The Patterns in the Noise

How I Knew it was Time to Leave the U.S.

The harbor at Marstrand, Sweden on the day we decided to leave the U.S.

When I was in my ‘20s, I lived in Budapest for five years. We were young, so we went out every night and every night, we talked about the war. In that part of the world, history has a certain weight. You can still feel the pain. It’s in the cobblestones, in the wrought iron. That terrible war is still alive there. Every night, I listened to the stories of those who had gotten out, those who didn’t and what happened next.

I got to know an older woman who lived in my building. Her name was Erzsébet and she would make us coffee using a complicated iron contraption that looked like it was from the 1800s. We would sit out in the courtyard and chat. Later, she would join us out in the evenings sometimes, even though she was much older than we were. I thought she was brave to do that. Now, I do it myself.

Erzsébet lost her entire family during the war. “Everybody died,” she said. She herself had survived only because of a fluke involving a tram hitting a bicycle, delaying her from an appointment with fate. It was only that tram that saved her, because she hadn’t yet made a plan to save herself. She’d thought things weren’t that bad yet. She’d been waiting and seeing. But while she was waiting, she had felt an overwhelming sense of panic, which she ignored.

“Don’t go by what your intellect tells you,” she said one night, tapping her temple. “Go by what you feel.”

There were lots of stories about flukes like Erzsébet’s tram accident that turned out to be salvation. But probably the dominant trope of these evening war stories was the close call. I heard it again and again. It’s hauntingly described in Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, Could Have:

It could have happened.

It had to happen.

It happened earlier. Later.

Nearer. Farther off.

It happened, but not to you.

You were saved because you were the first.

You were saved because you were the last.

Alone. With others.

On the right. The left.

Because it was raining. Because of the shade.

Because the day was sunny.

You were in luck -- there was a forest.

You were in luck -- there were no trees.

You were in luck -- a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,

A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant . . .

My unconscious absorbed the lessons of those nights: Life is killing and eating. You should always be scanning your environs for safety. Pay attention when things start to change. Always have a plan to get out. And when you get the signal to leave, do it immediately. Do not delay. Lots of the stories concerned those who left it too late.

Too late is too late.

For years, those stories and their warnings lived in my head. I always had a plan, just in case, but I never needed it. Things in the U.S. were pretty good for a long time and then, suddenly, they weren’t.

It will take time to come to terms with the results of the 2024 election and its aftermath. Many people I know are struggling to respond. Some of them are considering leaving the U.S. and I spend a lot of time and effort trying to help. But one thing I don’t have to do is respond myself. I already did, five years ago, when I got on a plane with my family and left.

When I moved to Sweden in 2019, I was certain the U.S. was heading for civil war, a democratic collapse, or both. There was no shortage of reasons to believe this, but at that time, not many people seemed to see what I did. It was crystal clear that what was happening to the country wasn’t going to get better. But in the time it took to prepare our move, my friends said they didn’t understand why I leaving. Wasn’t this a sweeping overreaction, they asked? Was I maybe allowing my feelings about Trump to warp my brain? I wondered the same thing. But every time I checked, my intuition said it louder: Get out.

The day after the election, I called my mother. “You were right to leave,” she said. “I don’t know how you knew, but you knew.”

A lot of other people have also asked me how I knew. This is how.

I’ll preface what follows by saying I’ve got something of a track record with these things. Let me explain. Back when I worked as an editor at the Wall Street Journal, I had a dream one August night. I saw people flinging themselves off buildings near our office and cops and firemen rushing around frantically as sirens screamed. I saw myself getting into some kind of company van along with my colleagues. A dream voice said, Pack up your desk. Something is coming. I felt profound fear. As I wrote down the dream in my journal the next morning, as I often do, the hair stood up on my arm. When I showed up at work with a bag to empty my desk, my colleagues laughed riotously at this ethereal message and my dimwitted compliance. Ha ha! Soon afterward, a Boeing 767 traveling at 590 miles per hour and carrying 9,717 gallons of jet fuel hit the World Trade Center. Its force was equal to 480,000 pounds of TNT. We were in our newsroom across the street, watching people leap from towers and cops and firemen rush around frantically as sirens screamed and no one was laughing then. A few days later, my colleagues and I were commuting to the paper’s backup facility in South Brunswick, New Jersey. We travelled there by company van.

