Have you ever met someone who has decided to emigrate and its like they have suddenly converted to a strange new religion?

They become gripped with enthusiasm for a far away land whilst their current home, which you have all lived in reasonably happily before, is now some terrible hell-hole – a Nation in terminal decline where there is “no future” for them or their children! They may overwhelm you with wonderful tales of their future life beneath the palm trees and then stop just short of advising you to get out of your home country before its too late! Of course there are people in the process of emigrating who are level-headed, pragmatic and entirely sensible about it but there is always a strong pull towards the extremes. A constant temptation to interpret your current life as a bit worse than it actually is and your new like in a foreign country a bit more happy and full of sunshine.

Ironically, people who have emigrated but don’t actually like it and end up returning home often have the same opinions. Only in reverse. The things that they find themselves missing from home become more and more important to them whilst the attraction of the new country (that they used to believe in so passionately) are forgotten or downgraded. I often think about this when I hear people who live near the sea say that they never actually go to the beach anymore – the dream has now become a non-event.

Why does this happen – how come people can flip-flop so dramatically?

There can be all sorts of factors involved but here are two things to consider.

Your mind’s “Reticular Activation System” (RAS)

This is an impressive sounding term for a fairly simple idea i.e. “when you are interested in a particular thing your brain tends to notice it everywhere”.

A common example is this – if you decide you are going to buy a certain car (for instance a black VW Golf) then you start to notice them all the time. They have always been there, mixed in with the other millions of cars on the road, and you probably haven’t noticed them before but suddenly they seem to be everywhere. Because your brain processes trillions of pieces of information everyday it necessarily has to prioritise some and not others. So if you have got the idea into your head that you could be doing better in another country you may suddenly see reasons for this everywhere and wonder why you never paid attention to them before.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is an incredibly powerful force. Basically, once you have made a decision your brain tends to filter incoming information to support that decision and filter out evidence to the contrary. Its as if now that one part of your brain has made the decision (often not as logically as you might imagine), other parts of your brain now set out to prove that you have made the right one.* This force of confirmation bias gets even stronger when you mix with other people who have the same opinions and you get a bit of “Emigration Groupthink” going on! If you have ever been to a BBQ for new arrivals to the country you will know what I mean

Everyone does this to some extent – its just how we are programmed and it can lead people to very different and very passionately held opinions. For instance, if you were to interview a couple who were just about to emigrate to Perth and then a couple who had returned to the Perth from the UK because they didn’t like it over there what would you make of the two contradictory opinions? Would you recognize either country they described or would they be two warped caricatures?

So what’s good about this?

Emigrating can be a long-drawn out process that will require a lot of patience, determination and persistence in order to make it work. It’s not the sort of thing that you do because you woke up one morning with a vague preference for living in a foreign country – it’s the sort of thing that you do because you have a clear and compelling vision of how it will make your life a LOT better. Not 5% better or better in a “I guess its all swings and roundabouts” kind of way. Your mind indulging in a bit of confirmation bias will sustain you in your emigration project – without it it would be so easy to give up and then rob yourself of your chance of a new life abroad.

And what’s not so good…

A common pitfall for people who are on the path to migrating is that they can get a bit too good at filtering out the evidence that doesn’t fit. This can lead to a very unbalanced point of view and you could be setting yourself up for a hard “bump” when you arrive and hard reality makes an appearence. No-one dreams of hard work, paying the bills, cleaning the bathroom or standing in line at the supermarket but this still how you might spend most of your time when you live abroad! You’d be surprised at how little time you spend with “a drink in your hand and your toes in the sand”.

Seeing things in an over simplified “Heaven & Hell” way does set you up for a fall but balanced point of view that is still enthusiastic and positive will be your friend when you arrive and start to settle abroad.

*  An excellent book that explains confirmation bias and how things can go wrong is “Mistakes Were Made (- But Not By Me)” by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. It manages to be informative, funny and really quite worrying all at the same time.