Is becoming an expat the right move for you?
There are many reasons people move away from the country of their birth to go elsewhere. Let's assume you are a U.S. citizen. Here are some popular reasons for leaving this well-known location.
You see black helicopters everywhere.
On your way to work, after work on your way to the bar, on weekends when you're walking the dog -- all the time. Just about every time you look up you see another black helicopter.
You get spooked.
But there are reasons. One is that you started looking up, so now you see them flying around, but you don't realize that. You just figure that they're suddenly after you.
Another reason is that black is a trendy color for helicopters, especially glossy black. It looks professional and really cool, so everybody with a helicopter wants a shiny black one.
But rationality is not for you, so you leave.
You're afraid the U.S. dollar will go into the toilet.
That works.
I had a friend whose grandmother gave him a harmonica for Christmas. It happened that a harmonica was just what he wanted. No, I don't know why, but both he and his grandmother were happy. He was around 20 at the time.
So he goes into the bathroom for the usual reason and as he leans over to push the lever on the toilet his new harmonica jumps out of his shirt pocket and ploops into the toilet, and goes right down the drain.
So the short answer is don't carry U.S. dollars in your shirt pocket if you want to keep them out of the toilet.
But maybe you can't help yourself. Maybe leaving the country is your way of handling that.
You believe lettuce is cheaper everywhere else.
Sometimes it is. But do you like it that much?
Remember, even in the U.S. lettuce sometimes has cooties. How do you feel about foreign cooties?
You want to escape socialism.
Sure, I can see that.
I too get tired of all this "free" education and "free" police and "free" fire department stuff.
I see no reason why, when I go to the bank, the people who work there should be able to read, write, and do arithmetic unless they paid for it themselves. And if they didn't have the gumption as eight-year-olds to get jobs and pay for their own schooling, then the hell with them. Let them do without.
And what is the deal with all these public streets, roads, and highways?
They don't have so much of that stuff in other, less socialist countries.
Like safe water.
You want to be totally disoriented without taking drugs.
Walking down the street, you enjoy not knowing where you are going or even if it's legal to be there.
When people jabber at you and make quick, insistent hand gestures before they suddenly run for cover, you want to savor that tingle of pregnant expectation while you stand there, smiling, waiting to see what's going to happen next.
Or you just continue walking toward the gunfire.
You want to do research and publish your results.
Remember that story from a few years back about how water runs down a drain in different directions, depending on which hemisphere you're in?
Well how about right on the equator? What about that?
By becoming an expat you can devote all your free time to seeing how long eggs will spin at different altitudes right along the equator, or how many toilets get it wrong when you pull the lever and they force water to swirl the wrong way.
If this is your option, be sure to blog about it. Because that's a sure way to get rich.
You want to live in a free enterprise environment.
Free means free, and you want that.
No rules, no regulations, no government.
Sure it's been tried before and people claim they didn't like it. Even gave it a name, a disparaging one. They called it the Dark Ages. But you think they got it wrong.
Luckily there are lots of places where enterprise is still free, and you have lots of ammo, so it might be worth a shot. You against the local warlord.
Don't forget to write.