loneliness

A ฿1,200 night out in Pattaya, a ₱2,000 one in Angeles. The daily number is small and true. Compounded over ten years, here is the six-figure total the daily number hides — and the health cost beside it.

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 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.

Widowed men carry a mortality hazard around 1.27, peaking near 1.41 in the first six months. Abroad and alone, every buffer the figure assumes is gone.

The isolation-to-dementia science is settled; the living-alone risk is documented. The move abroad raises that risk and removes the detection.

Living alone raises mortality risk by a third, and the most exposed cohort abroad is the one no dataset counts. The sourced mechanism, stated cold.

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.

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.