Why you should leave your home city

October 9, 2026

Imagine that the only ice cream flavour you ever ate was chocolate. It’s delicious sure, you know it tastes good, and it’s not going to taste like anything other than what you expect it to. Chocolate ice cream is like living in your home city for the rest of your life.  That’s not to say that its bad. After all, it has tasted good for your whole life so far, even if you didn’t like the taste of chocolate at first, you’ve probably adjusted to it and come to enjoy it.

But what happens when the ice cream shop stocks new flavours, ones you may be familiar with, like caramel. Caramel is good, kind of similar to chocolate in a way, but what if it doesn’t taste quite as nice as chocolate, you wouldn’t want to make a risky decision to try something new and fun over knowing what you’re going to get by making the safe choice in chocolate. Then there’s Mango Passionfruit Mania – that’s a very different flavour from chocolate, while it does intrigue you, it would be way too risky to go so rogue on something so different, but then again, it could be a life changing flavour.

If it wasn’t quite clear the different ice cream flavours are living in different cities – caramel being a city somewhat similar to your own , and Mango Coconut Mania being a place incredibly foreign to your own. Usually, I like to start these pieces with an anecdote, but I’ve got nothing here today so the ice cream analogy is what we’re rolling with.

I’m a big believer that everyone at some stage should move abroad from their home town and live in some place completely different. The more foreign the place the better. Its all too easy to get rapt up in the comforts of familiarity in the place you were born and have spent most of your life, or maybe you know inside that large parts of the environment in your home town are not treating you as well as they should. Regardless, moving out of your home town will almost certainly be a path that once you go down you’ll never look at your hometown the same again.

Moving away to somewhere completely different is a complete change in environment, and with that so many elements of what has become routine in life changes too. Principally among those are the people you spend most of your time with, this includes friends, family, colleagues, even the same barista who serves you coffee. They’re all going to be completely new people.

Where this is significant is because people who have known you for your whole life have a fixed way of viewing you. They see you as the sum of your past experiences with them, times you’ve had together, jobs you’ve worked, habits that you do. This is not necessarily a bad thing, if these people have stuck around for this long in your life, chances are that they accept and like you for who you are.

The problem comes when you aren’t happy with certain parts of yourself and want to reinvent yourself. It’s not uncommon for people to continue seeing you as who you have been for your whole life. Those around you may have known you long enough that they rely on you being ‘you’ as something comforting to them, whether that is your place in their social standing, or the way you’ll predictably respond to a situation with them. So when you express a desire or intention to change in some way, whether intentional or not these same people can often feel threatened by your worldview and hold you back.

But when you move abroad and meet completely new people who become your friends. They have no existing knowledge about who you are, to them you are simply, you, the person they just met. This absence of being shackled to other people’s definitions of who you are is liberating. It’s a clean slate, you could reinvent yourself to be whoever you want to be.

If you’re not a person who’s into sports you could easily go out and participate in whatever sport you wanted to and no one would say that you’re not someone who does sports. Want to become a pro at dating but your love life back in your home town is non-existing? Who’s to stop you from becoming Casanova in your new city or country. The possibilities are limitless.

The chances are you’ll have to reinvent yourself in your new place. You will no longer have the pre-existing same group of friends who you went to the same bars with most weekends. In a search for new friends a great way to meet people is to join interest groups, and particular interest groups that may present themselves to you could be far different from what’s common in your home city. This is easier than ever these days with “expats in (insert city/country)” Facebook groups being plentiful, and are usually very welcoming of newcomers in the search of community.

Moving abroad is an incredibly difficult thing for people to get up and actually start doing because it requires them to sacrifice their entire existing network of familiarity with people and how their city functions for a place that is more foreign than not. This unfamiliarity breeds its own challenges as becoming familiar with new systems of bureaucracy or rental rules or parking rules can be uncomfortable, and on certain days it will feel particularly draining. But within the understanding of these new systems starts an understanding of how things can function differently outside the place you were born and spent most of your life.

As you start to recognise the differences in your new city, you’ll form new opinions about what your home city does well but more importantly about things that it does poorly.

