When Staying Abroad Starts to Feel Like a Decision You’re Avoiding

On sunk costs, conditional belonging, and the quiet question of whether you still want the life you built.

A few weeks ago, I read an essay that stopped me in my tracks. It was by Alejandra Hagedorn, and it was called Why So Many Expats Stay in Countries They Secretly Want to Leave.

Hagedorn writes about living in Germany for almost a decade while privately questioning whether she still wanted to be there. Her life — like that of many long-term expats or globally mobile folks I speak to — looked good from the outside: a job, an apartment, friends, a language she had learned, and a country she had worked hard to understand. Still, she kept postponing the possibility of leaving.

The line that stayed with me was not only the title. It was the question underneath it: ““I can’t go back home just because I feel lonely, can I?”

Hagedorn eventually left Germany and returned to Chile. Her essay is about giving yourself permission to leave when the life you built abroad no longer feels like the life you want.

For today, I want to stay with a slightly different question:

What happens before that permission to leave arrives?

What happens when your life abroad is not unbearable — but no longer feels like something you are consciously choosing?

When leaving feels too drastic, staying feels increasingly automatic, and every reason to question the arrangement gets translated into evidence that you should try harder?

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The life that looks finished

On paper, your life abroad can look finished. You’ve unlocked all the levels of integration like it was a video game that gave you prizes at every stage.

The job took years to build. The apartment finally feels like yours. You can handle the bureaucracy without needing to translate every form. You know which pharmacy is open late, which friend will answer after midnight, and which version of your name people use in each room.

You’ve learned the language well enough to argue in it, not just order coffee. You’ve built routines that would be difficult to reconstruct somewhere else. You have proof that you adapted.

Sometimes that proof of adaptation becomes part of the problem.

The people around you see the life you built and assume the question has been settled. You have a home. You have community. You have history. You have become the person who knows how to live there.

But a life can be established without feeling chosen.

You can be grateful for what a country gave you and still be unsure whether you want to keep giving your life to it.

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The problem of permission

If you’ve said any version of this out loud, you’ve probably heard some version of these responses:

“You’re so lucky to live there.”

“Maybe you just need to get out more, meet more people, make more friends?”

“You’ve already built a life there. You can’t throw all of that away.”

None of these responses are necessarily wrong. The trouble is what these answers do to the question you were asking in the first place. They turn a genuinely complex decision into a referendum on gratitude — as if wanting to leave is only legitimate once your life abroad has become unbearable enough to justify it.

When everyone around you sees your life abroad as an opportunity, wanting to leave can feel like ingratitude — even when what you’re feeling is simply information.

Loneliness is not always evidence that you should leave. But neither is it evidence that you should stay.

Photo by David Kanigan

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The bargains you make with yourself

This is usually where the postponing begins, and it rarely announces itself as postponing.

Because in your head, it sounds completely reasonable.

After the next job. After the language finally clicks. After you make one friend who really gets it. After the visa situation resolves. After you feel more settled — whatever that would even look like now.

Each condition gives you a little more time. Sometimes that is exactly what you need. A decision made while exhausted, grieving, or in the middle of a crisis is not necessarily a clearer decision.

But sometimes the conditions keep moving.

The next job becomes the next contract. The language gets better, but belonging does not arrive with it. You make friends, but the question remains. The visa resolves, and another administrative horizon appears.

You begin treating certainty as a prerequisite for honesty.

This is an illustration of the ways conditional belonging can show up as self-imposed in life abroad:

I’ll allow myself to decide whether I belong here once I’ve finally become the kind of person who belongs here.

Except that person, if she ever fully arrives, never seems to arrive with the question already answered.

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The sunk cost of life abroad

There's a name for part of this: the sunk-cost effect. Psychologists Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer first described it in 1985 — the tendency to keep going with something simply because you've already invested in it, even when that investment isn't a good reason to continue.¹ The pattern has held up since (a later review of nearly 100 studies confirmed it's real, though its strength depends on what's being decided).²

In a life abroad, those investments are rarely just financial ones. They include the language you learned. The bureaucracy you mastered. The friendships you built and rebuilt from nothing. The professional credibility you had to establish. The cultural codes you learned to read. The version of yourself you worked hard to become.

