Many expats don’t like to be thought of as “lucky”

When you tell your friends back home that you are living an exotic lifestyle in an exotic part of the world, have any of them ever called you “lucky” in response? It’s a natural reaction from some to assume that someone living an enviable lifestyle is doing it based on good fortune, or perhaps people use the term as a lazy way of implying that you are fortunate to have put yourself in that position?

In an interesting and short article asking if there such thing as an expat state of mind, longtime Dubai resident and expat Annabel Kantaria says it’s very annoying to hear people jump to the conclusion that her position is down to Lady Luck.

Are expats lucky to be expats?

While I don’t fit the typical definition of expat, since I’m more of a long-term traveler having been on the road for almost two years now, I still get that same reaction when people ask me what I’m doing. Whether I’m renting an apartment for months at a time or staying in a hotel for weeks at a time, when some people hear the brief description they gasp and say it sounds like a dream life, and some do tell me how lucky I am.

Is it really “luck” though? Obviously it’s not. If you’ve gone through all the hassle of uprooting your life to spend your days elsewhere for long periods it’s a very deliberate act, and one that is fraught with complications. There are many wonderful advantages to this sort of lifestyle, but there are many obvious disadvantages as well. For most of it the balance is a positive one, though certainly there are some who are expats for career reasons and they’d prefer to have stayed home if they could have.

Expats are risk-takers

Annabel’s question about whether there is an expat state of mind got me thinking that one mandatory quality of an expat is that they are willing to take risks. Think about it. Even if you barely graduated from high school in a small town back home you could flip burgers for long enough to become an assistant manager and then be making enough money for a modest and safe existence. It would be mind-numblingly boring, but it would be safe.

But to uproot your entire life to suddenly become an oddball in a country where you might not even know the language is filled with risks. Throwing yourself into the unfamiliar takes a lot of courage, and most people do it because they hope the rewards will outweight the stress and potential problems. Some people eventually become so comfortable in their new country that they end up staying forever, while others see it as more of a short-term adventure. In either case, there are endless possibilities for things to go wrong and the potential expat has to accept the risks.

So while we might not really be “lucky” to be expats, we might actually be lucky to have been born with the capacity to start from scratch in uncertain surroundings, hoping that the good outweighs the bad.

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