NOBODY TELLS YOU THAT THE FIRST few months feel like the first week of a new school, every single day.

You walk into a room and don’t know anyone. You go home and the apartment is quiet. You open your phone and everyone you love is asleep or at work or living a life that has continued, without much interruption, without you in it. You knew this was coming and it still lands harder than you thought.

This is the part people don’t put in the brochure.

I’ve been in Medellin long enough now to have moved through several versions of this feeling. The early acute version, where you question everything. The middle version, where you’ve built just enough of a life to see what’s missing. And the version I live now, which has its own particular loneliness… the loneliness of building something, which turns out to be a universal condition that has nothing to do with geography.

Here’s the reframe that helped me most: you would be lonely anyway.

If you switched jobs, moved to a new city, went back to school, walked into any new situation as an adult, you would spend months feeling like a stranger. We tend to forget this because we’ve been in our existing lives long enough that the loneliness of entry has worn off. But think back to the first year of college, or the first months at a job where you knew no one. A year in, you had friends. A year in, it had become your life. The timeline abroad is the same. The disorientation just has an accent.

There’s also something worth saying about the alternative. The older you get, especially as a man, the harder it becomes to make and keep friends if there’s no shared activity holding things together. The friend group you’d be protecting by staying home has its own slow erosion built into it. Throwing yourself into the deep end is uncomfortable, but treading water in the shallow end has its own costs that can compound over the years.

So what actually helps?

Learn the language. This is not optional if you want a real life in your new country. Without it, you are stuck at the surface of every conversation, every relationship, every experience. You can have a perfectly pleasant expat life conducting transactions in English, but you will always be a tourist in your own home. Spanish opened Medellin to me in a way that nothing else could have.

Have a project that pulls you out of the apartment. A blog. A newsletter. A content series. Something that gives you a reason to go somewhere, talk to someone, pay attention. Netflix and video games are fine and I’ve done both in excess, but they don’t accidentally introduce you to anyone, except maybe some Korean kid who massacres your entire Call of Duty troop before you can say “he’s behind the…”

And that, unfortunately, is not the kind of human connection I'm talking about.

Say yes to things you would have been too busy to say yes to back home. My landlord invited me to his ranch recently. He runs a cattle operation outside of the city, grows tropical fruit, the kind of place that exists in a completely different universe than my normal life. Back in the US, with a full calendar and established social life, I would have found a polite reason to decline. Here, I said yes. How many people can say they have stayed at a working cattle ranch in rural Colombia? Eaten alien-looking fruit that looks, feels, and tastes like cotton candy (it’s called “Guama” known as the Ice Cream Bean). I had a conversation I couldn’t have had anywhere else on earth. That’s the exchange rate of life outside the US. You trade comfort of the familiar for the occasional experience that simply has no equivalent.

Keep your body in motion. Gym, tennis, walking, whatever it is. Routine is underrated as an antidepressant.

And when the hard days come, because they will, try and hold onto this: low periods are like catching a cold. You feel terrible; at points you convince yourself maybe you will always feel this way, but then it passes. It always passes. The mistake is treating a temporary state like a permanent condition.

The loneliness of building a life abroad is real. It is also the price of admission for something most people never give themselves the chance to find out about. A bigger life, a more three-dimensional version of yourself, and the particular freedom of a person who chose, on purpose, to start over somewhere new.

That’s a price worth paying.

🇰🇷 South Korea
South Korea’s digital nomad visa rollout is accelerating, but the ~$70K annual income requirement confirms the country is targeting established remote professionals, not budget nomads.

🇹🇭 Thailand
Thailand is moving closer to reducing visa-free stays back to 30 days amid mounting pressure over visa abuse and unauthorized remote work, a real shift for nomads relying on flexible entry cycles.

🇭🇺 Hungary
Hungary’s investor and mobility environment is getting less predictable after the new government proposed halting non-EU worker visas next month, a broader signal that immigration posture in the country is tightening.

🇵🇹 Portugal
Portugal continues intensifying scrutiny around foreign income declarations and residency compliance after the dismantling of major NHR tax advantages, increasing audit risk for expats using Portugal as a tax base.

⚠️ South Asia
This affects movement now: continuing India–Pakistan tensions are still disrupting regional airspace, forcing reroutes and longer flight paths across parts of Asia and the Gulf, with higher fares and reduced schedule reliability for travelers.

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

I don't believe I have ever eaten tteokbokki, a Korean street food made of chewy rice cakes in a spicy, sweet red sauce, but I did spend a lot of time in LA's K-town eating delicious Korean food, and I can understand how that kind of meal might feel like a reason to stay alive.

This book was recommended by BTS, so obviously I had to read it. I always read whatever Korean boy bands recommend. Just kidding. But it is a fascinating structure: recorded transcripts of the author's sessions with her psychiatrist, interrupted by poetic and deeply honest passages that do the emotional heavy lifting. What strikes you immediately is how good the psychiatrist is. If you suffer from depression, or as Baek Sehee did, dysthymia (persistent, low-grade depression that never quite lifts), seeking professional help is not a suggestion, it’s the thing.

The other striking element is the author's commitment to honesty, which you realize over the course of reading are actually two separate things: the honesty itself, and then the decision to be honest. And doing it again, and again, every single time.

The passages she shares are specific enough to feel borrowed from your own interior monologue. On sensitivity: "I also became much more sensitive; I wanted to shout at the middle-aged men who walked down crowded sidewalks smoking their cigarettes without any consideration for others. Over thirty minutes I saw seven smokers, and they were all middle-aged men. Hate them. Hate them. Hate them." On books as medicine: "Books never tire of me. And in time they present a solution, quietly waiting until I am fully healed. That's one of the nicest things about books." On what empathy actually looks like: "Just be there to hold my hand, be sad or angry with me, or if you've gone through something similar, tell me about it and say it will all pass eventually."

The psychiatrist closes the book with a note about his own anxiety to discover his work turned into a book, but then his joy in the spirit of the writing. So brave and vivid. To anyone living day-to-day in barely contained anxiety, he writes, listen to that overlooked voice within you. Because the human heart, even when it wants to die, quite often wants at the same time to eat some tteokbokki.

Baek Sehee died on October 16, 2025. She was 35. The cause of death was not disclosed. She donated her heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. Five people are alive because of her.

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.

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