A video popped up on my YouTube feed recently, dude talking about how “bad” Canada is and how he’s leaving. It’s a position I can personally relate to, having myself left Canada in the past, unhappy with the place, and have spent a good deal of time contemplating leaving again as things have seemingly gotten “worse” in recent years. However, as waiting to make decisions from a place of clarity rather than impulsively bouncing across the globe once more, new perspectives have opened up to see this way of living from a more balanced spectrum of both the allures & illusions of becoming an expat and/or “digital nomad.”
There are a number of reasons people sell their things, pack up what remains, and hop on a place to either settle in a foreign country or keep moving from one to the next…
Weather, lifestyle, the appeal of certain places & cultures all filter into one set of reasons. Economic factors, another - a biggie amongst those with higher incomes being that of taxation. And then, the matter of politics.
Though people have surely been relocating for these & other reasons as far back as man had the ability to, recent years have seen the growing popularity of these trends as the internet has enabled us to work from anywhere. And if you’ve ever been curious, you mighta come across guys/channels/companies like Nomad Capitalist, Offshore Citizen, and Wealthy Expat seizing the opportunity to educate on options and cash in on assisting others in navigating legal complexities of taking their leaps.
The picture they paint… well, if you know a thing or two about marketing, you know that it’s alot easier to sell people on an idealized image of it. And for those of us who’ve ventured into a “digital nomad” life, there certainly is a common honeymoon phase where it seems to be the end-all-be-all fantasy life come true. The feeling of having “escaped” the tyranny, cold, mundane reality, and tax extortion traps of one’s home country for pristine beaches, low living costs, and communities of “like minded entrepreneurs” is an experience seemingly hard to beat.
But how long does this honeymoon phase last? How long can one color their experience to meet the ego’s desire for an all-positive all-the-time fairytale, before other aspects of reality creep in and can no longer be denied? What exactly are the illusions of the expat/nomad lifestyle so many are enticed into?
When I first jumped ship from the normality train in my twenties, first to Thailand and later Bali, I didn’t have the full awareness of all the different reasons for leaving. I did sense an energetic oppression in my home country of Canada present throughout its institutions & culture, though really wasn’t tuned into politics enough to grasp what was going on. And I’d never made enough money, and my dad had been doing my tax returns/filings, so the whole tax situation was of no concern at that point. In a way, the ease of my decisions to leave were made with both a rather innocent purity & naivety - simply following through on a “calling,” letting my instinct/intuition lead the way to promised lands… where the promises did seem to be fulfilled.
I fucking loved Asia. The food, massages, vibe, weather, affordable costs of living, sense of adventure. All-in-all, there was an expansion and sense of freedom unlike anything available in Canada. I was sold. As biased my memories may be, it’s tough not to conclude those were the six total best years of my life. But of course, life unfolds in ways that aren’t always in our conscious direction,and my path took me back here… and - though the ego craving all those perks of the past might not wanna admit - with a different level of appreciation for many of the upsides to this country. Though with my marriage having fallen apart in less than 3 years and not a whole lot else I saw as reason to stay, sights were set to embark overseas once again in search of that aliveness I’d only found abroad.
But… COVID. In hindsight, it was life’s perfect way of putting brakes on my immature compulsivity towards escapism, slowing me down to face some of what I’d been running from since the start. Though within a couple years, that itch was acting up again. And given the extremity of Canada’s governmental overreach into personal liberties, there was more than enough evidence to support my confirmation biases that it was a shit country worth escaping. Yet as honoring the “inner guidance” indicating it wasn’t time to make any big moves yet - providing space to allow the addictive draw towards the alluring to subside - part of what emerged was an increasing awareness of the illusions of this ‘expat/nomad dream…’
The political considerations were one that have become much clearer since first leaving Canada in my twenties, and evermore so through the CONVID years. I always knew there was repulsive corruption in the governments of the western world and would prefer to “escape” them. Though while I may have been effectively able to delude myself during the years in Asia that I could isolate myself there in a foreign land, crafting my personalized bubble totally disconnected from the uglier political realities at home, one thing has become undeniably apparent the last few years: the “New World Order” is that… a world order.
While Nomad Capitalist may reel in folk like I, who want to “escape” the tyranny encroaching all corners of the globe, with click-bait implying there is somewhere promising ‘greener pastures,’ having spent ALOT of time looking at and contemplating options, I’m not sold. Elevate to a high-enough altitude and look at the global landscape objectively without others’ biases influencing your perception, and it become evident that *should there really be an “elite” having extensively planned out world domination, they’ve done the job well. The idea that there is any particular place immune to the parasitic invasion of worldwide financial, economic, political, and socio-cultural systems is a pipe dream.
While at the same time, there occurs a vast distortion of how “good/bad” things actually are in certain places.
As happens as a natural consequence of the cognitive biases & logical fallacies always present in humans’ filtration & judgement fundamental in shaping their perceptions.
For those who believe a country’s political climate is all-pervasive, a threat, and that the ‘best’ response is to escape, select news headlines providing evidence to support those beliefs is bound to be given significant weight - irregardless of a ton of other data points that might contradict/invalidate their beliefs, provide effective alternative responses & solutions, and/or give very different glimpses of personalized experiences many within the country may be living on a day-to-day basis that do not match the expectations set with/through the fear-based paradigm. Meanwhile, there may often be a different set of biases at play filtering information to support the beliefs that some other places are “better” - conclusions which may have no tangible objective basis in reality, but are merely a byproduct of subjective narrations formed through subconscious attempts to self-validate one’s beliefs. And of course, a third set of biases in place to complete the triad of past, present, and future with slippery slope & strawman fallacies, attempting to project fears into the future, anticipating worst-case scenarios that while may have sound logical basis according to the frames one approaches them with, are often/probably not likely given consideration of a ton of info that’s gotten filtered out by one’s biases.
Of course, we need some specific, tangible examples here to make sense of the technical theories & psychological dynamics…
More to come in Part Two…