I sold or threw away about 80% of everything I owned, gave up my apartment, put the rest in storage, and left Norway with a one-way ticket and three nights of accommodation booked.
It was the best decision of my adult life. It was also not really my decision.
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How I got forced off the map
My girlfriend found me on YouTube. A comment on someone else’s video led her to my channel, then to my website. She commented on a photo I’d posted of a book about metaphysics. You can guess the rest.
She came to Norway in October 2018. In November I flew to the US to see her — ninety days maximum, and a border officer who looked at my vlog camera and said, “Mmmm, that looks like a gun with a sight on it.”
By December she’d sold everything and moved to Norway. We spent Christmas together. Her university professor’s verdict on her leaving the States was, “Yeah, that’s probably a very good idea.”
Then the arithmetic started.
The system said no
As an American she got ninety days as a tourist. She wasn’t permitted to earn a living in Norway — not even running her own business online, from our flat, for clients elsewhere.
A work permit required a job offer matching her education. Most employers won’t hire someone without a residence permit. You need the job to get the permit and the permit to get the job.
That left marriage as the only route. The application fee alone was 10,000 kroner — around a thousand dollars — and the process would take months we didn’t have.
I chose love. I just had to leave my own country to keep it.
Going back to the US wasn’t right for her, and I’d have hit the same ninety-day wall there. So we researched somewhere neither of us was from, and chose Chiang Mai for its entrepreneur community.
We packed and left. I stuffed a 27-inch iMac into a red suitcase so I’d have a proper setup on the other side of the planet.
I won’t pretend it was an adventure at the time. It was frightening. I’d moved thirty-two times as a child — including a stretch in a tent and a spell in a motel where the owner let us stay for nothing — and that apartment in Norway was the first place that had ever felt stable.
I was giving up the only security I’d ever built, on three days’ notice, for a country I’d never lived in.
The woman who owned our Airbnb took pity on us and made calls. Within days we had a proper apartment. Within months we were living somewhere with a pool and a garden, for a fraction of what Norway cost.
7 benefits of moving to another country to start over
These aren’t hypothetical. Each one is something that actually happened.
- You break the loop of old routines — the ones so automatic you’d stopped noticing them.
- You get distance from relationships that were costing you. Distance does what a difficult conversation often can’t.
- You put life back in motion. New events start arriving simply because you’ve stopped standing still.
- Your brain wakes up. New place, new language, new everything — nothing is on autopilot, and that’s tiring in a way that’s genuinely good for you.
- You open the door to things you couldn’t have planned. Almost everything good that followed came from a chance I couldn’t have arranged from Norway.
- Your money can be worth substantially more. Our cost of living dropped enormously, and food that was expensive in Norway was suddenly cheap and better.
- You find your actual people. This was the big one — we landed among people with goals, running their own things, genuinely interested in what they were doing.
Staying still has a cost people don’t count
Think of standing water. Nothing dramatic happens quickly — it just stops being good, gradually, because nothing is moving through it.
Your life force behaves similarly. When your days and your work are at a standstill, running the same loop over and over, something in you registers it long before you consciously admit anything is wrong.
Apply that to your job, your education, where you live, your relationships. Those are the usual places people get stuck.
We’re here to experience things. That’s the point of the exercise. When there’s no movement, your higher self notices, and it tells you in the only language it has — a persistent feeling that something isn’t right, which you’ll then spend years trying to explain away.
It’s like being dressed in too many layers, too tight, unable to move properly. Eventually you’ll do something drastic just to get free.
Is it worth it?
For us it wasn’t just worth it — looking back, it was necessary. Things that had been stuck for years moved within months.
Worth weighing honestly before you decide:
- Does the energy of the place, and the people in it, suit how you actually want to live?
- Could you afford a materially better life there, and do more of what matters to you?
- Do you need the reset — fewer possessions, fewer obligations, room to think?
- Are you moving toward something, or only away from something? Both are valid. It helps to know which.
Thailand is one option among many. Whatever country you’re considering, research the visa situation properly and recently — the rules change, and tourist entry is not a long-term plan.
The thing that made it possible was working online. Location independence isn’t a lifestyle brand — it’s the practical mechanism that lets you leave without needing permission from anyone.
The disasters and the blessings
If you’re reading this you may be in the middle of your own version — pushed into something you didn’t choose, frightened, unsure whether it works out.
We had plenty of those nights before we left.
What I’d tell you is what I couldn’t see at the time: the thing that looked like the disaster was the thing that unstuck everything. I wasn’t brave. I was cornered. But I’d rehearsed that life often enough that when the door opened, I recognised where I was going.
Related: what a reality shift actually is, and leaving Thailand, simple living and trusting the universe.
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