This is the reason expats are happier than the average American. It’s not just because there are no school shootings or mall shootings. It’s not only because we have access to healthcare and childcare. When we move abroad we get to design our life from the ground up. Every choice we make gets to be about what we want and desire. The alignment that comes from moving abroad can’t be duplicated if you stay in the United States. 🆘🇺🇸 #TikTokEncyclopediaContest

There's a huge benefit of moving abroad that nobody really talks about, and that is that when you move abroad, you are designing your life from the ground up, from scratch. So we talk about all the ways in which our lives change when we move abroad. But part of the reason that it changes so drastically and to our own benefit and why we're so happy with the new lives that we create is because we choose every single detail of the new life. In your existing life, in the United States, it's really hard to do that because you're built into a system that has so many expectations of you, everything from societal expectations to your own family. You will never be able to choose everything from the ground up because you will have all sorts of feelings entangled in that with your family situation, your neighborhood situation, your kids friends situation. Everything is going to influence your decisions about where you live, how you act, what jobs you take, every single thing is based on your existing situation. But when you move abroad, you get to design everything. But when we moved abroad, we had this idea that we wanted to live directly next to the kids school. We wanted to make it so that the kids could wake up as late as possible and still be on time to school because that would change our morning routines. One of the big stressors in the United States was our morning routines because we commuted into the private school that we had chosen, which was not close to the fancy neighborhood we had chosen. But when we moved, that all changed and all of a sudden our kids got more sleep and our routines became slower and we were more calm because we didn't have that grind to adhere to because we designed it differently. And now we've done that in all of the countries we've lived in. We did that in Tokyo where we were super close to the school. We picked our house based on the schools that we were applying to. Here in Portugal, we lived three blocks from the school. Our kids probably lived closer to the school than virtually anybody else because we have designed it that way. So they get to sleep in. My daughter woke up at 753 today and her school starts at 820. So she can wake up, still have breakfast, get dressed and make it to school on time because we've made our life that way. That's what designing your life enables you to do. It allows you to change how your day looks and you get to choose everything. Choose the neighborhood, choose the school, choose exactly what you want your life to look like. Do you want a car? Do you not want a car? Make it however you desire it. So when you hear other expats or immigrants who have moved abroad talking about how happy they are with their new lives. Remember, they're happy because they chose everything and they made the life that they wanted. Just them, nobody else, nobody else's expectations inflicted on that new life. They are happy because it was entirely based on their choices. And the expats who tell you how miserable moving abroad clearly made bad choices. So not everybody knows how to design a life that they desire because they don't realize what it is that they actually want. So there are sometimes flops and those people are very vocal on this app and all over the internet telling you how moving abroad is a terrible mistake. But they just don't know how to make good choices for themselves that would lead to a life that would be very happy based on those choices. If you don't know me, I'm Veronica. And five years ago, I took my family of four out of the United States out of that chaos and decided to live fully abroad. And for the last five years, we've been able to live on three different continents. I now teach Americans how they can leave the United States and create a happier life somewhere abroad. I help you match your reality with the visas around the world that will take you so that you can start designing that new life.