Why We Left the US for Australia: A Personal Growth Story

so after living in the US for 35 years I made the decision with my family to leave America for good it was not a decision that was easy But as time passed it became clear that the US was no longer the right place for us so I want to talk about why we left the downsides of leaving America and a lot of the benefits that we found as well there were quite a few benefits and because

this is a channel about personal growth I also want to talk about some of the less that I learned along the way that might help you to make really hard decisions and live a more meaningful life my wife Nat and I met in New York over 10 years ago she was on a one-year tourist visa from Australia looking for a good time and I was on all the dating apps looking for love I don't think that

we realize the implications of falling in love with someone who was born 10,000 Mi away from you at the time or how difficult of a life that would be especially once you have kids but at the time we could give a [ __ ] less so as things started to get more serious we had to talk about where we wanted to settle down where we wanted to start our family New York definitely wasn't it so we tried California

and later Pennsylvania but no matter where we lived we couldn't find a place that felt like home and after giving this a lot of thought I think it really came down to having a lack of community so I've got a big family I've got six brothers and sisters and we all spread out across the East Coast some of us even moved across the country my friends from school followed a similar pattern a couple of them still

live in my hometown but the vast majority of them moved more than 2 hours away everyone just became so spread out and I think this is a universal experience for people who grew up in small towns in the US most people go off to college and find opportunities in bigger cities and they rarely ever return while there are real benefits to being within a few hours from your family and friends I don't think that's the same

thing as having a community a community needs to be close in proximity they're your actual neighbors they're the people that you run into on your morning walk they're the ones you call when you have to make a midnight trip to the emergency room we really struggled to find any sense of community in the US and that's not the fault of the us as much as it is the fact that all my family and friends that I

grew up with just spread out so much but what I learned from this process is that you're never really stuck and you can always start over honestly I lost track of the amount of times that we started over I think we sold all of our stuff and moved across the country two or three times if you can avoid doing that I think that's probably the way to go you're going to save a lot of money but

I also found out that this wasn't the scariest thing in the world to be able to start over again and again to experiment with where you want to live and what you are looking for for your home what you need out of a community I think those are Pursuits that are worth investing your time and energy into and the more that you do it the more that you start over the more you begin to build up

resilience and realize that you actually can begin again in a new place and I think that's one of the reasons that made it so easy for us during the pandemic to spend a significant amount of time in Australia so I visited Sydney for the first time over 10 years ago this was very early into my relationship with Nat and I immediately fell in love with the city I mean sure there were some challenges in adjusting to

the new culture I mean for one everything was upside down the toilet flushes the other way but wow was this country beautiful I mean the hiking trails the tiny beaches scattered all across the coast the people were so friendly and God damn it their accents are adorable at the time though I never really considered it a real possibility for our future Nat and I kind of had this unspoken agre agement that since we met in the

US we would always live in the US whether that was fair or not that was kind of the unwritten terms of our relationship when the pandemic hit it gave us an opportunity to live in Australia for 7 months and for the first time I really got to live there I wasn't just visiting as a tourist it gave me a taste of what life might be like if we stayed and honestly it was pretty great I got

a gym membership I learned how to drive on the other side of the road I learned that a flat white isn't a boring white person which which is it's a common mistake so outside of the nature and the friendly people I also found a country that was safe and looked after each other Australia's Public Health Care system has been amazing Nat has been in and out of the hospital over the past few years from giving birth

to our son to losing our daughter and to having an emergency epcom and we haven't had to pay a single dollar out of pocket we've never had to stress about insurance companies and whether or not we would be paying tens of thousands of dollars or even going into debt for having life saving procedures yeah we pay a little bit more in taxes but i' so much rather pay into a system that ensures everyone gets access to

healthcare without dealing with shady and predatory insurance companies Universal healthare should be a thing in the US like the fact that the Health Care system and insurance care system is so backwards in the US is a huge problem and obviously both sides of the aisle are trying to fix it one thing that you might not agree with me on is the fact that it's really nice to live in a country with practically no guns I've lived

on blocks in Philly where people got killed in shootings I've been to parties where people pulled guns out I went to schools where bomb threats put everyone on lockdown for hours I even had a friend who was on campus during a school shooting I always have my guard up in the US when I'm going to concerts movie theaters bars anywhere out in public I'm always looking for the exits and when I speak with my family and

