The People Who Leave Have Always Been Right About Something
The headlines call it an exodus. The historical record calls it something else: a pattern, and one the people who lived it rarely came to regret.
If you’ve been doing the math in private — what your life would actually cost somewhere else, whether you could get residency, what you’d have to give up and what you’d get back — you’re not delusional or hysterical.
And you’re not alone.
A lot of people are sitting at their kitchen tables and on their couches and in their cars right now, working through the same calculation. Most of them haven’t told anyone yet.
Those thoughts of packing up and starting over somewhere carry quite the stigma. We’ve been trained to read these kinds of question as a personal failure. Buck up. Be stronger. This too shall pass.
The instinct, the moment the math stops working, is to assume the problem is you. That you should be more grateful. That a more resilient person would be making it work.
But it doesn’t always pass. The lifetime of relative stability most of us grew up inside of was the exception, not the rule. Wages tracked productivity. Housing was affordable on a normal salary. The country you were born in could reasonably be expected to be the country you’d retire in. None of those things are historically normal.
They were the conditions of a particular moment, and the moment is ending.
In the United States, an estimated 180,000 citizens emigrated in 2025, the largest outbound migration in decades. Applications from Americans seeking European residency jumped 183% between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025.
In Canada, 106,134 people left in 2024. That’s the most in nearly sixty years. 2025 is on track to break it.
In the UK, 257,000 British nationals left in the year ending December 2024, eight years after a Brexit vote that still hasn’t delivered the country anyone thought they were voting for or against. When the Office for National Statistics switched to a more accurate counting method last year, it revised its emigration figure up by 180,000 people. The people leaving were already leaving. The state just hadn’t been counting them.
Right On Time is our weekly series of lessons in courage, clarity, and change for those rewriting their story.
Different catalysts. But I’d bet there’s a lot of overlap in their browser histories.
I want to say something carefully here, because it matters.
If you’ve been feeling that something has shifted in the country you live in, that the deal you thought you were making has stopped being on offer, you are not imagining it.
The labor share of US GDP, the slice of the economy that goes to wages instead of to capital, is at 54.1%. That’s the lowest reading since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping the number in 1947. In the year 2000, it was 63%. Three-quarters of that decline happened between 2000 and 2016. The drop has been building for a quarter of a century, and the technology arriving now is going to accelerate it.
In Canada, the share of household income going to housing has reached levels that, for younger households, are functionally unprecedented in the post-war period. Average rent in Toronto and Vancouver runs higher than mortgage payments did a decade ago. The grocery bill is no longer the small line item it used to be. The math of a normal life has been shattered.
In the UK, real wages spent most of the 2010s stagnant or falling, and the post-Brexit recovery the country was promised hasn’t arrived.
The CEOs know. Lawrence Winnerman, writing in Blue Amp Media, pulled the numbers together recently in a way that's worth reading in full. The short version:
In 2026, Jeff Bezos sold $5.7 billion of Amazon stock. Michael Dell sold $2.2 billion. Safra Catz at Oracle sold $2.5 billion. The people running the largest companies in the world sold shares at levels analysts called staggering.
Insiders sell when they think the stock is closer to its top than its bottom. They have access to numbers the rest of us won’t see for months.
American companies authorized $665 billion in share buybacks in the first four months of 2026, the largest figure to start a year in history. A buyback is what a company does with cash when it can’t think of anything more productive to do with it than return it to its existing shareholders. Boards authorize record buybacks when they’ve stopped believing in the growth story they’re supposed to be investing for.
Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on cash equal to 31% of its total assets, an all-time high. That’s Warren Buffett, the most patient investor of the modern era, refusing to spend. He’s telling you what he sees coming by what he’s declining to buy.
These are not the moves of people who think the next few years are going to be good for ordinary households.
You can feel the math shifting under you. You’re correct that it’s shifting.
And this is the part I want to say plainly: choosing to build a life somewhere else doesn’t make you a traitor.
The contract was simple. Work hard, stay loyal, contribute, build, and the country you do it in protects the life you build. For two generations, that contract more or less held. The people who signed it got a middle class. Their children got a shot at one. A lot of you organized your whole lives around it.
It isn’t on offer anymore… not in the form it was offered to your parents. Not in the form you were told it would be offered to you.
Noticing that out loud is not a moral failure.
In November of 1948, a 24-year-old writer named James Baldwin bought a one-way ticket to Paris with forty dollars in his pocket. He’d never been out of the United States. He didn’t speak French. He had no job waiting and no real plan beyond getting on the boat.
He stayed for nine years.
The reason he left, in his own telling, wasn’t that he hated America.
It was that he could see, by 24, that staying was going to cost him the ability to do his actual work.
