m showing up at the gym every day, and learning Catalan, and going to a local Buddhist center.
I’m going out of my way to talk to the people in the market. I want to create community.
The Search for Happiness
I suppose that the “feeling of home” is just part of a larger quest: the search for happiness.
Personally, I think happiness is overrated.
When I look back on my life, I can think of long periods of time when I was struggling to achieve big goals that seemed totally out of reach.
Was I happy at those times?
Not really. I was sometimes euphoric, sometimes heartbroken, and often just grateful that I was in a position to struggle for something meaningful.
I look back now, and think “wow, those were the days!”
But at the time, that life was pretty hard. The thing is, it was meaningfully hard.
One of the main reasons I think that happiness is overrated is that a lot of things in life just suck. And most of them can’t be avoided. But you sure can find meaning in them.
Imagine, for example, that you move to Spain hoping to find happiness… and what you actually find is loneliness, tons of bureaucracy, and a huge language barrier.
Your life abroad might be harder than it was back home. Or at least hard in new and unexpected ways. But how you react to the difficulties makes all the difference.
Spain isn’t your personal Disney World – it’s a country with a long history, its own language(s), and a lot of people just struggling to get by. Spanish life isn’t a permanent vacation.
And neither, if we’re being realistic, is life anywhere else.
You might just bring your misery with you
And here’s another thing: misery is portable.
The days of “leaving it all behind” when you move abroad are long gone.
Yes, thanks to modern logistics and information technology, you can bring most of “it” with you, even halfway around the world.
In some ways, that’s a good thing. But in others, not so much.
If you’ve decided (for example) that a large part of your personality involves being angry at the news… guess what? You can see the same news 6000 miles away, in your Mediterranean paradise.
The notifications are probably right there in your pocket, each one demanding your moral indignation.
If you choose to play that game, you can be just as angry here as you were back home.
On the other hand, you might benefit a lot from some aspects of moving away. In my case, when I got to Madrid, I realized that I’d been surrounded by some very of toxic people back on the ranch.
Those people mostly lost interest in me when I moved to Spain, and I was able to be more intentional about my inputs. My life improved quite a bit.
But wherever you go, you’re going to bring at least some – probably most – of your hang-ups and neuroses with you. So be willing to do the inner work.
Moving somewhere might bring you happiness – but it’s far from guaranteed.
All you need is love, food, water, rent, electricity, gas, Wi-Fi, and 30 to 54% for taxes
Humans can benefit from thousands of years of the collected wisdom of others.
Most modern urbanites, however, choose to base their worldviews on a handful of bumper-sticker slogans, song lyrics, and lines from shampoo commercials.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone – or at least, younger me was.
“Life is short, have an adventure.” “All you need is love.” “I’m worth it!”
Well, okay. All that sounds nice. But in addition to love, it’s good to have money for food and rent. You might be worth it – but that “it” is ambiguous enough to be confusing.
And let’s not forget that you could live a long time. What seems like a life of adventure in your 20s looks more like self-indulgent loserdom if you’re doing the same thing in your 40s or 50s.
Most people, for most of history, belonged to some sort of tribe or nation. And that tribe or nation was attached to a place. Your identity wasn’t something to discover or invent – it was something that was defined by your family, your people, and your religion.
The idea that you can just pick up, move halfway around the world, and “put down roots” is a bit silly, if you think about how these things worked historically.
But you might want to try anyway.
Was Sisyphus an expat?
I’ve been abroad for more than half my life, and the only thing I can say for certain is that life in Spain worked for me. You’re different. You’re not me.
So you might find expat life to be just another tedious grind.
You might get sick of the bureaucracy or the language barrier and want to go back to California. Or you might enjoy it, and find the whole thing meaningful in ways you didn’t expect.
Albert Camus describes, in The Myth of Sisyphus, a type of absurd hero, condemned to push a huge rock up a mountain. Every time he gets close to the top, the rock rolls back down and he begins again.
Camus concludes…
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942.
Sisyphus has his life of struggle, and he can’t change it. But he can choose to improve his attitude towards the whole thing. He can choose to find meaning in the effort.
It’s a good analogy for Spanish bureaucracy – or for expat life, if you think about it.
As always, I love Spain
Some people love Spain. Others move abroad with high hopes, and find it to be disappointing.
But I’ve been to almost 30 countries at this point, and I can’t imagine myself being “happy” in any of them except Spain.
In fact, when I got my Spanish nationality last year, one of the first things I did was go through the list of EU countries one by one to see if there were any I wanted to live in.
Because now I can – EU passport holders can move around freely. It’s part of the European dream.
But looking at the list of 27 countries, I realized that the only one I want to live in is Spain – despite its problems.
That’s just my experience, though. Yours may vary.
To happiness! Or – even better – meaningful struggle.
Wherever you may find it.
Yours,
Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.
P.S. I wrote an article about immigrant life last year in which I tell the story in great detail, but basically, my feeling is that if people knew in advance everything they’d have to do to make a life for themselves abroad, they’d mostly just prefer to stay home. It can be worth it, eventually. But the trade-offs are there, too.
P.P.S. Of course, some Americans these days consider themselves to be fleeing. Full disclosure: I may have once considered that I was fleeing from the decline of the American Empire, because I was basing my life on lyrics from Rage Against the Machine. It was decades ago… what are you gonna do? Anyway, more about that in my article on American Refugees and the Exodus to Spain. Enjoy!
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