Why You Can't Decide Whether to Stay or Go

Published July 2026

Every week, somewhere on the internet, an expat writes the same post. The details change (ten years in Sydney, six in Berlin, fifteen in Singapore), but the shape never does. First the case for staying: the healthcare, the safety, the work-life balance, the fact that home has changed in ways that scare them. Then the case for leaving: the loneliness, the friends who keep moving away, the career that stalled, the feeling that this country was built for a life they aren't living. Then the line the whole post exists for: I can't figure out what to do.

And under that line, usually unwritten, sits another one: something must be wrong with me, because I have all the facts and I still can't decide.

I've read many, many of these posts, and I've sat with a lot of people living inside them. I want to tell you what I think is actually going on, because it's almost never what the person thinks is going on.

You've already done the homework

Let's start with the practical stuff, because it's real and necessary. Visas are real. Money is real. If you can't legally stay in a country, or can't afford the city you're dreaming about, or would lose medical care you depend on, those aren't feelings to work through. They're locked doors. Some options are just closed, and finding that out is useful.

But in the posts I'm talking about, the agonized ones, the problem is almost never that the options have been closed off by visas or money. It's the opposite. There are a million different reasons and ways to stay, and a million reasons and ways to go. So the research becomes endless: which reasons are "better," what's "worth it," and, most importantly (supposedly), what you "should do." But by the time you're posting about how to make the decision, you're no longer in the research phase. You've made eleven pros and cons lists and you're tempted to make another, but you're starting to wonder why they've stopped helping.

Why do the lists stop helping? Because a pros and cons list makes a quiet promise it can't keep: that the items can be added up. You want to believe that thirty advantages on one side beat five on the other, the way thirty dollars beats five.

But the things on your list aren't in the same currency. "Great public healthcare" and "I haven't had a real friend in four years" aren't directly comparable. There's no exchange rate between safety and loneliness. You can have thirty good things on one side and one bad thing on the other, and the one bad thing can win, fair and square, because it turns out to be the thing your life actually runs on, or the thing that matters to you most.

It works the other way too. One thing you love can beat thirty things that are wrong. That's not you being irrational. That's what it means for this to be a decision about what you value, not a math problem. And only you, not the list itself, can decide how much weight each item deserves, based on what you know, what you've lived, and what matters to you.

Unfortunately, that's exactly where the trouble starts.

The question you can't answer

Look at what the decision actually requires. It requires you to answer one question: what do I want?

Not what a sensible person would want. Not what someone in your position should want, given all the advantages. Not what you could defend to your friends back home, or to the jury that meets in your head at two in the morning. What you, personally, want.

For a lot of people, that question turns the mind to mush. It's not that they come up with an answer they don't like. It's that they come up with no answer at all. They reach inside to find out what they actually prefer and instead find the Expat Committee on Ethics, Morality, and Gratitude convening in their head, issuing edicts: "You shouldn't go; you should be grateful for this opportunity." "People would kill for your visa." "Wanting to leave a safe country with good healthcare is irresponsible and entitled." "Wanting to go home to a country whose politics horrify you is cowardice."

So instead of discovering their preferences, they just hear the Committee shouting. The preferences, the desires, the tradeoffs that would seem worth it (if they're even still in there) learned a long time ago to keep quiet.

Here is the plain version of what I think is happening. You're not stuck because you don't know the facts of your life and need more research and thinking to figure out what would be, objectively, the best and right thing to do. You're stuck because you don't know how you feel. And you don't know how you feel because somewhere along the way, you stopped treating your feelings as legitimate.

A feeling shows up. Say it's "I'm so lonely here I could scream." And instead of being received as information, it gets put on trial. Is it justified? Is it ungrateful? Would other people in my position feel this way? Have I really tried hard enough to make friends? The feeling never gets to just be true. It gets cross-examined until it goes quiet. Then you sit back down at the pro/con spreadsheet and wonder why the spreadsheet won't tell you what to do.

"I'm unhappy here" is information. So is "My family wants me to be closer, but I love it here." It doesn't have to win an argument before it counts. The country being safe doesn't make your loneliness inadmissible. Other people wanting your life doesn't mean you want it, and it doesn't mean you owe it to anyone to keep it. When you catch yourself building a case against your own experience, that's not you being rigorous. That's you not feeling entitled to your own life, dressed up as rigor.