Fast forward a bit and my husband and I were living in Mamaroneck, N.Y. in a little yellow cottage not far from the beach. Our two-year old was in pre-K and life was good. Then, one day in July 2007, two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed, weighed down by investments in subprime loans. When I read about it, the hair stood up on my arm. I knew enough to know it was a very bad indication. My husband was self-employed in an industry sensitive to economic shifts and I was freelancing. We were nowhere near safe. A voice said, Get a real job. Something is coming. Later that summer, when losses from subprime loan investments sparked a panic that froze the global lending system, I was well into interviewing. In the fall, I began my new job at a fancy investment bank. It was hands-down the weirdest job I ever had and was in no way what interested me. But it saved our bacon.

Bear Stearns folded the following March. In September, on one incredible Monday, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 4.4%. The next day, the Reserve Primary Fund broke the buck when its net asset value fell below $1 per share, sending shockwaves through the financial services industry. By Friday, the share price of my fancy investment bank had slid 57% to about the price of a sandwich.

It didn’t take long for all of this to trickle down. Through no fault of his own, my husband’s business evaporated into thin air. News of layoffs started circulating around the neighborhood. The playgrounds were suddenly emptied of nannies but full of dads. Our neighbor couldn’t make the rent and had to go back home to mom and dad, baby in tow. Our gardener quit to go back to Mexico to make some money. Rumor had it a guy around the corner was burning his furniture for heat. As the crisis entered its acute phase, prominent banks failed, stock markets plummeted worldwide, and the global financial system almost collapsed. But my stupid job held steady.

The next one was 2018. Trump was in the White House and my life kind of sucked. I worked remotely for a big consulting firm with a workday that routinely stretched from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM. In between meetings and deadlines, I popped in and out of my car to drive the kids around our suburban Connecticut town. I was burning out, but no one cared. In fact, I didn’t even care myself, because I had no choice but to keep going. Something seemed to have shifted in the compact between capital and labor and it for sure wasn’t in my favor. I was making good money but this seemed to do nothing but position me for still more work. I felt trapped in some kind of weird servitude that I never consented to. Was I doing this wrong somehow, I wondered?

All around me, no one was talking about it.

I’d been tracking an alarming new indicator for a while. It hovered on the edge of my peripheral vision, like a shadow. I checked it all the time: Middle-aged white people in Appalachia were dying, lots of them. The spike in deaths had begun in 2010 and was attributed to the triad of drug overdoses, suicide and alcoholism. The phenomenon was labelled “deaths of despair” by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton and later elaborated in their 2021 book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. The introduction reads:

As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy.

I knew this was a symptom of a failing state. I knew it was systemic. I’d seen it before.

The Russian mortality crisis hit in 1990, after the Soviet collapse. For five years, people there were dying in unprecedented numbers. In fact, it was the most precipitous decline in national life expectancy ever recorded in the absence of war, oppression, famine, or major disease. It seemed obvious that the mortality crisis stemmed from Russia’s transition to a market economy and the associated job insecurity, poverty, rising income inequality, and deep uncertainty about the future. All of that had added up to psychosocial stress. And that had added up to suicide and vodka. Now, the U.S. was going through a similar transition, but silently.

Pay attention when things start to change. Everywhere I looked, I saw a country that no longer functioned as it should. The decline was obvious. It wasn’t a good place to live. I fought myself for a time because moving a family of four and a large dog overseas is no small undertaking, but I knew it was time to go. During the summer of 2018, on a sailing trip in Sweden’s beautiful West Coast, I saw how different our lives could be. We made the decision to leave the U.S. then.

Strandverket, Marstrand, Sweden.

At the height of that stressful final period in the U.S., I had a recurrent dream. When I say “recurrent,” I mean that sometimes I had it three times in a single week. I was in a hotel on a business trip and I had to get to the airport to catch a flight home. In the dream, I was running out of time. I would pack one suitcase and then realize I had a second one to pack, as well. I would fill the second suitcase but be unable to close it, and then understand that I needed a third. I would pack everything and then observe that I’d forgotten an entire closet stuffed full of clothes. I would pack everything and then find I had nothing to wear myself. I would pack everything and then discover that I had more luggage than I could manage. I would get my bags to the door of my room, but I couldn’t unlock it. I would get my bags into the hall, but the elevator would be broken. I would get my bags into the lobby, but the taxi would cancel. For the years that I had the dream, I never made it home, not once. When I got to Sweden, though, the dream stopped, starting the minute I got off the plane. I think it’s because here, in Europe, I’m finally home.