He was Black. He was gay. He was a writer. The cumulative weight of trying to be all three of those things at the same time in 1948 America had become, in his words, a matter of survival (and not metaphorically).
He wasn’t running from anything in the sense the word usually means. He was going somewhere he could finish the sentence.
He wrote Go Tell It on the Mountain in Paris. He wrote Giovanni’s Room in Paris. He wrote most of Notes of a Native Son in Paris. The work that made him James Baldwin was the work he did after he left the country that was supposed to be his.
Related:
Baldwin wasn’t an isolated case. He was part of a pattern the twentieth century kept producing.
The Lost Generation went to Paris in the 1920s for the same reason in different clothes. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, the rest of them. They didn’t leave because they hated America. They left because the country had narrowed after the First World War in a way that made staying feel like a slow form of suffocation.
Tens of thousands of Americans came north to Canada during Vietnam. I’ve met a lot of them over the years. People who left the country they were born in because they didn’t believe in the war their government was asking them to fight. Most of them stayed. Some of them became the doctors, the teachers, the librarians, the civic leaders of the small towns that took them in. They built lives that, by any honest measure, mattered to the places they ended up. The places they left mostly went on without them.
Americans moved to Mexico in the 1970s, the artists and the disaffected, the ones who’d watched Watergate and concluded the version of America they’d been promised wasn’t on offer anymore. Brits left Britain after the war, after Thatcher, after Brexit. Canadians have been quietly leaving Canada for the better part of a decade.
Most of them don’t return to their country of origin.
Not because the country they left got worse, though sometimes it did. The life they built somewhere else turned out to be the one they actually wanted, and they hadn’t known it until they were inside of it. The leaving wasn’t a leap. It was the part where they finally got close enough to see what they’d been agreeing to without choosing it.
Baldwin came back to America in 1957 and spent the rest of his life moving between countries. He never lived full-time in the US again. He didn’t describe his nine years in Paris as a detour from his real life; they were the period in which his real life became possible.
That's the pattern. The people who leave stopped trying to fix a situation that wasn't fixable, and started building a life they wanted to be inside of.
The politics are a catalyst. The cost of living is a catalyst. But the people doing this aren’t making the decision in a panic. They’re making it the way most consequential decisions actually get made: gradually, over months, in the searches no one sees.
You’re allowed to be one of them.
Not because leaving is the answer, or the brave thing, or the right thing. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes staying and building something inside the country you have is the best answer. People do that too, and some of them are right.
But if the math has stopped working, if the country you live in has stopped being a place where the life you want is possible, naming that out loud is not disloyalty or a moral failure on your part.
It’s just accurate. The contract was the deal you were offered. That deal isn’t on the table anymore.
The people who leave are usually right about one specific thing: the feeling came first. The gut said something had changed before the numbers caught up. The conditioning told them the problem was their own ingratitude or lack of resilience.
They were correct to stop believing it.
Baldwin didn’t have demographic data. The Lost Generation didn’t have economists confirming the long stagnation of post-war Europe. The Americans who came to Canada during Vietnam didn’t have polling that said the war was unpopular.
They had what they could feel. They trusted it before the culture told them it was safe to trust it. Many were called names or vilified for leaving. And yet the historical record, when it eventually caught up, said they had been reading the situation accurately the whole time.
That’s the thing they were right about. Not that leaving was the answer. That the feeling that something had broken was real, and that no one was going to give them permission to act on it before they acted on it.
You’re allowed to look at what is.
✌🏻 Miranda
Sources:
The Boston Globe, “A record number of Americans are leaving the country and seeking to renounce citizenship”
Inman, “More Americans are moving abroad and not looking back”
MovingTo / Stacker, “The ‘Plan B Passport’ boom: How political uncertainty is driving a record surge in Americans seeking European residency”
Yahoo News Canada, “Canada just broke an emigration record with more people leaving the country than ever before”
MTL Blog, “A record number of Canadians fled the country in 2025 but Quebec is not following the trend”
BBC News, “UK net migration 20% lower in 2024 than first thought, ONS says”
Office for National Statistics, “UK emigration explained: what we know about Brits moving abroad”
Blue Amp Media, “This Isn’t a Recession. It’s Worse.” — source for labor share data, CEO insider sales, buybacks, and Berkshire cash position
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Great source of the facts... I'm gonna be passing this on to a few people.
It's funny how you just know your gut that you have to get out, even before you can explain exactly why. I've felt that my country is burning down around me for nearly a decade now. and this, last 18 months has made it feel like somebody's been fanning the flames with the exhaust from an airplane engine. I had already determined that I was going to leave... And I'm glad I had to head start on it before now... This is not the country I was born in. And I can no longer support what is going on here by being here.