Always ruling against yourself, just in case

There's a specific rule running underneath this pattern. If you have it, you'll recognize it immediately.

The rule goes: when in doubt, pick the option that costs you more. Distrust whatever you want, precisely because you want it. If a path looks appealing, suspect yourself of being lazy or selfish for liking it. If a path looks grim, assume it must be the responsible one. The hard thing is the right thing, pretty much by definition. The easy thing is the easy way out.

If you live by this rule, you probably think of it as a safety measure, or even a virtue. It feels like humility. It feels like being a good person, the kind of person who doesn't just do whatever they feel like. But look at what it actually is. It's a policy of ruling against yourself in every close call. A judge who decided every unclear case against the same defendant wouldn't be called careful. He'd be called biased.

And this policy produces exactly the paralysis you're living in. Think about it. If wanting something counts against it, and dreading something counts for it, then your own preferences have become useless as a guide. You now have to steer your whole life using only outside measurements, and as we just saw, outside measurements can't be added up. You've unplugged the one instrument that could settle the question. Then you stand in front of the control panel wondering why nothing on it will tell you where to go.

So how did you get to be this way? Who knows. Some combination of genetics, upbringing, and social environment. These things are complicated. That said, nobody is born believing their own desires are evidence of guilt. Somewhere, usually early, wanting things caused trouble, or you got the message that your job was to want what other people needed you to want. Children are adaptive. You don't have to actually get in trouble to learn what expressing certain thoughts or feelings or desires would lead to. Maybe the rule made sense in the environment where you learned it. Maybe it even protected you. But it's running your relocation decision now, from decades away, and it doesn't know anything about Sydney or Lisbon or the town where you grew up.

What the indecision is protecting you from

Now I want to show you what the stuckness is actually doing for you. Because it is doing something. Nobody stays paralyzed for eight years by accident. Paralysis that lasts that long is always protecting you from something, and in this case, what it's protecting you from is grief.

Here's the truth every version of this decision eventually hits: there is no option that costs nothing. If you stay, you lose the life you would have had at home. The years with your aging parents. The version of you that belonged somewhere without trying. If you go, you lose the life you built. The safety, the ease, the person you became in this country and can only fully be there. If you pick a third country, you lose both and roll the dice on an unknown. Every branch has real, permanent losses on it. No clever analysis gets you around this, because the losses aren't a flaw in your options. They're what it means to be one person with one life.

The best move for you isn't finding the cost-free option. It doesn't exist. The best move is choosing what you honestly judge will be best overall, and then actually grieving what it costs. Sometimes that even includes making the decision and discovering you underestimated the benefits and overestimated the costs, or the other way around. Such is life. You take your best guess about what you want, based on your feelings and on how you predict things will go for you. But no matter what you decide, there will be real loss. And letting yourself feel that loss, or at least anticipate it, is the only way a decision ever gets made. You don't want to minimize it or talk yourself out of it. You don't want to decide that if you feel sad, you must have chosen wrong. You likely chose right and you feel sad, because you lost something real, and losing real things hurts.

And it has a cruel catch: it doesn't actually keep both futures alive. It slowly kills both. The eight years you've spent not deciding weren't a neutral waiting room. They were eight years of the staying option, lived at half strength, with the door propped open, so you never fully arrived anywhere. Including where you are.

And there's a reason you can't bring yourself to pay the grief, and it connects to everything above. To grieve a cost you chose, you have to believe you had the right to choose it. You have to be able to say: this hurts, and I did it anyway, because I matter enough to choose. If deep down you don't believe you're allowed to do something costly for your own sake, then every loss looks like a debt you had no right to take on. And the only way to stay out of debt is to never buy anything. That's the knot. It was never about the countries.

The regret you're afraid of

One fear guards this whole stuck system, so it deserves its own section: the fear of choosing wrong and regretting it forever.

