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The author left America for the Philippines due to a combination of factors including rising crime, an absurd cost of living, social isolation, boredom, challenging dating culture, political division, rampant consumerism, family estrangement, lack of daylight, and a desire for new travel experiences.
The video details ten reasons why the host, Alex, decided to leave the United States for the Philippines. He begins by discussing the pervasive issue of rising crime, sharing personal anecdotes like a car break-in and a disturbing encounter on public transit, highlighting a sense of unsafety and a frustrating societal tendency to excuse criminal behavior. This is followed by an examination of the absurdly high cost of living, where everyday expenses like takeout meals and basic services are excessively priced, leading to financial stress and a reduced quality of life, even for those with good incomes.
Alex further elaborates on the social and emotional challenges in the US, including widespread loneliness and social isolation, which he attributes to factors like social media, declining community engagement, and the loss of 'third spaces.' He contrasts this with the potential for community abroad. Boredom is presented as another significant factor, stemming from the highly regulated and predictable nature of life in the US, which stifles spontaneity and excitement. The dating culture is described as tiring and transactional, with an emphasis on financial status, leading many to feel inadequate and give up on dating domestically.
The discussion then shifts to broader societal issues like intense political division, which has fractured relationships and created widespread stress. Alex criticizes the culture of materialism and consumerism, where people often buy things they cannot afford to impress others, leading to debt and dissatisfaction. He also touches upon personal experiences with family estrangement and toxic relationships, finding solace and a fresh start in moving abroad. Finally, the lack of daylight during winter months and a personal feeling of having 'seen it all' within the US, coupled with the increasing expense of domestic travel, pushed him to seek new experiences and a better value for his resources internationally.
The decision to leave America for the Philippines was driven by a combination of factors including rising crime rates, an unsustainable cost of living, and pervasive social isolation. The author also cited boredom, a challenging dating culture, and political division as key contributors.
Key reasons to leave the USA for the Philippines include concerns about safety due to rising crime, the high cost of living that impacts quality of life, and widespread loneliness. The desire for new experiences and a break from domestic predictability also played a significant role.
For the author, life in the Philippines offered a better quality of life due to a lower cost of living and a greater sense of community compared to the US. The Philippines provided new experiences and a break from the societal issues prevalent in America.
The cost of living in the US is high due to factors like expensive housing, rising prices for everyday goods and services, and a culture of consumerism. This makes basic expenses and travel unaffordable for many, impacting overall quality of life.
The American dating culture is described as stressful and transactional, often with an emphasis on financial status. This can lead to feelings of inadequacy and a general dissatisfaction with the dating process for many individuals.
The video suggests that crime rates in the USA are a significant concern, with personal anecdotes shared about car break-ins and unsafe public transit experiences. This perceived lack of safety is a major reason for considering relocation.
Alex left the US for the Philippines due to a combination of factors including rising crime, the high cost of living, and social isolation. He also cited boredom, a tiring dating culture, political division, and materialism as reasons for seeking a change. Personal reasons like family estrangement and a desire for new experiences also played a role in his decision.
The video highlights the exorbitant cost of living in the US as a major reason for leaving. Everyday expenses like takeout meals and basic services are excessively priced, leading to financial stress and a reduced quality of life, even for those with good incomes.
Widespread loneliness and social isolation are presented as significant issues in the US. Factors contributing to this include the influence of social media, declining community engagement, and the loss of 'third spaces,' which contrasts with the potential for community found abroad.
The dating culture in the US is described as tiring and transactional, with an emphasis on financial status. This can lead to feelings of inadequacy and discouragement for many, prompting them to seek more fulfilling relationships elsewhere.
Viewers who have moved to the Philippines, like Thailand, report being happier, less lonely, and consuming less. They find the environment more peaceful, people nicer, and the pace of life allows for more introspection and self-improvement.
Some viewers feel that life in the US is overly regulated, predictable, and can be 'soul crushing.' This lack of spontaneity and excitement contributes to boredom and a feeling of being stuck, prompting a desire for a more vibrant and less sterile environment.