Having lived in one place for most of my life up until my late 20s it’s amazing what questionably unhealthy aspects of my home city had I accepted as normal. For example, having grown up in Melbourne, the Australian Football (AFL) season dominates the 6 months of the year that its being played. It takes up most of the media headlines, not only the scores from the weekend’s matches , but any controversy involving players, all throughout the week there’s football related content on tv – analytical stuff, comedic shows etc. Most of the people I’d speak to in day-to-day interactions would have a comment about their particular team to make on any given day. The whole city goes mad for it, and its justified, it’s a great sport, and it’s what makes up a sizeable part of the city’s culture.

But when you move abroad and see from afar that very few people in your new city care about AFL but can still see the massive volume of AFL content on your social media feeds or in your group chats from back home you realize how much of a fishbowl it can be. It’s as though the whole city revolves around this one sport.

Moving away from this is refreshing, it makes you see that there is a large world outside AFL. Despite the media reporting on every slightly significant or insignificant event in it. It’s only with distance from the sport and the city (both of which I’m still mad for) did I finally understand why some of the highest profile and incredibly well paid stars in the AFL have expressed interest in moving away from the self-described footy fishbowl that is Melbourne¹.

On the other hand, living abroad I appreciate Melbourne’s, and more broadly Australia’s morning culture. Cafes are open at 7am and you’ll see people out and about exercising most mornings, the expression that the 5-9 is just as important as the 9-5 holds true for Australians out starting their day with movement. Compare that to Budapest where its hard to find a café open before 8:30am. Again its not to say that the more evening centric culture in Budapest is bad, just that I align more with the morning culture, and that now having the reference point of both cultures makes me more sure of which one I prefer.

The longer you live in your new city the more data you’ll have on the differences between the two. I like to call these data points ‘reference points’². Broadly speaking a reference point is any experience you compare against another, whether a completely different situation or comparison of a similar situation you went through earlier in your life compared to a recent experience. The more reference points you get the deeper you’ll understand the difference between your old city and your new one, and with those differences, an understanding of what makes a place function well and what not so well.

With the reference point of having lived in a country with a good economy and one with a poor one, I can appreciate more the abundance of employment opportunities and the benefit of having a career that leads to those direct opportunities. Whereas in Budapest where my career doesn’t exist, it’s incredibly difficult to find a role that’s a good fit for me that isn’t a menial job. I’ll never take that for granted whenever I do get back to Melbourne.

But on the other hand despite the poorer economy, the public transport around the city of Budapest is excellent, where the metro comes every 3 to 5 minutes, and bus connections take you anywhere around the city or the suburbs and again are frequent, you could easily get by without owning a car here. But in Melbourne, you’re lucky if the train comes every 20 minutes, and on Sundays forget it about, buses either come 5 minutes earlier or not at all. You cannot exist without a car there.

It’s with these reference points that you can draw conclusions about your two places you’ve lived. Speaking to an Australian friend whose lifelong dream was to live in London was the admission that while she’s enjoyed London for its opportunities to travel Europe easily and its expansive life, that ultimately Australia is a better place to live long term. She could only come to this conclusion by having the reference point of having lived in the two different cities.

On the flip side another Australian friend moved to London in what was a relative snap decision after he got offered a job working in tennis, a sport he’s big into. He didn’t have any particular interest in London other than it being the host of Wimbledon. Despite his job barely covering the bills he was incredibly happy in the job working around tennis all day, having admitted his savings were being drained by simply existing there he STILL probably would have spent the rest of his working life there, because from his perspective London offered him something that Australia had not.

In a particularly peculiar case, I knew a guy who’d grown up in Bogota, Columbia and then spent a year abroad in Cape Town before coming to Budapest for his studies. His comments on the differences between the cities were that Budapest is so safe in comparison to the other two that its almost boring! He’d been conditioned growing up with the expectations of crime being omnipresent in his last two cities that when he didn’t always have to be aware of his surroundings that it felt dull. He continued to explain that this is how it should be, not always having to be on high alert for your own safety. But for him he wouldn’t have made this discovery without having lived in different places.

