Starting again

I've lived in Austria, Germany, Finland, Australia, and Spain. Not visited. Lived — with a lease, a local SIM card, a grocery store I went to every week, colleagues who knew my name.

Each time felt like the same thing: being competent and then suddenly not being competent anymore.

Austria was the baseline, the factory settings. Germany felt close enough to be deceptive — same language, completely different rhythm. You think you understand the place and then you say something slightly wrong in a meeting and the room shifts in a way you can't quite read. Finland was the most disorienting. A culture so understated that I spent the first three months wondering if I had done something to offend everyone, before I understood that the silence wasn't cold. It was just Finnish.

Australia was the one that surprised me most. Same language, I thought. Easy. But culture isn't language. It's the ten thousand small assumptions you didn't know you were making until they stop working.

And then Spain. Almost twenty years now, which makes it less a chapter and more just — my life. Barcelona is where I stopped moving. Not because it was the easiest landing — it wasn't, at first — but because it turned out to be the best fit. The city gave back as much as it asked for. I'm still here.

Every time I moved, there was a period — weeks, sometimes months — of pure observation. You can't perform yet so you watch. How do people handle disagreement here. What does punctuality actually mean. What's the real hierarchy versus the one on the org chart. You become, temporarily, a very attentive anthropologist of your own life.

I've noticed the same phase happens when you change jobs in tech.

New company, new country. Same learning curve, same sequence. First the overwhelm of things you don't know. Then the slow accumulation of context. Then the moment — you can never predict when it comes — where the place starts to feel like somewhere you actually live rather than somewhere you're staying.

What I've learned, from both, is that the discomfort at the beginning isn't a problem to solve. It's the process working. You're meant to feel incompetent. That's what recalibration feels like. The mistake is trying to skip it — performing confidence before you've earned the context, filling the silence with the assumptions you brought from the last place.

The people who adapt fastest aren't the ones who arrive knowing things. They're the ones who arrive knowing they don't know things, and stay curious long enough for the place to reveal itself.

A new country teaches you that. So does a new job. So, I think, does most of what's worth learning.

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