friends I know that this is a very common mindset I never realized how unnormal this was in the rest of the world until I moved to Australia there's this very real sense of relief when you get off the plane where you're like oh I can let my guard down I don't have to worry about somebody shooting me in the face say what you want but that's a pretty good feeling how [ __ ] insane is that there's other

other good things about Australia we have abortion rights which isett cool life in Australia might not be perfect and like part of me is just constantly waiting for the PIN to drop I'm like like when are you guys going to like just tell me this is a big practical joke and places can't get this good cuz honestly Australia is pretty great another self-development lesson that I got from this period of my life was to allow myself

to continue to question leld assumptions I think we tend to think that our life moves in a straight line and you have to check off all the boxes you grow up graduate school pick a career settle into a city you know get married have kids blah blah blah you do everything in a certain sequence everything happens in order and you're supposed to follow the path through to the end but what I've discovered over the past few

years is that life is more like a road trip than a train track you can change course or even your destination at any point in time just because you got a degree in dog training doesn't mean you need to dedicate your life to it just because you were born a Phillies fan doesn't mean you have to be an [ __ ] I take that back that's definitely not true the point is the life that you thought you were

supposed to have isn't the only one that's available to you and when you allow yourself to question what life and work Are Meant to look like you open yourself up to new possibilities living in Australia for those 7 months really made me question everything I assumed my home would look like when we looked around at our life one thing was clear we had found something that we could never find in the US a community and this

wasn't because you can't find communities in the US they're all over the place and you can even build communities for yourself it was just that we had everything set up so perfectly for us here in Sydney that we didn't have to work as hard for it our friends were starting their families they were having their first kids buying their first houses and then Nat got pregnant with our son and we had to make a decision this

is going to sound absolutely ridiculous and idealistic but in the beginning we wanted to try to live between the US and Australia we thought we would travel back and forth every 6 months because we just didn't want to make a decision we wanted everybody to be happy we wanted my family to be happy Nat's family to be happy we wanted to be happy we didn't want to make a decision so we decided to do both but

when we started looking into the realities of having a baby getting them into a good daycare looking at the amount of stuff that kids need and the cost of living in two places at the same time it just wasn't realistic like it's it's true that there are a lot of people that live very unconventional lives they they have a family of five living on a boat or in an RV or [ __ ] in a tent somewhere in

the middle of the woods so it's like obviously there are people that can do it but this just wasn't the life that we wanted to build for ourselves or for our son and so we had to make a decision I have to give Nat so much credit because never once did she pressure me to move to Australia she never even brought it up it was me who eventually came around to the idea and said something like

it' be pretty great to live here with Sydney we had a community a beautiful city and if I'm being honest a country that didn't feel like it was tearing itself apart so we made a decision to move here fulltime and this decision felt equally easy and impossible it was easy because of everything that I've already shared with you Australia is an amazing place to live it was impossible because we'd be 10,000 miles away from my family

there are moments that we will miss there are moments that my family will miss holidays birthdays Milestones it's in these moments when the distance really hits home but this was kind of the life that we signed up for whether we realized it or not and listen this life is is hard and it is challenging but it's not one that I would trade for anything okay one final piece of advice that relates to personal growth I don't

want to sound sound like an [ __ ] although if you made it this far I don't think this is going to upset you but it's not your job to make everyone happy when you make big life decisions some people won't understand they might question your choices disagree with them they might even feel hurt by them and that's tough especially when it's people that you care about your parents might not like the degree you chose or the fact

that you decided to become a YouTuber are you going to be a big and now you're going to be a YouTuber huh you're going to be a YouTuber son my dad doesn't even sound like that I don't even know where that came from at the end of the day other people's opinions about your life shouldn't Define it this doesn't mean that you should ignore people or not care about their feelings it just means that you don't

have to carry the weight of their expectations you could acknowledge their concerns and appreciate their perspective and still choose what's right for you and what I found is that when you stop trying to make everyone else happy and you just focus on building a life that you love people who care about you will come around that's pretty much it if you clicked on this video because you're in some weird kind of political algorithm welcome to my

channel I talk about self-development and personal growth if that's something that you're interested in if you want to learn more about how to build a meaningful life then click subscribe you can also get my newsletter by going to matt.com newsletter um thanks for being here and I'll see you soon