Europe Won’t Fix You
Moving to Europe won’t solve your problems, nor should it.
Many years ago, in a small Tuscan village, I sat under a vine-draped pergola in the backyard of my friend’s parent’s villa. The house and her family could trace their roots back 500 years to this place.
I watched as my friend’s father, Gio—freshly shaved, his hair neatly cut and pomaded—splashed milk into bowls for his farrago of stray dogs and cats.
I closed my eyes. The scent of lemons and limes from his Acqua di Parma cologne floated over on the soft breeze. Then, the voices of an angry couple exploded from a bedroom window.
My Italian friend, whom I’d met in graduate school, was yelling (she’s Italian, so no judgment) at her American boyfriend, an old friend; in fact, I’d introduced them... a mistake? I opened my eyes and met Gio’s worried gaze.
The argument was the same one they’d been having since I arrived: stay in Italy or return to the States.
He’d bought a nearby farmhouse and wanted to continue working on it. In truth, calling the ruin of crumbling rocks in the woods with no electricity or water a house was a kindness. Behind his half-baked American fantasy of life in the Italian slow lane was a broken family and an abiding distaste for 9 to 5.
Whereas she, who had done the hard work of learning perfect English and graduating from a prestigious American university, wanted to take the job she’d been offered back in D.C. to work in her chosen field of counter-terrorism, of which there were zero jobs within a 10,000-kilometer radius; and judging by her father’s concerned expression, he wanted that for his daughter, too.
That’s because father and daughter had seen what befalls men like my friend—afternoons spent at the local bar, weeks and years wasted on a project that needs a job to fund it, a life full of big talk strangled by inaction. His American fantasy was their Italian nightmare.1
A cottage industry sells the dream of moving to Europe as a cure for all the ills of modern American life. The truth is significantly more complicated.
Like so many Eat, Pray lovers (shout out,
) who’ve come after him, my American friend was using foreign cultures and people to fix him. Just one more of 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.Americans who came to Europe as an experiment, for a long-out-of-the-picture boyfriend or girlfriend, for a job teaching English, or to fix up a crumbling farmhouse—they all came for a dream. When that dream faded—because real life was hard and even more complex in a foreign country—if they had something to go home to, they did.
While those who remained did so because it was less awful to fail in Rome or Paris as an enigmatic expat than back home in front of their families in Fargo or Boston.
I blame A Year in Provence.
The groundwork for this rosé colored fantasy was laid with A Year in Provence, then accelerated through Covid and the Trump years—and I get the appeal; I do. I loved Peter Mayle’s charming tale of life in a small French town, but it, like the genre it spawned, is as close to the real lives of the people who live there as romance novels are to a 30-year marriage—it’s all heightened; it's a fantasy.
Now, more than 30 years later, there’s an ever-growing list of books and social media accounts specializing in the transference of cultural capital from small European towns and villages into English-language best-sellers and movie deals because we need to believe there’s a quick fix for the ills of modern life.
Americans are running away to France or Italy, and now the new darling, Portugal, for a host of good reasons.
The United States is changing; it’s facing a tidal wave of anti-democratic policies and politicians, and that’s awful and scary. Moreover, life in America is brutal. It is a hyper-competitive society with little to no safety net or shared social contract that weaves us into a tapestry of mutually beneficial community.2
When Americans come to Europe and see weeks and weeks of paid vacation, social medicine, and a centrist political system (although, I’m looking at you, France/Germany/Denmark/Italy), you would be forgiven if you thought you’d found paradise.
But what you find quaint or novel masks the complex realities of the people here. Try dealing with the inefficiencies and frustrations of daily life in Italy or France, not just for fun—because, in the end, you don’t have to be here—but as the locals must: with no exit strategy to escape the unending tribulations and quotidian struggles.
Life in the US, as in Europe, is a series of trade-offs.
As you contemplate your move, it might be worth noting that most people in that tiny Tuscan village of your dreams would kill to have a US passport and access to all the opportunities you can’t wait to get away from. Just look at the unemployment rate in Europe, and you’ll see what I mean.3
Despite the multitude of books and vloggers that try to convince you that moving to a small village in France will fix your life, it won’t.
Instead, it will add multiple layers of complication (and this is the fun part) in a language you don’t speak. Nothing says crying on the sidewalk like dealing with Italian immigration. Trust me when I say you haven’t suffered until you’ve dealt with the French or Italian bureaucracy as an immigrant unsure of language and customs.
