Moving Abroad Can Mean Starting Your Career Over

A woman who moved to the Netherlands told me she’s basically starting her career over in her 40s.

She’s a full-time artist. On paper, that sounds fairly portable. She can still make art in Europe.

But a lot of the work she had in the United States came through community connections she’d spent years building.

She moved. The connections didn’t.

Then I started hearing versions of the same thing from other people.

A photographer talked about losing years of professional relationships and referrals.

Someone else said Europe gave her a more affordable life, but she increasingly misses the career that made her life feel full.

A former professor said what he misses is the feeling that he was making a difference every day.

I’d always thought about the career cost of moving abroad in pretty obvious terms: income, job opportunities, whether your profession transfers, whether you have to change fields.

I hadn’t given nearly as much thought to everything around the actual job.

The people who know your work. The reputation you’ve built. The clients who already trust you. The person who thinks of you when an opportunity comes up.

You can technically take the work with you and still leave a lot of the career behind.

This made me think about relocation a little differently.

Most of my attention has naturally gone toward the European side: where I’d live, what I’d buy, how the lifestyle works, which cities make sense.

But there’s another side of the equation.

What in my current life is genuinely portable?

And what only works because of the people, routines, relationships and infrastructure around me now?

That doesn’t make moving abroad a bad trade.

It just means the cost of leaving a place isn’t limited to the things you can put a price on.

A few things I’m working through over the next several days:

Friday: I’ve been judging European cities as if each one has to work for me twelve months a year. I’m increasingly convinced my actual life may never require that.

Saturday: A much smaller question: what was the first little moment after moving abroad when you stopped feeling like a stranger?

Monday: I like having a big city around me. I’m less sure I need to live right in the middle of one. Cascais is making me think harder about how close “close enough” actually needs to be.

Tuesday’s video about mentally translating Europe back into America has turned into one of the more interesting comment threads I’ve had.

I asked when people finally stop converting euros to dollars, Celsius to Fahrenheit, square meters to square feet, kilometers to miles.

The answer so far is basically: there is no single switch.

Some people stopped converting money pretty quickly but still struggle with temperature years later.

Others use one system in one context and another somewhere else. One British woman living in Germany told me she thinks in miles when she’s in the UK and kilometers in Germany — but still thinks of people’s height in feet and inches while measuring objects in centimeters.

Another commenter has been abroad about a year and said her new currency has become so normal that, on a business trip back in the United States, she now catches herself converting American prices into her new currency.

And there are people who still mentally reference currencies or measurements they grew up with decades later.

So I don’t think the interesting question is simply, “How long does it take to adapt?”

It may be more like: which reference system does your brain decide to use for which part of life?

There’s enough in that thread that I’m going to come back to it later rather than force a conclusion now.

— Joe