Rising crime rates and a perceived lack of safety are significant concerns mentioned in the video and comments. Personal anecdotes of crime and a societal tendency to excuse criminal behavior contribute to a sense of unsafety for residents.
The lack of daylight during winter months in the US is a significant factor for some in their decision to move. This seasonal affective disorder, combined with other issues, pushes people to seek environments with more consistent daylight and a better climate.
0:05 Hey YouTube, Alex here. And in today's video, I want to answer the question: why did I leave America? In this video, I have 10 reasons as to why I left America. They range in terms of severity. I think a lot of you could probably relate to these reasons. Be sure after you watch the video to let me know what you think down in the comments. If any of these resonate with you, if you disagree with any of them, the comment section always helps to generate interesting discussion.
0:29 Crime. Crime has gotten out of control in the United States. I want to share a little bit about what I ran into. So, I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area before I came over here to Southeast Asia. Literally two weeks before I left, my car window was smashed. And many of you are probably familiar with the smash-and-grab burglaries around the Bay Area. I thought that if I paid a premium for parking and parked in a nice neighborhood, one of the more expensive neighborhoods in the Bay Area, that I would somehow evade these issues, but that was not the case.
1:01 Actually, I got a notification on my cell phone that my card was being used rapidly and in quick succession. They tried to swipe it like five times, and it finally locked down at a Ross Dress for Less. But the first charge was at a liquor store, and I don't drink. The subsequent charges were at other establishments I don't frequent. So, I was notified that my card was being used to make unauthorized purchases, and I immediately knew what happened. I thought, 'Okay, that was a card that I kept in my car in case of emergencies.' If I'm not using that card, then it would only be accessible to somebody that smashed the window and grabbed the card and took it for a spin.
1:41 So that's what happened. What's funny is they got a $20 power bank out of my car. That's it. They didn't get all these valuables they thought would be in there. They did leave their dirty, stinky, wet sweatshirt in the front seat of my car, and of course, they left me the San Francisco snow, the broken glass remnants in the back seat. I ultimately had to pay about $180 to replace the rear panel window on the vehicle. It was really frustrating to me because I was working hard in my tech job at the time for my money, and I was trying to save it to get ahead financially. So to have to spend several hundred to recoup from this, after already paying a monthly parking fee, was really frustrating.
2:21 Another example of the crime factor is that I was at a public transit station in the south of Berkeley, and I'm just standing there checking my phone, trying to figure out what I'm going to do. And this gentleman doesn't like that I'm standing behind him and decides to tell me to leave. I'm trying to explain to him, 'Hey man, I'm just trying to figure out where I'm going,' and he starts to threaten and stalk me. He's following me, and I go into the train station trying to find a police officer. Of course, in the Bay Area, they've defunded the police, and so there's no law enforcement present to handle this. Eventually, he gave up because he realized how stupid it would be to go to jail over attacking somebody for standing behind you.
3:01 You also realized I didn't have any valuables. So if he was going to try to mug me, I mean, you're going to get a cheap old cell phone and maybe 20 or 40 bucks I carry in my wallet. These quality of life issues didn't seem to get better. In fact, I felt like they were getting worse with time, that more and more crime was happening. And people would try to downplay it and say, 'Oh, that's not really crime,' and they'd come up with these excuses, excusing criminal behavior, trying to make up reasons as to why it's somebody else's fault. But the crime was a really big factor in me wanting to leave America.
3:33 Some people will say, 'Oh, well, that wouldn't happen in my state.' Maybe you live in a nice area. Okay, maybe you're very blessed and you live in a really nice neighborhood with wonderful people that look out for each other. I was not so fortunate to have that luck. I'd also hear from some people, 'Well, that's what you get for living in California.' I moved to California to work, to better myself, to work in the tech industry, and I got this sense from some people that there was this apologist attitude, there was this anti-California attitude.
4:03 Look, nobody deserves to be the victim of crime. I don't care where you live in the United States. I don't care if you live in San Francisco. I don't care if you live in rural Kansas. You don't deserve to be the victim of crime. And there's this kind of victim-blaming attitude coupled with the crime that, in my opinion, makes it worse. Anytime somebody's a victim of a crime, everybody is immediately trying to apologize for the criminals or to blame the victim. And I felt like it was just getting really toxic, and that I'd rather go live somewhere where crime is taken seriously.
