HACKER Q&A
📣 lokma

USA to Europe


I’ve hit a breaking point where I’ve decided I no longer want to live and work in the United States. I would like to begin searching for a suitable place to live and pursue citizenship in the EU, and am wondering if anyone here is in a similar boat or has already done this and can share some insight into your experience.

The main reason I want to leave is it’s just exhausting being here, especially in the Silicon Valley area where I live and work currently. Now more than ever it really does feel like late stage capitalism here. It doesn’t seem like this country makes anything of value anymore, especially with all the AI hype everyone’s main goal seems to be to do the least amount of work, for the cheapest price, and then dump the result on someone else to cash out as quickly as possible. It’s embarrassing.

As I get older, it’s more important to me to have balance in my life and enjoy the time I have here than it is to fulfill my capitalistic duty of working my fingers to the bone until I’m 68 years old and given the privilege to retire. It’s not that I don’t want to work, I just don’t want to have work be the center of everything I do, and Europe generally seems to have a better culture around this from what I can tell. I am completely ok with not making nearly as much money as I do now in exchange for living a simpler life.

  👤 big-green-man Accepted Answer ✓
Have you considered something less drastic, like leaving SV? There's a big big continent you live on, a ton of which you already have a right to be in, a diversity of biomes and landscapes I'm sure one of which would soothe your soul to wake up to in the morning.

In my experience, the american rat race is largely a city phenomenon. Have you considered moving somewhere less densely populated? You could work from home, do no overtime, take half the pay you currently expect and have a higher quality of life, if you lived in a low tax state with lots of outdoors and less huge cities. For the price of a condo in SF you could have a small ranch in Colorado, for example. North Carolina is majestically beautiful. Maybe the problem isn't america, but that where you think you need to be to make it isn't where you need to be because that idea of "making it" isn't your idea of making it?

I've found, if you get away from the rat race and turn off the news, america is a very pleasant place.

👤 toomuchtodo
Spain has a nice digital nomad visa and housing costs are reasonable. After five years, you can apply for permanent residency. After another five years, citizenship and an EU passport. Several EU countries will support pension and social security income as income needed to qualify for residency, if this applies.

Agree Europe is more humane to the human, and where you can optimize for quality of life.

👤 082349872349872
I left the Valley in the 80s and the Old Country around the turn of the century; these days I'm glad I escaped my (small-coastal-town) local optimum there.

My experience here was that the local language took ~2 years to pick up, but feeling at home with the local culture took closer to ~5 years.

At least in my neck of the woods we're still into Humboldtian Bildung, so depending upon what your interests are, you stand a good chance of being able to find like-minded communities. I met the girl I married through sports, and when I was Fresh Off the Boat, playing in various musical groups allowed me to see a fair amount of this and neighbouring countries in the company of people who helped me with the languages and cultures.

How much local exposure have you had? Are there any places you've visited which struck you as potential places to settle in?

👤 talldayo
If it's any consolation, current American tech compensation is a blatant bubble that will probably pop like a helium balloon once the China tariffs roll out. If you can't bring margins down on hardware, then employers are going to reduce their margins on management and development.

This has been a problem for a while now, and it's not one that's going to go away. You can feed and house an entire development firm in Pakistan for the price of a single San Francisco-based dev.