I read the Wall Street Journal piece this week the way I read most things like this, after my 5:30 am writing session, coffee going cold. Medellin still quiet outside my window.

The headline: Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers.

My current corner of the world made the article. Colombia was listed alongside Bali and Thailand as one of the places where locals have started protesting the arrival of American remote workers, people paying rent in dollars in economies that run on something else entirely.

I sat with that for a while.

Because I am one of those Americans. I’ve been here since the pandemic, as well as lived in other countries and I’ve told myself a story about what that means. That I’m not escaping. That I’m building something intentional. That the way I live is different from the tourists, different from the people who landed here with a laptop and a Revolut card and no real plan.

But the WSJ piece has a way of making that distinction feel a little less clean.

Scroll through the comments sections of any post or article about people from the USA moving abroad and you’ll find the same argument playing out in every direction at once. In many countries around the world.

Some people insist America is collapsing and the only sane response is to leave. Others fire back that millions of people still risk everything to get in, that the idea of Americans fleeing is an insult dressed up as an insight. A third faction points at the gentrification numbers and asks why anyone should celebrate a movement that makes cities unaffordable for the people who actually built them.

Everyone is arguing loudly. Almost nobody is talking about what the move actually involves.

Because here’s what the internet version of “just leave” leaves out.

Living abroad is a project. A Project with a capital P.

It means visas and residency rules and tax obligations that don’t stop at the border. The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world that taxes citizens on income earned abroad, regardless of where they live.

It means figuring out health insurance in a country where your existing plan doesn’t work. It means reading a lease agreement in a second language and still not being entirely sure if you understood it.

It means the particular loneliness of being competent at home and a beginner everywhere else, in the language, in the culture, in the bureaucracy, in the small daily transactions most people stopped thinking about decades ago.

The fantasy of leaving is frictionless. The reality has texture.

The people who actually do it fall into recognizable groups.

Retirees stretching fixed incomes into something that actually works. Remote professionals who realized the office requirement was always more habit than necessity. Entrepreneurs and freelancers whose income was already borderless before their address was.

They aren’t driven by politics or protest. Most of them still hold U.S. passports, pay U.S. taxes, and maintain U.S. bank accounts. They haven’t left the U.S. so much as they have stopped letting it be their only option.

That’s a different thing. And it’s the thing the comment section almost never gets to.

A certain kind of person is appearing more often now, and you probably know some of them, who think about geography the way a previous generation thought about their careers. As a variable. Something to optimize. Something that can change.

Winters in Latin America. Summers in Europe. Income global, schedules flexible, home a concept under active revision.

The WSJ calls this a record exodus. The comment section calls it escape or betrayal or privilege, depending on whose writing.

I think it’s something quieter and more complicated than any of those framings.

It’s people asking a question that most of us were never really encouraged to ask: Does my life have to be lived in the place I started it?

For most of the twentieth century, the answer was assumed. You planted yourself somewhere. You built around that. Geography was fate.

That assumption is dissolving. Not for everyone… mobility is still a function of income, passport, language, and a dozen other variables that aren’t evenly distributed. But for a growing number of people, the question is genuinely open in a way that wasn’t a generation ago.

I finished the WSJ piece and looked up at the city outside my window.

Seven years in. Still learning the language. Still, sometimes the American paying rent in dollars in a neighborhood that was here long before I arrived.

The honest version of this life isn’t the one that fits cleanly on either side of the comment war.

It’s more interesting than that. And harder.

Not escape.

But not innocent either.

Design. With eyes open.

🇱🇰 Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka officially launched a Digital Nomad Visa in February 2026 allowing remote workers earning at least $2,000/month to live in the country for one year, renewable annually. 

🇪🇸 Spain

Spain raised the income requirement for its Digital Nomad Visa to roughly €2,849/month in 2026 after the national minimum wage increase, tightening eligibility for applicants. 

🇲🇹 Malta

Malta is expanding its remote-worker residency programs as part of Europe’s broader push to attract digital nomads alongside Greece, Portugal, and Croatia. 

🇵🇹 Portugal

Portugal continues reshaping its Golden Visa program, which now requires €500,000 investment in funds or qualifying projects after real estate pathways were removed.

🇪🇺 European Union

Governments across Europe are tightening scrutiny of tax residency for remote workers, with the 183-day rule and cross-border reporting becoming central issues for digital nomads managing multi-country tax exposure. 

⚠️🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates

War in the Middle East is directly affecting mobility hubs. Iranian drone strikes have hit targets in Dubai and across the Gulf, and the U.S. State Department has urged Americans in 14 Middle Eastern countries to leave immediately as airspace closures disrupt travel. 

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

Something has been happening quietly in bookstores over the last few years.

Hardcover sales are up. Independent bookstores are opening faster than they're closing. BookTok has turned reading back into a social act: something people want to talk about in public again.

I've been watching this and thinking about what it means.

We live in an era of infinite content and shrinking attention. Everything is optimized for the scroll, the clip, the thirty-second take. And yet people are buying physical books in growing numbers. Paying more for them. Carrying them around. Underlining things.

I think that's worth paying attention to.

So I'm starting a book club. Analog fiction. One book at a time. Real stories about real human experience, the kind that require you to sit still long enough to actually receive them.

Read however works for you. Kindle, audio, library copy. I don't care. But if you can, buy the hardcover. New. It's the format that does the most for the writer.

Choi won the National Book Award for Trust Exercise and has spent two decades as one of American fiction's most essential and underread writers. Flashlight is her sixth novel. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and nominated for the National Book Award.

It begins on a beach in Japan at dusk. A father and his ten-year-old daughter walk out onto the breakwater. He's carrying a flashlight. The next morning, she is found washed up on the shore, barely alive. He is gone.

That's all I'll give you.

What follows is the kind of novel that makes you realize fiction can access things that journalism, history, and memoir cannot. It's about individuals caught inside forces too large to see clearly… and what gets lost in the space between.

Discussion opens April 7th.

Read the book. Underline things. We'll see what we find together.

Reinvention begins not with where you land, but with what you make.

Every place is a blank page. What you write there? That’s your legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

This community grows through real connection. One story, one share at a time.

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See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.