4:32 Put the name of any major city in the US into the Google News section, and you will see plenty of reports of various crimes that have been committed or are being committed. It's really unfortunate to see. I don't feel safe going out in most major US cities these days. It used to not be that way, but crime has really gotten out of hand in the US.
4:53 Cost of living. Cost of living in the US has become absurd. I call it clown world pricing. There's always charging the maximum of what they could possibly charge, regardless of what it is. Services that cost modest sums of money over here, that don't cost that much to deliver, are priced at the maximum of what they can absolutely charge, and it's getting absurd. I think it's really hurting the social cohesion of the United States.
5:19 I think that people are deeply stressed out and in a rush. Often, when I'm talking to people back home, they seem to have this kind of manic, stressed-out energy, this agitation, like they're in a rush. 'Got to go, got to go, got to go.' One of my friends who lives outside the US these days says people back home are in a hurry to go nowhere because most people cannot afford to hire out for basic tasks. They work hard at their day job and then they come home and rush around trying to get chores done before they have to go to bed to get up the next day. And they spend their weekends trying to recover from their heavy workload and also still get chores done.
5:54 I personally found that even though my income tended to go up over time, that with the inflation, my quality of life was actually going down. Even if you have a high income, if you want to live below your means and try to save money, that often requires renting a cheaper apartment, cooking at home more often, doing free activities as opposed to paid activities. And I felt like quality of life just kept going down. And I've talked to other expats here who said the same thing. It was like every year they could enjoy less and less of the things that they used to enjoy.
6:26 Just to get a basic takeout meal in the US will easily cost you $15 to $20, and it may be made with cheap ingredients that aren't healthy for you. Even fast food has become quite expensive for most people, and it's really making life less and less convenient, less and less frictionless, because you're constantly having to find out when you go out to a restaurant, for example, 'Can I even afford this?' Let me check the menu and let me order the cheaper thing because I'm on a budget.
6:57 One of my buddies here told me he had Eggs Benedict for the first time here in the Philippines because he could never afford it back home. It was always $15, $17, $19 plus tip, you're looking at $20, $25 bucks just for Eggs Benedict. But when he came here, he found it was like six bucks, within his budget, basically.
7:15 I'd sometimes get this from people, 'Well, you just need to spend more money and live in a nicer neighborhood.' But before I left the US, I was living in downtown Berkeley, California, where the average rent is like $2,500 per month for a one-bedroom apartment, and can easily go up from there. So it wasn't like I was living in a bad part of St. Louis. This is supposed to be a pretty nice area, but even in this area, there were crime issues.
7:41 It wasn't hard to figure out when you walked out on the street that there were vagrants and homeless people, people who were affiliated with organized crime types. It was just really strange because on one hand, the price is really high, but on the other hand, quality of life was really low. So it wasn't just that cost of living was through the roof, it was like everything seemed to be going against people who need to work for a living, to benefit the people who own all the real estate.
8:06 I later found out many real estate owners in Berkeley actually lived elsewhere. They lived in other cities, they lived in perhaps even more affluent areas, areas that were more suburban. Berkeley is fairly urban, so that really threw me off as well, that I'm paying all this money to people who are not part of my community, that don't actually face these issues that we're facing here.
8:29 Now, I know some people would say, 'Just move to a cheaper area.' But I found that the inflation in the United States is disproportionately impacted the cheaper parts of the country. I found that it was negligibly cheaper to move back to my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, because Nashville has seen the highest increase in cost of living of any city in the United States. Even in small towns that were supposedly cheap, rent is easily upwards of $1,000 per month, that doesn't include utilities or the necessity of having a car if you're in a small, small town. There's typically no public transportation.
9:03 You're paying a premium even if you live in an area without high-paying jobs. Just a basic hotel room is easily $100 a night these days, and it's not for a fancy place. It's not for a place in a high-end area. That's just a basic roadside motel can run you $100 a night. And so you're paying all this money for an experience that used to be much cheaper, to the point where I don't want to vacation in the US anymore. I don't want to pay these super high prices to experience the same.