There will likely be small things you’ll have to do differently compared to back in your home city. Things of little consequence but that had become habit from the familiarity of living so many years in one place. Take the example of how I commute in Budapest compared to Melbourne. In Melbourne I drove to work, maybe I’d play some music or a podcast. But in Budapest I’ll take public transport, and with that I’ve been reading heaps during my daily commute, reading had been something I’d wanted to do more of lately, and by sitting on a metro for 20 minutes it was an unexpected benefit of having to do things differently. It’s the same with cycling, I’ll occasionally cycle around here, not being so tightly bound by time I can often take time and cycle to the city which is a way I’ve been able to explore so much more of the city I’m in. In Melbourne my time was so tightly organised I didn’t have time to use anything other than a car. Being forced to make these changes has been something I’ve preferred, getting in an extra half hour of reading time, or the opportunity to cycle safely around is something I’d prefer over the necessity to drive every day. Its something I could only have gotten by moving to somewhere completely new.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about living abroad for me has been the different people you meet. Unless you’re only interacting with expats from your home city in your new one, the people you associate with will likely have different worldviews, values and different goals in life. They have different interests most likely, and again its refreshing. Not to dismiss the importance of having a social group around you but having been friends with largely similar groups of people for the last decade or so, all from the city I grew up in, having friends from a completely different environment exposed me to these differences. Some of the differences I greatly appreciate, and others I prefer in my friends back home, but if we are all products of our own environment then our friends abroad will enlighten us with their experiences growing up in their own unique environment.

A big difference I noticed in the values of the people of Budapest compared to those in Melbourne is that there is not a massive fervour to purchase a property. In Budapest its implied and expected that you will purchase a home at some stage in your life, whether that be in the heart of Budapest or a suburb nearby. Whereas in Melbourne the advice is to purchase a property as fast and as soon as you can, there is generally a frenzy around it. This frenzy creates anxiety that if you haven’t brought a property or are actively working at purchasing one, then you’re behind. The problem becomes that this goal dominates large parts of people’s lives to the point that they’ll rush to buy a property just to quell that anxiety.

Interestingly moving away from your home city is not so commonplace in Australia as it is in other parts of the world. In the United States it’s just expected that you move on from your home town as most of your friends there are likely going to move abroad to other cities for opportunities so it’s just something you’re expected you’ll do. However, in the US it’s more likely that you could be moving abroad for a significant portion of your life, which doesn’t need to be the case to get the benefits of moving abroad. In fact, moving abroad temporarily for a period of one or two years is enough to draw the differences between elements of your life at home and abroad.

Two thousand years ago, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote to a friend who had travelled widely and found no relief from his low mood³. Seneca’s answer was blunt: you cannot expect a change of place to fix what is really a problem within yourself. Wherever you go, your faults go with you. The fact that Seneca is arguing against travel as a cure is itself telling. It means his friend, like most of us, expected travel to change him, and was confused when it didn’t.

I think Seneca is right that a new location doesn’t fix you by itself. But I’d push the idea further. Moving somewhere new doesn’t change you through the place itself, it changes you through what the place demands of you: the challenges you have to face, the beliefs about yourself, other people, and the world that get tested and the belief systems that get broken along the way. The location is incidental. The friction is what does the work.

So I’d rework Seneca’s line rather than just borrow it. It doesn’t matter so much where you move abroad to, but what person you become while you’re there, and more importantly, what person you are when you come home.

1. Several articles on big name AFL players wanting to leave Melbourne
   https://www.afl.com.au/news/1037074/the-mystery-man-joe-daniher-who-has-become-heart-and-soul-lion
   https://www.afl.com.au/news/108738/rioli-finds-fame-hard-to-swallow
   https://www.afl.com.au/news/453093/pickering-opens-up-on-buddy ↩︎
2. I use the term ‘reference points’ as their own concept and a core idea of mine that I believe drives how we think about many situations we encounter in life. ↩︎
3. Seneca: Letters from a stoic: Letter XXVIII ↩︎