I can count on one hand the number of expats I’ve met who speak about their home country with any real fondness. They are more likely to explain why (of all the countries) theirs is the worst. A common expat conversation involves each party trying to convince the other that their country is shoddier. “You think bureaucracy is bad in your country, well listen to this” [insert appalling anecdote here].

Whilst there are expats who genuinely dislike their own culture and feel they’re better suited elsewhere (which is why they moved away in the first place), I would argue that there are also unconscious elements at play that influence the way expats view their homeland.

One such aspect is that, much like people who purchase something expensive and then say it’s good even if it isn’t to avoid feeling foolish, expats are continually reassuring themselves that they have made the right decision to live abroad. This is a form of choice-supportive bias in which we apply positive attributes to the option we have chosen and negative attributes to the choice we opted to forgo. The lives of expats will be negatively impacted if they think everything is better back home, so it is possible they subconsciously adjust their views to avoid this.

Another reason an expat might be negative about their home country is that they have a more intricate understanding of their own culture and so are more likely to notice all the negatives. No matter how hard an expat tries to integrate they will never understand their host country the way a native does. Even if there is no significant language barrier they will likely remain blind to the deeply imbedded negative aspects that give locals cause for complaint. In this way, expats make unfair comparisons between their own country and their adopted home because they have more information about the former.

An expat friend of mine has a different viewpoint on why expats are so outspoken about the drawbacks of their own country. He believes that if you spend your life gushing about how amazing your own country is then local people will ask why the hell you don’t f*** off back there, so expats choose to focus on the negatives of their own countries instead. His theory is that these expats then end up buying into the narrative they’ve created (i.e. they say it so many times that they convince themselves their own country is a complete dump).

Another storyline is the romantic one of ‘moving to a foreign land and living a better life.’ We are exposed to this narrative in movies and books from an early age. It is a story deeply embedded in our subconscious, in a way that ‘Don’t go anywhere because it’s better where you are’ isn’t. In order to uphold this romantic narrative, expats must hone in on the negative aspects of their own country to widen the gap between ‘better’ (their host country) and ‘worse’ (their homeland).

It seems likely that at least some of the above-mentioned aspects are at play in relation to why expats are so vocal about the drawbacks of their own country. I myself am often (overly?) critical of the UK, so like other expats I have a vested interest in figuring out how accurate my opinions are and to what extent they have been shaped by subconscious bias during my time living abroad. Right now I can’t answer that with any conviction, but I suspect that being negative about the country we have chosen to leave behind is less about facts and more about the stories we tell ourselves to justify the life decisions we have made.