North Americans, I’m one of you. You have to leave for a while. You gain perspective.

Back in '07, I left. I was in Australia in '09 and some Aussies asked me, ‘what’s it like living over there?’

The only thing I could come up with at the time was " causes neuroticism.’ It’s so much worse now that we have social media, smartphones, and a penchant for duelling forms of misinformation.

What I learned is that there are many ways to live. There are lots of goals people have — and can have — many of them are quite modest: a safe place to live, love, and feel part of community. There are much worse daily experiences than those we hear about in the news, or see on TV, or read about it books. There is truly grinding poverty and privation that does not translate well into a novel or an article — readership is fickle. Yet, from those ashes, there is still joy, levity, and grace.

So, we residents of the most powerful economies must see outside of our bubbles. We must see, first hand, how we are duped into believing there is only one set of goals, one North American dream, one prestige, and one centre of power. When you spend enough years away, you just might forget about homeownership, career-building, and fretting over retirement. You might find that life is about living, about doing good work, and about being with people you care to pass the time with.

At least, that’s what 12 years outside of NA taught me.

I mean, I did. Highly recommend. Spoiler alert almost all the non-USA people places a multinational company would offer to post you don’t have guns

I really love Belgium. It’s a criminally underrated country with a silly culture and a pretty fun vibe.

The bad news is that I’m Moroccan, and not just any Moroccan, a QUEER Moroccan (even more specifically, an aroace gender non-conforming Moroccan man), meaning basically everyone hates me.

I need to get the visa which takes forever to get and I have a chance of getting denied.

Right wing politicians in the country are basically super racist and really hate the immigrants so much (most of the bad apples are second generation folks that literally act like they’re having a stroke, even Moroccans hate them).

Housing is expensive basically everywhere. People in Belgium are pretty introverted (just like me), meaning they basically don’t care of my presence, but it’s much harder to make friends.

Everyone I know actively discourages moving there because they only know Brussels and… the snooze festival that is Charleroi or something, but they’ve never heard of Ghent or Hasselt or Bruges or Liège or Antwerpen (truly amazing cities) so they’re basically untrustworthy.

I’m so disconnected from the country I live in that I genuinely don’t feel Moroccan and want to get rid of my citizenship (spoiler alert: it’s quite literally impossible). But is it really easy to convince people? Actually, my family gets very mad when I say this because they’re super patriotic and shit.

I don’t even practice religion. I’ve never cared about it. I do believe in God, but I really lack that spirituality and whatnot that would make me “religious”. But unfortunately everyone would wanna kill me for apostasy.

I could go on, but we’d be here all day. Basically, I hate my country so much and I just want out so bad.

I live in the PNW of Canada. It’s expensive, but I love it here and wouldn’t move unless I absolutely had to.

I’d take an offer to work from home on a house boat and go sailing around the world I feel like I’d end up making a lot of new customs officer friends XD

Maybe Cuba or Vietnam? Hard to say without having visited.