Everyone’s Arguing About Moving To Europe

(And what it's REALLY about)

Everyone and their Substack is yelling about Europe. This post breaks it all down: the fix-me fantasies, the backlash, the soft landings, the slow burns.

You’ll laugh, you’ll wince, you’ll probably find a few good new lines you can use the next time someone engages you in this debate.

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You’ve read the posts.

I’m moving to Europe.

But it won’t fix you.

It might, though.

Just not the way you think.

Europe isn’t actually that great.

It is, though.

Also: Europe doesn’t exist to fix people.

It’s a conversation that’s been simmering on Substack for years — and what began as curiosity about life abroad has become a deeper debate about what we’re really searching for when we move to Europe.

Things tipped into full discourse mode when a bestselling author published her now-viral breakup letter to America — from a soon-to-be olive grove in Puglia. Since then, the posts have been rolling in: essays, rebuttals, confessions, micro-manifestos. At first glance, it’s a bunch of Substack writers arguing about Europe. Look again, and it’s a lot more than that.

Because beneath the good-natured discourse, we’re really talking about the systems we’re fed up with, the lives we’re trying to build, and the things we’re willing to give up for a sliver of peace. What started as a whisper (“I need out”) has become a collective question mark. One that keeps echoing: Could there be another way to live? And how we interpret this debate says more about us than about Europe.

This isn’t just a trend piece. It’s the conversation of our time — about freedom, belonging, burnout, reinvention, and what happens when your nervous system finally exhales.

So whether you’re 10 years into life abroad, plotting your escape, or just hate-read one too many Tuscany essays, consider this your cheat sheet. The themes. The tensions. The story so far.

Let’s break it down.

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The Europe Problem

If this whole debate has a catalyst, it’s Kirsten Powers’ The way we live in the United States is not normal. That 2023 essay — part love letter to Italy, part breakup note to burnout culture — set the tone long before the “fix you” discourse took off. Her argument wasn’t aesthetic. It wasn’t about villas and spritzes and terracotta rooftops. It was about the quiet violence of American life — the stress, the disconnection, the cost of simply existing — and the audacity of choosing something softer. Something slower. Something sane.

“I realized there are other places in the world (not just Italy) 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.”

(And clearly she struck a nerve, as she just announced yesterday that she’s working with a publisher to turn it into a book.)

But the moment “Italy” enters the group chat, so does projection. It’s not about Italy, you see. Italy and the misunderstood conception of its Dolce Vita (tellingly misspelled) represents a common conception of life in Europe: that it’s slower and sweeter and far more romantic than America or elsewhere. And that’s the heart of this theme: the dissonance between what Europe is and what people want it to be.

In La Dolce Vita Does Not Exist, Sarah May Grunwald calls out the fantasy head-on. Hey! Italy isn’t a curated Instagram reel, she points out. It’s a real place, with bureaucracy, bad plumbing, and deeply embedded social issues. Romanticising it — especially through an outsider lens — isn’t just naïve, it’s a kind of soft-focus colonialism. Back off.

“There is nothing wrong with enjoying an Italian holiday. We all need holidays that refill our souls, but please know that the Italian dream on a holiday is not the reality here,” she writes.

Pia Whitmarsh claps back: maybe “la dolce vita” doesn’t need to be perfect to be real. Maybe it’s about noticing joy, not escaping mess. “Let others, the young and inexperienced enjoy the wonder of a country even if old hacks have now become jaded and take things which were once wonderful for granted,” suggests Pia.

But Barbs Honeycutt wasn’t having it and jumped in with a signature eye-roll and a one-liner: “Please, film more Tiktak of hot Italian men, trust that they are still living at home because most houses have become Airbnb’s or are unaffordable.”

Recently, Sema Karaman threw her hat in the ring, cutting to the bone. Her post, In Defense of Italy, flips the critique back on the critics. Italy doesn’t exist to fix you, she reminds us. Maybe it’s not Italy that needs a reckoning, but our expectations. The entitlement. The unconscious belief that a place exists to emotionally rehabilitate you.