Two things about that. First, picture the scenario you're afraid of. You move, it goes badly, and you spend years beating yourself up. Notice that this picture isn't really about the move. It's about how you already treat yourself, projected into the future. If you cross-examine your own loneliness today, you will absolutely cross-examine your own relocation tomorrow. The regret you fear isn't built into the decision. It's built into the prosecutor. Which means the best insurance against unbearable regret isn't choosing perfectly. It's becoming someone who's on their own side. Someone who can say: I made the best call I could with what I knew, it cost me, and I feel for the person who paid it. That person can survive any outcome. The self-prosecutor can't survive even the good ones. You might have noticed that already, since you're currently living in an objectively good situation and standing trial for it anyway.

Second, the research on regret is clear on one point, and it's worth knowing. In the short run, people regret their actions. The leap that went wrong. But over the long run, people overwhelmingly regret the things they didn't do. The move they never made. The years spent waiting for a certainty that was never coming. Refusing to decide doesn't get you out of this. Not deciding is a decision. It's the decision to keep everything exactly as it is, made again every day, silently, without ever being examined the way the other options are. It just sends you the regret bill later, and the bill is bigger.

When it's two of you

Everything above gets doubled when the decision belongs to a couple, so let me talk about that directly, because half the people reading this aren't stuck alone. One of you wants to stay. One wants to go. You've had the conversation forty times, and by now it's like a third person living in the marriage.

Here's what I've come to believe about these standoffs. They're almost never what they look like. They look like a collision between two countries. They're usually a collision between two people, neither of whom fully knows what they actually need, trying to negotiate anyway.

Real negotiation has a requirement that almost nobody mentions. Each person has to know, for themselves, what they truly cannot give up and what they only prefer. What they must have, and what they're genuinely willing to sacrifice and grieve. Sorting that out is inside work, and it's exactly the work this whole essay is about. You can't tell your partner what you're willing to give up if you've never felt entitled to want anything in the first place. So the couple ends up trading city names like flags, Copenhagen versus Chicago, while the real needs underneath stay unspoken. Belonging. A career that means something. Being near a dying parent. Not disappearing into someone else's life. Sometimes those needs are unknown even to the people who have them.

This produces two familiar ways things go wrong. In the first, somebody caves. They give in, because giving in is what they know how to do, and they call it compromise. But a sacrifice you didn't genuinely choose doesn't behave like a gift. It behaves like a loan you never agreed to make, and it collects interest as resentment, year after year. The trailing spouse who "was fine with it" and five years later doesn't recognize themselves and is quietly furious didn't end up that way because the move was wrong. They ended up that way because they absorbed a cost instead of choosing it. In the second way, somebody bulldozes. They force the move on a partner who never really said yes, and they get the destination at the price of the marriage's trust.

The way out of both isn't a better argument. It's each person going off and doing their own reckoning first. Figuring out what they actually need and what they can honestly, sadly, give up. Then coming back to the table as two people who know what they're negotiating with. Standoffs that look hopeless from inside the forty-first argument often turn out to be two unfinished personal decisions leaning against each other.

It was never about the map

If most of this essay felt less like an article about expat life and more like a description of you, I want to point at one last thing.

The stay-or-go question is probably not the only place this pattern shows up. The people who hang over this decision for years are usually the same people who overthink most big choices. Who research long past the point where research helps. Who feel a low hum of guilt whenever they do something for themselves. Who lie awake replaying decisions they already made. Who hold themselves to standards they'd call cruel if anyone applied them to a friend. The relocation question isn't a strange exception in an otherwise decisive life. It's the biggest, most visible example of something that runs under everything, and it only looks unique because it's the one in front of you right now.

That matters in practice. It means that even if you white-knuckled your way to picking a country tomorrow, the pattern would still be there, waiting for the next big decision, and the one after that. The real work on offer here is bigger than geography. It's learning to treat your own feelings as real information. To claim the right to act on your own behalf. To pay for your choices with honest grief instead of endless delay. And to give yourself enough compassion to make all of that bearable. People who do this work tend to report something almost boring: the decision that was impossible for eight years becomes, not easy, but normal. A hard choice between two real lives, made by someone who finally believes they're allowed to make it.

That work is what therapy, the real kind, is for. Not advice about countries. Not a better decision matrix. A place to figure out how you became someone who doesn't trust their own wanting, and what it would take to become someone who does.

You already know more than you think about what you want. The question was never really whether to stay or go. The question is whether you'll let yourself be the one who decides.