I'm also sure a small percentage of people from the USA may even rethink living there.
Connecting through a corporate VPN to the corporate network wouldn't shield your location, and I'm not aware of any company that lets employees connect using their own VPNs? With corporate VPN connections, it's usually pretty easy to trace back to the geographic area of the connecting IP, and IT generally keeps logs of these.
While most companies are cool with short term remote work in other countries (especially for employees who do not work on revenue-generating products or services), undisclosed long term remote work is generally grounds for for-cause termination.
As an employer I have to fill out a lot of extra forms for someone outside the USA. But there are companies popping up to solve this -- they take care of all the paperwork for you, for a fee. Usually you negotiate with the employee to reduce their paycheck by however much the fee is, and everyone wins because they are going somewhere with a much lower cost of living (or you just eat the cost to keep a good employee).
And that one is able to choose which standards by which one evaluates one’s living.
Humans are very resilient.
Honestly, the barriers are not so great, and definitely finances are not at the top of the list of things to overcome. Without giving any numbers it's not clear what is required to be secure, but it also depends a lot on where you live.
That being said, I'd say language acquisition is more important than having a lot of money. Once you have enough money to reach escape velocity - again, this is personal, so I couldn't say what it is - more money doesn't really matter and just makes it more likely that you'd lose it because it's an easy button.
Language acquisition and learning how to meet new people are far more important, but fortunately they're free! (almost)
Europe is hard with the pandemic because it’s crowded in the main towns and cities, and a little colder than the USA. In smaller places the virus is much much less severe than you think.
That being said, I think the impact of the virus will diminish with the combination of vaccines as well as the virus continuing to mutate and compete against other variants.
Probably it will eventually become endemic and not so life threatening and reach an equilibrium, but that’s just what I think. It’s probably not great for the virus and it’s babies to kill lots of people and then suffer massive human led reactions like vaccines and quarantine measures. Maybe the cold or flu thousands of years ago were much more deadly.
Anyway, speculation aside, there’s also quality of life to consider. A lot of other places in the world really emphasize this.
The big picture is it’s an amazing world with cool people, and it couldn’t hurt for those of us who are without families and with some savings to explore it.
Ok feel free to give me some. I'd like to know the COL in these places as well.
A lot people here tend to complain about the US but are living in ridiculous high cost coastal areas and are unaware of more affordable options. Most of them are willingly sacrificing QOL because they refuse to change their attitudes.
Infrastructure, transparency, and just shit working is really amazing in the USA. Plus, access to USA markets is incredible. Being able to have same day delivery of groceries is mind blowing to people abroad. So, I really consider all of it, not just roads and bridges, as part of our 'infrastructure' and it's really good in the USA.
That being said, there are a lot of things that money can't buy, and culture is one of those things that's virtually priceless. It just takes time to develop. I don't mean to imply the USA doesn't have culture, of course it does, but it doesn't have X, or Y, or Z country's cultures.
I stayed in Mexico for about 11 months for example and I can honestly say I just 'felt' happier. Yes, sometimes I was super pissed because everything was broken: sometimes there's not water, power is constantly browning out (I really mean on a continuous basis), and the government in the south of mexico can be a mess. These kinds of things get perpetuated and affect the citizens as well over generations... yet still, Mexican culture was amazing and I enjoyed my quality of life there.
This is unfortunately something that's hard to put into numbers, but obviously there are proxies for it like the numbeo list in this thread. It's a personal subject though ultimately, because it's a qualitative assessment, so that's why I hesitated to "speculate", but thanks for asking :-)
That being said, I'm now in Italy and I got to say I like it even more here. Northern Italy in so many ways has the best that all of Europe has to offer. You can basically drink the alps on tap, any where you go, people are super duper smart, kind, hilarious, passionate, and then there's the food and all that other stuff. It's a lot more expensive here (for reference one could live easily in the south of mexico, like Oaxaca City, for about $500 USD if they wanted or $800 USD if they didn't feel like messing around with finding an affordable place), but it's also much cheaper than living in San Francisco was, and again the quality of life is much higher.
I actually think in general professionals will reach a point in the USA where they'll start spreading out, just like this article says, but it won't be limited to domestic destinations. Other countries, with aging populations, will start to attract these people, and they'll go abroad and start businesses and families. This is how the world has always worked. Italy for example was the pinnacle of the world now 2 times in history, they're kind of used to it, but the USA is just beginning its journey.
Sorry, that was probably a little meandering, bear with me, but hopefully that's satisfactory? I'm totally happy to talk more, I'm just not sure what people are interested in hearing, if anything haha. Ok have a nice day everyone.