That’s why I was amused and then horrified by
’ 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. For the record, there is no hell like the hell of worrying about and trying to care for a sick or aging family member from five time zones away.
All those wonderful things they have in Europe are predicated on giving up as many other wonderful things.
Things we have in the US but fail to appreciate because we were gifted them at birth. Indeed, the privilege of being an American gave you the money and the freedom to buy a golden visa and move to Porto. And, it’s worth pointing out that even if the good people of Portugal dreamed of finding opportunities in the US, it’s unlikely they’d have a job that paid them enough to do so. Americans are rich. You might not be comfortable with that fact, but we are, and many, many, many people around the world want what we, in our privilege, so blithely condemn and abandon.
Unsurprisingly, I have found over the years that in contrast to folks born with a US passport, naturalized US citizens understand the benefits of living in America, even with the growing list of problems (try explaining mass shootings and student debt to anyone not American: you can’t). They sacrificed much to earn one, and unlike those who ran away, they stayed to fight and make America better, not just for themselves but for all of us.
The Elizabeth Minchillis and David Lebovitzs of this world are less common than you might imagine.
For most expats, it’s often a one-way conversation about all they’ve taken and how they’ve benefited. Rarely, if ever, is it about how they’ve contributed. The people who came to build something—a family, a life, a career—enriching their present lives, not hiding from their old ones, are few and far between.
As you daydream about escaping all the ills of modern American life, it's worth remembering that it’s not better over here; it’s just different.
She is currently married, not to my friend, lives with her family in Virginia and has had a long and successful career in counter-terrorism, or at least I think she has—she can’t talk about it, or she’d have to kill me.
Also known as socialism.
In March 2024, the youth unemployment rate in Italy was 22.8 percent.
Elizabeth, standing ovation. 👏🏼👏🏼 Moving to Europe does not solve your problems.
1.) I'm married to a French man and spoke some French when I arrived in France, but this has been one of the most challenging, isolating, and stressful experiences of my life. *And I used to work politics in DC!*.
2.) The "European Dream" industrial complex omits issues like cultural difference (the cultures are more different than people let on...), language barriers, loneliness, homesickness. Americans will be surprised at how much France is a relatively "closed" culture (do not come for me in the comments- this is well-documented.)
3.) They don't mention the pesky fact that European salaries are, on average, far lower than American. The best way to "live the European dream" is to get rich in America then move overseas!
4.) When they boast of "free" services like healthcare and daycare they don't mention the eye-watering tax rates in most European countries. (Not starting a political war on here, this is a fact.)
5.) Do you like a takeout salad on occasion? Clothes dyers? Air conditioning? Target? TJ Maxx? You'll be SOL in most of Europe.
6.) Last, and not least, when you move to Europe, you will bring your insecurities, anxieties, sensitive issues, and anything else you might be working on.
I'm not sharing this to put down Europe, start an online war about healthcare policy, or put down anyone's dream or experience.
But for God's sake, moving to Europe will not solve your problems.
It's not that there's no trade-offs. Virtually everywhere you live has positives and negatives (the trick is to determine which set of positives/negatives work for you at that point in time). But living in Europe can just generally be preferable. It was only when I left North America that I discovered I am not made for the way that North America has decided to develop itself. I need the kind of development that you find in Asia/Europe. That lifestyle so broadly improves my quality of life, and living in a car-obsessed culture so broadly degrades my quality of life, that I have never returned to the United States.
There are a lot of shaky comparisons out there. It's common for people to say things like, "Your salary in the United States is much higher than in Europe". These are often poor points of comparison (your costs in the United States – for education, for health care, for pharmaceuticals, for owning a vehicle or two, for all that overconsumption, for so many things – are also much higher, so you'd better earn more!). Actual differences lie in things like access to public transportation and quality of food, say. When your point of comparison is "I've got a more satisfying job, I can save more, I love learning languages, I run into friends all the time just going about my day, and my 10-minute commute by subway is SO much more preferable to my 90-minute commute by car to a shittier job because I couldn't secure anything else from my place in a suburb outside the city because I could never afford to live downtown, which means I had to pre-plan events to hang out with friends because you'll never just run into someone you know", well, that indicates a drastic change in lifestyle. And in that light, Europe does solve a lot of problems.