“It doesn’t owe you a hand-crafted Mediterranean experience tailored to your tastes as an expat or digital nomad. Italy is not a lifestyle brand. It is a sovereign country, imperfect and complex. (the emphasis on imperfect and complex).”

You cannot and should not just parachute in, soak up charm, and then get annoyed when the barista doesn’t speak English. And she makes a good point.

At its core, The Europe Problem isn’t about Europe at all. It’s about the narratives we drape over it — and whether we’re willing to live somewhere as it is, not as we hoped it would be.

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The Fix-Me Fantasy

This is where the real fight broke out.

Elizabeth.Ink’s Europe Won’t Fix You hit like a perfectly timed slap: poetic, disillusioned, and brutally self-aware. Because Elizabeth wasn’t just writing about Europe — she was writing about escapism in all its pretty disguises. Moving abroad, she argued, is not therapy. You’re still you, just with better baguettes.

“I loved Peter Mayle’s charming tale of life in a small French town, but it, like the genre it spawned, is as close to the real lives of the people who live there as romance novels are to a 30-year marriage — it’s all heightened; it's a fantasy.”

The piece exploded for a reason. It poked at something raw — the dream of being saved by scenery.

But Russell Max Simon wasn’t having it. His response, Europe Could Fix You, Actually, reframed the question entirely. What if place does matter? What if Spain didn’t “save” him in the cinematic sense, but changed his pace, his relationships, his nervous system? “It’s not that a life rich in all the things that give us meaning is impossible in the U.S.— it’s just that that’s not what America is optimized for,” he writes. “Spain, on the other hand, well… Come buy an old stone ruin and see for yourself.”

What if the right environment can support the internal work, even if it doesn’t do it for you?

Brian Wieser took it a step further. His post, Europe Will Change You, sidestepped the binary altogether. Of course you’re not “fixed.” But you are softened. Stretched. Recalibrated. You walk more.

“Living in Spain has changed my life in many ways, but cycling is the most profound. Before moving to Barcelona, I hadn’t owned a bike since high school.”

Cycle more. You rush less. You become, almost accidentally, someone new.

And then came Tuğba Avci, whose essay may be the most intimate of the bunch. In Moving Abroad Won’t Fix You, But It Will Change You Forever, she describes how her move cracked open inherited identities — immigrant daughter, second-class citizen — and made space for something else to emerge. Not healed. But more whole. “Immersing ourselves in something new forces us to step outside our comfort zones, revealing both our strengths and vulnerabilities,” she points out.

Dan Keane, next, helpfully categorised the debate: the “Fixies” vs the “Wherevers.” Those who believe place is the portal. And those who insist the work is internal, always. Or maybe we’re all a bit of both? “I couldn’t have left home without a Fixie dream in my heart,” he writes. “I stay out to catch those cold, clear gusts of Wherever. The empty beaches here are full of ‘em.”

But maybe, as Gregory Garretson reckons in Do You Need to Fix Yourself Elsewhere?, it’s not a binary at all. Maybe it’s Maslow. Maybe you need food, safety, and a stable place to live before you can even think about doing the deep, emotional digging. “Moving to another country makes the most sense when the needs you are struggling to meet are toward the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy — the deficiency needs.”

Maybe the fantasy isn’t the problem — maybe it’s pretending there’s one right answer.

Or maybe, as Elizabeth Silleck La Rue pointed out in a recent scathing post, it’s ridiculous to even discuss the idea of moving to Europe to fix yourself when, “Things are not ok, on a global scale,” and also: “the default to European standards for behaviour is deeply rooted in elitist, colonial narratives that we should really know by now are horrifically hypocritical.”

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Escape, Privilege, and the Search for Belonging

Beneath all of this — the essays, the sparring, the literary subtweets — is a quieter undercurrent. A reckoning with who gets to leave. And what they leave behind.