9:29 Super high prices to experience the same old, same old. I'd rather go to cheaper countries where I get a lot more value for my money when it comes to taking a vacation. Finally, I think that you see with the side hustle culture, everybody is trying to get a second job or an additional income and work even more hours. But there are limits on output when it comes to the number of jobs. You can only work so much, especially in knowledge work. You can only put out so much in a given time. Now, I think some people work more efficiently than others. I think some manage their time better than others. There are diminishing returns when it comes to many different types of jobs.
10:03 The next one is loneliness. I think that the US has a generally lonely culture. A lot of people feel atomized and isolated, and I think that you see this with a lot of the mental well-being issues in the United States, where a lot of people feel like they don't have anybody they can trust or talk to. Some people go to bars, some people join community organizations, some people join clubs. But sometimes the people at these organizations seem to have ulterior motives, whether it be their egos, maybe it's a financial incentive. But there doesn't seem to be this hanging out for the sake of hanging out.
10:38 I think social media has contributed to some of these feelings because people feel like they're connected even when they're only digitally connected, and it's not the same as being together in person or having that sense of community and shared values that I think could come from religious organizations, for example. With the decline in religiosity and the responding decline in church attendance, along with the elimination of third spaces—places where people can go other than home and work—it's no wonder that people are more lonely. I realize that loneliness is not just something affecting me, but also affecting a lot of would-be expats. I think a lot of people see things like the blogger community here in Dumaguete and they realize that there's a lot of opportunity for them to establish a sense of community abroad that they might not be getting much of back home.
11:30 I'm not a big church guy, and that probably works against me in some ways. I think loneliness will continue to be prevalent in the western democracies as people put up more and more barriers between them and the outside world, whether it be a screen or a fence or whatever it may be. People don't seem to want to interact with each other in the same way that they used to. I have seen studies on it, and a lot of American adults have nobody to talk to. I've even seen some people say that loneliness is the new smoking, that the negative impacts on health are going to be studied for decades to come. And I can attest to that, that loneliness has negatively impacted my well-being.
12:13 The next one is boredom. The US is boring because they've worked out all of the excitement and spontaneity in life. There is no room for unpredictability because that goes against business interests. So, everything is regulated down to a T: your movements, your scheduling, where you can go, what you can do, what's open, what's not open, how things operate. Everything becomes very boring and repetitive, and you just feel like everything is predictable. You feel like you're in Groundhog Day, where every day is the same as the last. You just keep repeating the same experience over and over again.
12:50 You go to the grocery store. Some people call it 'box life.' They live in the box, they go to the box, they ride in the box to get to the other box. And everything is so predictable that I think people get really bored and they feel checked out. I felt that way a lot. I have ADD, so I tend toward seeking novelty and interesting things, and travel does that for me. But back home, it just felt like everything is set up to be streamlined to do business, and it's so efficient that it gets boring. You know, when you go to the store, they're going to have all the same products. You know when you go to work, basically, you know what your work's going to look like for the next year. It's not going to change that much. It's not going to be dynamic. You're not going to have any surprises. It's just this repetitive grind. You keep doing the same thing over and over again.
13:36 I think a lot of people are stressed out in that kind of environment. Where in that climate, there's not much to look forward to. People are doing the same thing over and over again. And for some people, that's awesome. For some people, they like boring, they like repetitive. But for a lot of us, we look forward to exciting experiences. And we just feel like for a lot of people, they may enjoy that boredom and that repetition and that predictability. But I find that it also involves stress for a lot of people. I think that the boredom factor is an underrated one. A lot of guys don't discuss it. I think a lot of people talk about dating, they talk about cost of living, but they don't often talk about just simple, basic boredom as to why so many of us are leaving the United States and other Western democracies.
14:18 I think some of it also has to do with the aging population. People who are older don't have the same energy that they had when they were younger. The next one is going to be the dating culture in the US. I think the dating culture in the US is just not what it used to be, and it's kind of tiring. I mean, you feel like you're getting judged. You feel like you're at a job interview. You're getting sized up for what you can offer. The first question you get asked when you're on a first date is, 'What do you do for a living? What's your job? What's your salary? What's your income?' Two-thirds of young men in the West are single, and I don't think that's going to be changing anytime soon.
