Culture, Digested: How to Know When to Leave
Every election, people threaten to leave depending on the results. When George W. Bush was elected, a lot of people declared they were going to go to Canada. When Obama was elected, a lot of people who had not been to Europe recently said they were going to go to Europe. (I’ll let you sort out the reasons for that.) With Trump, the destinations are more decentralized. The first time a lot of people said New Zealand because it had a female leader. Expat communities in Bali, Berlin, and Portugal grew. People who have not been to Europe recently (or who have not been paying close attention to European politics) keep saying maybe now’s the time to move there. Better work-life balance. Did you know you can eat whatever you want over there and still lose weight? The American food supply is poison, I swear.
Political instability is a pretty common reason to leave a country, especially if you are of a demographic likely to bear a disproportionate amount of harm with the shift in the ruling power. But a lot of people will exaggerate either out of fear or to avoid social ostracism the amount of threat they will be under. A lot of people through professional networks, money, and adaptation can live very normally through instability. And a lot of people who think they can protect themselves with wealth and social status find themselves surprised that under certain circumstances that means very little.
Americans are used to alleviating the difficulty they personally face caused by intractable social problems with what is essentially shopping. If someone lives in a state where abortion they want or need is now illegal, they can overcome this by buying an airline ticket to another state where it is legal and paying a medical provider there for the procedure. And if they can’t afford the trip? Well… There are networks in places that can help women who can’t afford to travel out of state access care, but they’re not always easy to find if you are not socially embedded within a community because you’ve never had to be or you just moved to the area for a job or your own community is not the kind to care about these sorts of things.
Buying a ticket out of the United States right now is a bit like shopping your way out of oppression. Which is not a statement of condemnation — sometimes that is all that you’ve got. If you have the resources—or the access to debt—to buy transportation, move your belongings, hire an immigration attorney, and establish yourself in a new country, there’s nothing really stopping you from doing this. I think the magical thought “This is what the universe wants for me” when an opportunity arises is a way to chase away doubt, guilt, or anxiety. But what it really does is just reinforce this idea that if you can afford something you deserve that something. Why else would the universe have given you this money to move to Berlin if it didn’t want you to move to Berlin?
People leave their countries for all kinds of reasons. War, dictators, coups, yes. But also, I could make slightly more money over there than here. I saw a movie once that convinced me I would be happiest in this other place. I fell in love with someone not here. I saw someone else move there on social media and I want to be more like them so I think I should move there too. None of these reasons to move are legitimate or illegitimate.
If you do leave, there can be a temptation to think ridiculous things like, “Now I am stateless. Just like the Syrian refugees.” Or whoever. The Venezuelans in New York City, the Turks in Berlin. In one way, yes: your experience should make you more sympathetic to others in even more difficult positions than your own. You should listen to them and learn from them and help in the ways that you can. But often this will only be used in the most self-flattering way possible, to make your suffering more dramatic and romantic. And you’ll use it to judge the way other people behaved or made different decisions than you did. “I learned the language, why can’t……….” Our suffering is too precious to us.
There can be tension between the people who leave and the people who stay. If your country falls into civil war or your currency crashes or the United States backs a coup and takes away your ability to make your own political choices, the fates of the people who stay and those who leave are irreconcilably divided. The pain of exile can’t be understood by those who experience the pain of staying, and vice versa. People who stay can create fantasies for themselves about how they did it for noble reasons rather than because they didn’t have the opportunity or out of fear of the unknown, and it’s easy to curse the people who left as cowards and narcissists. They can bluster about what they did during the hard times, like how after the liberation of Paris everyone claimed to have been in the Resistance.
A lot of people who leave will ultimately return. Because it’s hard to live a life in another language, because not every community is welcoming, because other countries have problems you couldn’t even imagine before arrival. Because tyranny sometimes barely even changes your life. Returning can be even harder than leaving, or staying. It can feel impossible to cross the divide that leaving created between you and your friends, your community, your own life.
People will want you to account for the decisions you made. Did you leave for the right reasons, did you do enough when you stayed. What could you have done better or differently. Whatever hardship you endured will become a defining part of your experience, proof that you were justified in your choices. If you want something better for yourself, people will demand to know how much you suffered and they will say that it was not enough. We want justice, for resources to go to the people who deserve them the most. But the calculations to determine that are impossible, and you can never predict what will be the thing that breaks you and what will be the thing that makes you.
Ultimately, people will make a decision, and overwhelmingly this decision will be to stay. And they will construct a narrative around that decision (“I am staying to help” whatever that means) to protect themselves from their own doubts and the doubts of others. It’s the emphatic statements of certainty that should make you skeptical. Underlying them are unseen layers of anxiety.
Recommendation:
I liked Matt Pearce’s column on the loners and losers who commit political violence.
Really enjoyed Peter Gatrell’s The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent.
Re-reading Don DeLillo’s (difficult to find) “American Blood: A Journey Through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK”. Here it is in a Google doc.
This is the only good essay ever written about Elena Ferrante.
Spent a lot of time recently on jiu jitsu and lifting forums, so this TikTok about men discussing their diets will be running through my head until the end of time. Will just occasionally think BUGS AND PRETZELS and start laughing out loud.
And in case you missed it, Robert Long Foreman wrote about men in domestic spaces, the “just when I thought I was out they pulled me back in” violence storyline, and The Way of the Househusband. It’s a wonderful essay.
The Way of The Way of the Househusband
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I don’t eat meat, but I like hamburgers. They make for easy lunches. Add pickles and I’m having the time of my life. Beyond Burgers are a good option if you don’t eat meat. They’re not great, though. I’m not sure what they’re made of. They seem unhealthy. There’s junk in there for sure, and a box of eight Beyond patties costs $18.99.
It takes a lot to leave, and it often feels like defeat to come back. But it can also be fortifying. Once you’ve left and learned what you are capable of, you can choose to take up the responsibilities you left behind. When those burdens are all you’ve known, they can be suffocating; when you choose to go back to them, they can be meaningful work.
There might only be a small degree of agency between those two options. But feeling like there’s any agency at all is, IMO, the thin line between most of us and a mental breakdown.
And if you leave once, you can always leave again. It’s good to have hard limits on the levels of humiliation/toxicity/boredom we’re willing to take.
Brilliant, you capture the dilemma of the dichotomous yet interlinked relationship between the departed and the remainers perfectly. British expats in Southern Europe would be an interesting study.