Because let’s be real: the option to relocate for “a better life” isn’t universally available. It’s shaped by passports, bank accounts, and borders that open for some and not others. That’s the privilege baked into the entire debate — and increasingly, it’s being named.

But privilege alone doesn’t make a person fulfilled. Where you go is one thing. What you find when you get there is another.

That’s where the freedom narratives start to crack. In The Freedom Trap, Lauren Razavi questions whether geographic freedom is just a prettier version of the same old grind — self-exploitation in a sexier timezone. The remote work dream, she argues, often comes without roots, without support, without a floor to land on when life inevitably knocks you sideways.

I echoed this in The Digital Nomad Lie — not as a policy critique, but a personal confession. Freedom, for me, meant drifting. Moving constantly, chasing inspiration, avoiding stillness. Until I realised I hadn’t built a life — just a story I was tired of telling.

“People think paradise heals all wounds. But let me tell you something: if you’re falling apart inside, the palm trees don’t make it prettier. They just make it lonelier.”

Which brings us to the real question pulsing under all of this: belonging. Not just abroad, but at all. What does it mean to feel at home — in your body, in your community, in the world? And what if you’ve never really had that before?

Sarah Bringhurst Familia’s A Beautiful Existence or a Full Life? touches on this tenderly. She doesn’t argue for or against moving abroad — she simply says that beauty matters. That pleasure matters. That sometimes, it’s okay to want more from life than just stability and grind. That wanting a life that feels good doesn’t make you naïve: “I’ve come late to the understanding, but I’ve come; a full life—for me—encompasses a beautiful existence. I can’t imagine one without the other. I can’t understand either of them apart.”

Kirsten Powers said something similar back at the start — though maybe with more urgency. Her Puglia post wasn’t about self-actualisation. It was about choosing life over survival mode.

And really, that’s the through-line to all of this. Whether people are leaving because they’re broken, or because the system is, or just because they want to see what’s possible — the question remains the same:

What kind of life do you want to build? And what might it take to get there?

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Not a Map, But a Mirror

By now, the dust has settled — a little. The posts have been written, the comments debated, the essays dissected like literary tea leaves. But here’s the part we’re only just starting to clock: this conversation, honestly? It was never really about Europe.

It’s about us.

Because the way we interpret this debate — the post we roll our eyes at, the one we dog-ear, the one that made us unexpectedly cry on a Tuesday — reveals something deeper. A crack in the surface. A personal ache we haven’t quite named. Whether you read Europe Won’t Fix You and nod solemnly, or whisper “actually, it kind of did,” says less about the continent and more about the continent of you.

Which means the real takeaway isn’t prescriptive. It’s reflective.

There’s no right answer here. No definitive verdict. Just a tangle of longing, context, privilege, trauma, hope, and timing. Maybe you’re the kind of person who needs roots. Maybe you’re the kind who only blooms in motion. Maybe you're still figuring out which one you are.

But if this conversation has done anything — and I think it has — it’s invited us to stop asking, Is it foolish to want a different life? and start asking, What am I actually yearning for? Safety? Reinvention? A softer nervous system? A shorter school run? Some version of freedom that doesn’t leave you unravelling by Wednesday?

And also:

What right do I have to that life?

What impact will I have on where I move to?

How can I do so in a way that will be least disruptive to the rhythms of my new home?

There’s no template for this stuff. Just hints. Gut feelings. Conversations like this one — sprawling, contradictory, and oddly comforting in their lack of resolution.

So no, this debate doesn’t offer a map. But it does hold up a mirror. The only question is: are you ready to look?

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Now, over to you. Where do you see yourself in this story? Which camp are you in? Did this debate stir up anything surprising in you?

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And if this post stirred something — a laugh, an ache, an urge to Google “visa-free countries” — don’t keep it to yourself. Share with your Europe-curious crew.

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