A lot of us move abroad in our twenties, either to study or to work. It is one of the best windows in life to do it. It is also way harder than the highlight reel suggests. I want to write the honest version of why.
I moved from India to France in 2018 for the HEC Paris MiM. Six years later I am still here. The first three were significantly harder than I had been told to expect. None of that means I made the wrong choice. It just means the picture I had going in was incomplete.
Your 20s already have too many variables
Even if you stay home, your twenties are a juggling act. Career, social life, romantic life, the shifting relationship with your parents, setting up an apartment, sorting your finances, building habits and systems. All important. All connected. Push on dating and your career suffers. Save aggressively and your social life shrinks. Prioritise work and your family relationships drift.
That is already a lot. The twenties are partly about learning how to balance these in the first place.
Moving abroad adds a whole new set
Now layer on a second set of variables. That is what happens when you move overseas in your twenties.
Community and friendships
You no longer have a constant support system. Local culture is different, so connecting with locals is slow. You mostly end up with other young foreigners. The problem is they are not fixed in place. Some leave after a year. You leave for an internship and come back to a different friend group.
A year into France I took an internship in Los Angeles for six months. Two suitcases, left behind the new friends I had just started making, rebuilt again in LA. Then rebuilt again on return. The friendships kept restarting and never had time to deepen.
Only after about five years did I have a genuinely stable circle. That timeline surprised me. I went deeper on this in the pros and cons of living in Paris.
Dating
It is already hard to find someone you click with. Add variables like, will this person still be in the same country in six months. Will you be. Most people who move abroad have just broken up with whoever they were dating before, because long distance is hard. Then arrival hits and there is no spare energy. You just do not date.
That is what happened to me. It took until year three or four before I had enough stability to put real energy into that part of life.
Life logistics
Apartment, renter insurance, furniture, electricity contract, landlord, bank account. Small individually. As a stack, in a new country and often a new language, exhausting. The first year I moved I had to file taxes in India, France, and the US. It took weeks of evenings.
The good news is logistics stop being variables once you have done them once. The bad news is the first time hits while you are doing everything else from scratch.
Visas and permits
Unique to living abroad. Also the variable that can wipe everything else out. Wrong visa, missed renewal, and you leave your entire life. A friend of mine picked the wrong master’s program here. She did not qualify for the right post-study visa and had to leave France.
When I graduated I had to target job offers that paid enough to qualify for a four-year passeport talent. For my US internship I did not get my visa until the day before my flight. This year I am preparing my French citizenship application. Each is a months-long project with stress that has nothing to do with your job or your social life.
Career and family
Building a career in a foreign country, in a multilingual team, adds friction. I picked the English-track in France, which let me focus on business skills but narrowed my job market and slowed my French. I covered this in my marketing career path post.
Family is the hardest one. You miss birthdays, weddings, sometimes illnesses. You watch your parents and grandparents get older over video calls. Flights add up, vacation days are finite, and the compound cost across the years is real.
Some things just get pushed back
There are only so many variables a person can prioritise at once. Energy is finite. In your first year or two abroad, you spend disproportionate energy on the basics. Finding an apartment. Earning enough to live. Building a baseline social circle so you do not slide into deep loneliness. Doing all this in a foreign country and often a foreign language drains more energy than the same tasks at home.
So other parts of life get delayed. Friends back home pull ahead in their careers, buy houses, get into serious relationships, get married, start having kids. You are still on a one-year lease, eating pasta alone on a Tuesday, learning the difference between a prefecture and a mairie. The delay is real. It is not a failure. It is the price of taking on more variables at once.
By year five or six, I had caught up on the basics. The visa, the job, the stable circle, an apartment I actually liked. From there I could put real energy into hobbies, relationships, music, travel that was not survival travel. I am genuinely happy with the slope of my life here, even though the timeline does not match my home-country friends’.
What I want you to take away
If you are abroad right now and things feel harder than they should, you are not failing. You are dealing with a whole second layer of variables that your friends at home are not. Adjust your expectations downward for the first three years. Do not compare your insides to other people’s outsides.
And remember why you moved. Mine was that I wanted to see the world. Six years in, even with the friction, I would make the same choice again. I wrote the positive flip side of this argument in non-obvious reasons to move abroad, which sits next to this post.
The struggle is part of the deal. Knowing that going in helps.