14:51 I think a lot of guys have given up on dating. They just feel like it's not worth it. I'm falling into that category, to be honest. I don't date back home anymore. It's just not worth it. It's stressful. You feel like you're never going to measure up. You feel like no matter what you do, it's not sufficient for potential romantic partners. So you go overseas and you find a much better dating climate. It's no big deal to ask a woman for her number here in the Philippines. It's no big deal to ask for her Facebook. You can message her, chat with her, get to know her. It's not like this pressure I think you feel sometimes in the West, where women may have the question, 'If you ask them out, are you going to ask them to marry you next week?' or something like that. It's just such a formal culture back home in general, and I think that that formality extends to the dating market, where people can't just enjoy the company of the opposite sex without major implications.
15:46 To be fair to American women, I think that these smart women settle down early with a good guy, and that's why a guy like me is single. Is that I skipped over a lot of great potential partners? There were some wonderful women I dated, but I wasn't ready to settle down, and I did miss out on some great women that I should have settled down with. But I was just not thinking. Yeah, it's definitely a regret of mine. I myself have baggage, so I totally get it. If we're going to be together for a really long time, I want somebody who's going to be around for a long time, who can help me to engage in healthy routines.
16:21 The beauty of the globalized world is that you have 4 billion potential partners out there. There's 8 billion people in the world, so if you're a person looking to date and you're not satisfied by your options in your home country, you've got many different options around the world to choose from. We're very fortunate to live in a time with so many people. I find that culturally, it's easier for me to relate to Asian women. That's just what I'm used to. Culturally, I find that there's less explanation to do when I am dating an Asian woman. We like some of the same foods. We can trace our culture back to Confucianism. There's a lot of common ground and not as much explaining needed to do as when I've dated American women in the past, or perhaps women from Latin America. That's a beautiful thing about dating is I couldn't find what I was looking for back home, but I found much more of what I'm looking for overseas. That doesn't even get into the cost of dating. You're talking about $230 per entree. You may be paying for parking, you may be paying for tickets to an event. It adds up very quickly, whereas here, I could take a date out for 10, 20 bucks, we can have a great time, and it's not this huge financial burden compared to back home.
17:30 The next one is political division. Political division has gotten way out of hand in the United States. People and families have quit talking to each other. Friendships have ended, relationships have ended. It's just getting way out of hand. This red versus blue stuff, people take it way too seriously and they get way too upset about it. It's contributing to a breakdown in Western society because people no longer want to fix the issues. They just want to make enough money so that the issues don't apply to them anymore. That's one of the biggest issues a lot of expats have with back home is a lot of them feel disenfranchised by the politics. They feel like they're being demonized, they're looked at as a bad guy, maybe even a traitor.
18:09 When I was a kid, my friend's parents may have had different political beliefs, but people generally got along. They could have a civil conversation with one another. Toward the point now where half the country feels like the election results will be fraudulent regardless of who wins. That's what's happened the last couple of elections. That's what I anticipate will happen in the next one as well. People are just really stressed out about American politics. I look forward to when the election is over, we can move on and we can talk about other subjects because it's just getting really old. It's not fun to talk about the stress that I see in people's eyes over something that they don't have control over. It's really getting old, and I missed the days when I was...
18:48 It seems like people really hate each other over it. Back in the States, it's really discouraging and disappointing because at one time, it seemed like we were going to be able to overcome some of these differences, like maybe back in the '90s, that people would overcome some of this stuff. Now, I'm not so sure that's going to happen.
19:06 Some of that is certainly due to the mass media in the US that stokes the flames of discontent, disagreement, and division. But I think it's more than just the media; I think it's too simplistic to say it's just the media. I think there's more at play there.
19:22 I think a lot of Americans feel like they are losing these debates rather than either of the candidates winning. I've seen numerous people who I believe to be otherwise totally rational, normal, well-intentioned human beings get sucked into angry political discourse. They do so in such a way that's detrimental to their physical and mental well-being.
