Notes

He arrived projecting capability. The body is the audience that stopped clapping. SE Asia is the stage that was always going to outlast the actor.

A form of capital that is not money, not friendship, not language. It is the accumulated record held in the minds and files of an institution-rich locale. Relocation severs it.

"It's so cheap here" is a snapshot taken at the lowest-cost point of a life. The three forces that compound upward as the body declines, and what cheapness costs.

The general case is that you take yourself with you. This is the itemised one: loneliness, a failing marriage, drinking, depression, money fear — each tied to the data showing it stays broken.

The retire-abroad channels you watch are made, by construction, by the people for whom it worked. The ones it broke don't post a final video. The denominator is missing.

The universal expat reassurance is a conditional that fails exactly when it is needed. 'Go home' decomposed into five preconditions, each plotted.

The expat second-year wall is real, but the culture-shock U-curve that explains it fails its own tests: a novelty dividend amortising to zero.

For many, isolation in late life abroad is not a risk of the move but the structural endpoint of it. Each support decaying on age, distance, foreignness.

The brochure footage is real, and honeymoon-phase, survivor-sampled data sold as a marriage. Paradise is a relation, and the move ends it on schedule.

Moving abroad won't make you happy. The geographic cure is a term from addiction recovery. What travels with you, what doesn't, when the bill lands.