What’s Europe for?

It’s a Dazzling Dream for American Expats, Until Shit Gets Real

My friend Jeff is going back to the U.S.

Rules are how you make a great society. There’s no other way. Sweden has a lot of rules and, many would argue, has built a pretty good society, if not a great one. But there’s no such thing as privilege here, by design, as I’ve written about before. That, the weather and the taciturn natives can all come as a shock, especially if you come here with stars in your eyes. 

If travel is supposed to change you, then expatting/immigrating should transform you. It’s one hundred times more intense. It’s one thing to go to Paris, visit the museums and then sip a café crème. It’s entirely another to buy the right lightbulb, pay your phone bill or figure out parking. I was thinking about this when I read Elizabeth Colman’s essay, Europe Won’t Fix You. She writes:

The United States is changing; it’s facing a tidal wave of anti-democratic policies and politicians, and that’s awful and scary. Moreover, life in America is brutal. It is a hyper-competitive society with little to no safety net or shared social contract that weaves us into a tapestry of mutually beneficial community.

When Americans come to Europe and see weeks and weeks of paid vacation, social medicine, and a centrist political system (although, I’m looking at you, Hungary/France/Germany/Denmark/Italy), you would be forgiven if you thought you’d found paradise.  

But what you find quaint or novel masks the complex realities of the people here. Try dealing with the inefficiencies and frustrations of daily life in Italy or France, not just for fun—because, in the end, you don’t have to be here—but as the locals must: with no exit strategy to escape the unending tribulations and quotidian struggles.  

Oddly, the morning that I read this essay, my friend Jeff had told me he’s going back to the U.S. next winter. It wasn’t working out here. 

He’d followed his wife to Stockholm on her two-year contract with a FAANG firm. She has a big job and her relocation package seemed robust. They were happy to get out of the U.S. with its guns and its toxic politics and were exploring the idea of a permanent move. They were not naive, but they did have visions of Swedes frolicking in the crystalline snow, made merry from their suite of welfare-state protections. It’s possible that Jeff was not full of steely realism. Because barely had the plane landed that his troubles began.

There comes a moment in this expat/immigrant life when shit gets real, just as Colman argues. If you’re lucky, it comes later down the line. For Jeff, it was immediate. His wife’s relocation package didn’t include housing assistance so they moved into a depressing extended-stay place with fake plants and grubby carpet. Then three different banks turned down his application. He didn’t have a job, so in the considered estimation of the bank, he didn’t need a bank account. That he had money in the U.S. didn’t matter. It wasn’t a factor in the Swedish equation. These rejections are commonplace here, but incomprehensible to the American mind. Jeff was in a bind because Sweden is a cashless society and there are some payments you can’t make with a foreign bank card.

He adopted the only strategy there is for this, making a million appointments at different branches of various banks, each time with a different employee. Eventually, he figured, he’d hit an outlier, someone who wanted to be helpful or that would show mercy, even if out of sheer perversity. He spent weeks leaping off trains and bounding onto trams and buses as he rushed to appointment after appointment. “I was busier than a sailor in a regatta,” he said ruefully. After a few months, Jeff succeeded. He proudly showed me his new debit card, polishing it with the hem of his shirt.

His initial plan had been to find a job. He’d known that 100% of Swedes speak flawless English, so he didn’t expect that finding work would be a problem. It was. Jeff’s work is in a heavily regulated area, so he would need several certifications in order to find employment here. But these certifications required fluency in Swedish, so he’d have to master the language first. By the time he’d be qualified to look for a job, at least three years would have passed. His fallback plan–to find work within a different industry–also failed because of his language skills. While Swedes do speak English, they usually speak Swedish at work. It was an impossible dream.

Before he’d had time to think this through, though, he had another problem to solve: He still hadn’t found a permanent apartment. Stockholm real estate is crazy expensive, so they were looking in the nearby city of Uppsala. It didn’t make sense for them to buy, so they would have to rent. But Uppsala is a university town and rentals, especially one-bedrooms, are hard to come by. Also, the rules governing rentals here are nuts. For most buildings, you can only get a one-year lease. If the all-powerful association that governs the building likes you (and they never do), you might get a second year. But there are no guarantees. 

In any case, the landlord has the right to kick you out any time with three-months notice, so a lease isn’t really a lease. When Jeff and his wife finally found a place, they only made it to Month 7, whereupon the landlord served them notice. His daughter wanted the place. In the second place, they made it to Month 9. The landlord planned to sell. 

That was it for Jeff. There would be no permanent move. 

I suppose the point of the story is that it can be very difficult to move to a different country. Even accomplished people who have planned well run into grave obstacles. Some say the grass is greener on the other side of the fence because there is more shit. 

In her viral essay, The way we live in the United States is not normal, Kristen Powers writes:

I realized there are other places in the world … where life isn't about conspicuous consumption and "crushing" and "killing" your life goals, where people aren't drowning in debt just to pay for basic life necessities. There are places where people have free time and where that free time is used to do things they love — not to start a side hustle.

I started to have a dawning awareness that we don't have to live this way.

Powers’ solution was to buy property in Italy, where she is building a house and plans to live. It sounds to me like she knows what she’s doing and she’ll be fine. But not everyone gets it. The other day an American woman posted on an expat site, saying that she wanted to buy land in Sweden and then move here with her family. Oh, and also with her farm animals. All of them – equines, bovines, pigs and chickens. Would that be a problem, she asked. Yes, I said. Yes, I think it might be.