19:43 It's a culture of materialism. I like my creature comforts as much as anybody else, but it seems like in the US these days, it's taken to a whole new level where people's sole reason for moving forward in life is to go buy new stuff. This consumerism culture, this idea that you are your possessions and you have to strive to purchase a new this or a new that, you need to go into debt to do so. That gets old after a while.
20:11 I don't buy a lot of stuff here in Southeast Asia that I don't need. Most of what I buy is for the business or what I absolutely need for survival, like rental payments, food, transportation, and that's mostly it. With the consumer culture, people get stressed out because they owe all this money for all this stuff that they can't reasonably afford.
20:34 It's disheartening to see people stressed out trying to impress other people. It's a famous line in Fight Club where they talk about how we are buying things that we can't afford to impress people that we don't like. That's just such a common thread I see it every day when I'm watching the news, when I'm talking to people back home.
20:55 I remember that every time I saw a friend I hadn't seen in a while, they immediately wanted to show me some kind of purchase that they had made. More power to them; I respect their initiative, their hard work to get to where they're at. I didn't necessarily want that for myself.
21:10 I feel that experiences are what I'm really after in life. All these purchases that I made, because I had the same habits for a while, they were really exciting or fun initially, but then the newness wore off and I got bored of them. Then they became just another addition to the junk pile or cluttering up my apartment.
21:28 Often I lived in the city, so I'd be in an apartment, and then whenever I'd move, I'd have to pack all that junk up in my car, cart it to the next place. Today, I still have a storage unit full of stuff that I don't need anymore, and it feels like a ball and chain that I can't get rid of because there are items with sentimental value there.
21:49 But they're mixed in with a bunch of other junk. And yeah, some of that stuff in there is stuff that I don't want to get rid of, stuff that is important to me. But it's also mixed in with a bunch of stuff that isn't that important to me, that I had for a business, that I had for my e-commerce store.
22:05 And really, I just need to, I really need to dispose of a lot of that stuff. But it's not easy to let go when you put all this time into accumulating it, into cleaning it up, storing it.
22:17 Number eight is estrangement. And for those who haven't seen it, I suggest you watch my video describing why I'm estranged from my family. I don't have any family support back home. I don't talk to my family; they're generally very toxic people.
22:31 There's a lot of narcissism in my family. A lot of people who are so narcissistic that they are not capable of working with other people at all. This is evidenced by the trajectories of their lives. They often engage in bullying behavior toward me.
22:44 And I know some people would say, "Oh, you're playing the victim." It's almost like if I tolerate the bullying to be family-oriented, then I'm the victim. But if I say, "No, I don't want to deal with it anymore," then I'm also playing the victim.
22:58 So I don't participate in that. I tolerated it when I was a kid, and then when I turned 18, I came to the conclusion that I don't have to associate with any of these people.
23:07 Unfortunately, a lot of people are unhappy, and it's better to avoid them if you can because they're not going to be supportive of you in pursuing your best interests. They're going to mostly be looking to leech and to take advantage of your time and your goodwill.
23:22 That's a conclusion I came to based on my conversations with other expats. This is unfortunately not an uncommon thread of expats not getting along with their families. For me, the space has been wonderful, knowing they can't call me up and start harassing me or bothering me or asking me for my limited time.
23:38 I think for a lot of us, going halfway around the world is a great opportunity to start anew, to get away from those toxic people, to be around people that may not judge you, people like other expats that they get it, right? They come from toxic families.
23:54 They probably, if you're halfway around the world, part of what's gone wrong in your life back home is relationships. For me, I decided I'm not going to put up with it. When I have the agency of adulthood, I'm just not going to tolerate it anymore, and that's been a great decision.
24:07 That decision has been proven well. I don't think a family is people that are necessarily blood-related to you. I think it's the people who want the best for you, and I think many of you want the best for me, and I really appreciate that.
24:19 Many of you have provided a sharp contrast in the way that you treat me compared to my biological family. The only thing more difficult than going through life without family support is going through life with family dragging you down.