The more effort a life abroad has required, the harder it can be to admit that the life built from all that effort might not fit anymore. The investment starts to feel like evidence that you should stay, rather than evidence of how much staying has already cost.

That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with your thinking. After ten, fifteen, or forty years, a decision can become difficult to revisit because it has absorbed so much of your effort, identity, and history.

Sometimes you aren’t only asking, “Do I want to stay?”

You’re also asking:

• What would all those years mean if I left?

• Who would I be without the identity I built here?

• Would going back make the years abroad look like a detour?

• Would I have to explain why I couldn’t make the life work?

• What if the problem I’m running from follows me?

These questions can make staying feel safer than deciding.

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Staying is also a decision

We tend to treat leaving as the risky choice and staying as the neutral one.

Leaving requires paperwork, money, logistics, and a story other people can understand. Staying can look like doing nothing. It can pass as patience, stability, or gratitude.

But staying for another year is not neutral if you’re using that year to avoid asking yourself the question at all.

That doesn’t mean staying is wrong. Plenty of people examine this question honestly and land, clearly, on staying. They may decide that their life is imperfect but meaningful, that the difficulties are manageable, or that what they have built still matters more than what they imagine elsewhere.

That is a real decision.

The point is not to turn every unsettled feeling into a departure plan. It is to stop treating staying as the absence of a decision.

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The questions underneath the question

Sometimes “Do I want to leave?” is carrying several smaller questions underneath it:

• Do I want to leave this country, or do I want relief from the version of myself I’ve had to become here?

• Do I want to go home, or do I want somewhere I can stop translating myself every day?

• Do I want to keep building a life here with no support system, or do I feel obligated to go back home for family or friends?

• Do I want to leave this place, or do I want to be witnessed differently inside it?

There may not be an immediate answer.

The questions I listed here may not even belong to the same category. Some are logistical. Some are relational. Some are about grief. Some are about a life that has become too narrow, too demanding, or too familiar to examine from the inside. (If they’ve crossed your mind before, know you’re not alone — all of these have come up in different versions in my long-term life abroad research.)

Which means your decision may need more room than a simple stay-or-leave binary can provide.

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Should you stay or should you go?

You don’t need to prove that your life abroad has become unbearable before you’re allowed to question whether you still want it. You also don’t need to turn the question into an immediate relocation plan the moment you let yourself ask it.

Sometimes the first honest step is smaller: to stop treating staying as the absence of a decision.

You can ask what this life abroad is still giving you, what it’s quietly costing you, and whether you’re choosing it as it actually exists now — rather than staying loyal to the life you once hoped it would become.

You may decide to stay. You may decide to leave.

You may decide that the question needs more time, more information, or a different kind of support before it becomes a decision.

None of those outcomes is automatically the right one.

What matters is that the answer belongs to the life you’re living now — not only to the person who first moved abroad, and not only to the people who have grown accustomed to seeing you there.

And if this essay named something uncomfortably accurate, you don’t have to make sense of it alone:

If this question has been sitting quietly underneath the life you built abroad, I offer a small number of one-to-one Expat Orientation Conversations each month: a structured, non-clinical space to make sense of what is contextual, what is personal, and what kind of next step — if any — might be useful.

You can read more or book here:

Let’s keep walking the edges together.

Onward,
Kay✨

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Who’s behind Edgewalkers Collective?

I’m Kay — Filipina American TCK (Third Culture Kid), 17 years in Spain, and a counsellor‑in‑training (CPCAB, UK). I spent over a decade working in inclusion and cross‑cultural strategy, helping organizations bridge cultures. I was good at it. I was also quietly burning out from being the bridge. Now I’m training to offer something different: recognition‑based support for expats and global citizens who are done being told they should feel lucky to be here.

• If you’d like a sense of what working together could look like, you can read more on the Work With Me page.

• If you want to access to the guided audios and quarterly pattern reports from my long-term life abroad research I send to paid subscribers, you‘re welcome to upgrade your subscription at any time.

1. Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124–140. DOI:10.1016/0749-5978(85)90049-4

2. Roth, S., Robbert, T. & Straus, L. On the sunk-cost effect in economic decision-making: a meta-analytic review. Bus Res 8, 99–138 (2015). DOI:10.1007/s40685-014-0014-8