pics

I have friends who have actually emigrated to the US who have been begging me to go, telling me I’d love it. Cultural melting pot and all. My English is pretty good and I have a lot of cultural exposure to US things. It’s strange, but even as the US has done stuff I very strongly disagree with, I still have some admiration for a lot of American things. That’s soft power baby!

These repeated calls to move have dried up very suddenly in the past year and some of them have left.

I’m from Lebanon where we’re taught from day one to leave the proverbial crab bucket and go figure out a living somewhere where life is (theoretically) better.

The most realistic big international city with decent pay I can move to is actually Dubai. And I go there a lot for business - just like the US, there’s some good and some bad. There’s a lot of (valid) complaining about such places in communities like Lemmy but frankly Dubai just is the melting pot world city that is accessible in my part of the world. Many of my friends have been rejected for immigration because of financial reasons (or for being from the wrong religious community…), ending years-long processes to move westward. As if it’s their fault their bank savings lost more than 99% of their value in 2020-2021. Compared to those who moved to the Gulf who basically got a work visa in their email after getting the job and flew out the week after. Do you know how hard it is to even briefly visit another country with a passport as weak as ours?

But honestly moving anywhere feels like an impossibly immense decision. My friends in the Gulf are less enthusiastic, they don’t say I’ll love it, they say I’ll be paid enough to afford moving somewhere I’ll love after five years. Sometimes I feel like it’s inevitable that I move there. But that’s how I felt about the US in like 2015. So who knows.