Thanks for offering a reasonable perspective that you actually expound and illuminate why you have it.

Personally, I suspect I am like you.

I have spent the last five years living in Poland and my life here is/ was soooooo much more comfortable than the one I had in the US. I had a severe illness, it cost lots of money in the US, and that sucked and prompted us to move because we couldn't easily rent due to credit score BS.

Well, I've outlasted that, and we can afford a house there now, got a loan, and did it. Since the war in Ukraine started, many of our friends have left, most of them actually; and the country is growing increasingly fearful (or oscillating I suppose) about what happens if Russia decides to invade.

Besides that the economy is slipping hard, we don't have the roots of socialization or adopted families that we would like, and the only expats left here besides us that have spent equal amounts of time all married in or are trying/ about to. The rest all left for greener pastures as the corporations here have increasingly crappy work conditions and they found out that being an expat and finding a new corpo is frequently not as available as it sounds on paper. I would suggest that corporations frequently take advantage of expats here to bring them in, isolate them, and then through this isolation get an amount of work due to the insecurity of person that is inhumane.

We have the option of moving to France, but we would have to entirely restart, can't get a home loan, face significant housing discrimination, and our skillsets aren't as in demand there as in the US.

We would be moving to a small town satellite to a bigger city like your case, and the parameters you described are mostly similar: no issues with Police, safe, good education, and more importantly my wife hates her job here and the job offer she has in the US is one we know she loves (old employer wants her back, she had the best work environment I've ever seen there).

We also want to start a family and here one can only buy a flat, but not a house or land due to regulations to prevent market issues like what happened in Toronto. The house we bought is like 10x the space of our apartment right now and we both grew up on farms and want for space.

So I'm looking at the bright sides and honestly, if it fucking sucks and we hate it, since she's an EU citizen we can hit the fuck it button again and bite the bullet to move to France or something. I'm really not that worried, the house we bought it of sentimental value to my family and I'm sure that I could just leave it to a family member in a pinch with sufficient forecasting.

I will be very excited to have more access to: carpentry projects and shop space, family, community, and national parks.

Oh yeah, kids! I noticed expat kids get mentally fucked up. Like mute-ism, really high rate of emotional disorders, and even one that has language confusion and didn't want to speak the mother tongue of his parents or the country he lived in. The only successful expats we know are all childless. The rest all are increasingly depressed because of the impact it has had on their family and that was a huge motivator for us. We don't want our kids to pay a developmental cost we don't understand out of our own selfishness.