24:30 The next point is daylight. Winter in the US sucks for most of us that are not in California or Florida or some similar sunny weather state. Some of us are trapped indoors half the year and we don't get much sunlight.
24:43 I think this is especially true for brown people like me who tend to need more sunlight. I know plenty of people back home that spend half the year complaining about the weather, and it got me thinking, why don't I check some other places out that have different weather?
24:55 So I found places in Latin America, places in Southeast Asia that don't seem to have the same overcast weather much of the year. Now, I know Lima, Peru does have some of that, but it's not so cold and frigid. There are a lot of different places in the world that if you're looking for sunlight, you may find them outside of North America.
25:14 There are some sunny places, there are some warm places, but they tend to be really pricey and high in demand and crowded because everybody else has figured out those places have nice weather. Places like Florida, Southern California, Arizona.
25:26 A bonus here is that I've been able to simplify my wardrobe while living overseas. I don't have to have heavy winter coats over here. I don't have to have winter boots. I can live with some fairly simple clothes.
25:38 Wear the same thing every day; it's not a major issue. I buy sneakers once again, not a big deal because I don't have to prepare for extremely cold weather. There are some things that I miss about back home, but the weather is not one of them.
25:51 One additional thought here is the daylight is fairly consistent because we're on the equator here in Southeast Asia or not too far from it. The sun generally rises and sets at the same time every day. I do suspect that many Americans suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder.
26:06 The last point here is that I felt like I saw it all. I traveled to 36 of the 50 states. I still need to get to Alaska and to Hawaii. There are limited new places for me to go to, and it's become much more expensive to travel in the US these days.
26:19 So I just feel like, why would I spend more money to see places I've already seen, already spent time there, already been there? I'd be paying a lot more today than I did yesterday to enjoy these places. I'd prefer to go abroad where my limited resources go a lot farther.
26:35 As far as buying me time to enjoy life, see new things, do new things, meet new people. There's just so much to see in the world outside of the United States. As I've traveled more, I've discovered new places, I've met other travelers, and they're often asking me, "Have you seen this? Have you done that?"
26:51 And many of the places they're talking about aren't in the United States. It's like with every new place I go outside of the country, I discover two new places to check out. I feel that my time in the US, rather than trying to see new places, is better spent earning money or working on a plan to move overseas, which has been a goal of mine for a long time.
27:09 And so when I am back in the States, I'm in grind mode. I'm not in vacation mode, I'm not in relax and enjoy mode. I've skipped over a lot of awesome things because my focus is outside the country and checking out some new destinations and new places, as opposed to going back over some of the same things that I've already seen.
27:27 And you may not be in this position. You may have not traveled much in the US. It's a beautiful country; there's a lot to see. But for me personally, I felt like I'd seen most of what I wanted to see in the US, and I needed to turn my attention to other countries.
27:39 Maybe it's just me, but because of the high cost of living in the US, it seems like a lot of people just try to rush through their vacations there. There seems to be a lot of what I call "checkbox tourism," where people rush through things to see every little thing and check the box off their list, as opposed to really being able to immerse themselves in local culture, have conversations, get to know people.
27:58 It's like, "Okay, did I get the Instagram picture? Okay, did I eat at the nice...
28:04 Did I eat at a nice restaurant? Did I see the natural sights? Okay, now I'm off to the next thing, or I'm back to work on Monday.
28:12 Whereas when I slow travel abroad, I really take my time. I feel that after I go to a place, there's often not much left for me to see or do. I've met the people, I get the culture, and I've really immersed myself. I don't feel like I've just gone through the motions.
28:28 So let me know what you think down in the comments below. Are you thinking about leaving America? Have you already left America? Did you leave and boomerang back like I may have to do for work?
28:37 Are you interested in learning more about how to leave America? Feel free to send me an email. The email is in the description below.
28:42 If you want to help the channel, give us a thumbs up. It really helps with the YouTube algorithm. And finally, subscribe to the channel down below if you want to see more content like this. And we'll see you soon.
Follow the journey through expat life, travel experiences, and the realities of living abroad while exploring different places, cultures, and everyday life overseas.
