You can tell which decade of life someone was in when they moved abroad by the way they pack. The twenty-something fills a single oversized backpack and leaves half the zippers open. The forty-something fills a shipping container, labels every box with a room name, and still ends up staring at an unlabelled one in the hallway three months later, unable to remember what’s inside or why they brought it.
Both of them will tell you the move was about opportunity. Both are telling a version of the truth. But only one group can name what they’re actually running from — and that gap in self-knowledge shapes everything that follows.
The twenties move: running from definition
When you move abroad in your twenties, you are typically running from the version of yourself that was being assembled without your consent. The one built by your hometown, your parents’ expectations, whatever career track your degree implied. You don’t articulate it that way at the time. You say you want adventure, or that you got a job offer, or that you’ve always wanted to live in Berlin or Barcelona or Copenhagen.
The real engine is less romantic. You’re running from premature definition. The worry that if you stay, you’ll calcify into someone you never chose to become.
I moved to Copenhagen from Melbourne when I was in my late twenties. Close enough to the twenties move to recognise the pattern. I told people I was coming for a position at Politiken’s culture desk, which was true. But the quieter truth was that Melbourne had started to feel like a sentence I’d already finished reading, and I didn’t want to read it again.
The twenties mover doesn’t know what they’re running from because the thing they’re fleeing hasn’t fully formed yet. It’s a shape. A gravitational pull toward a life that feels assigned rather than chosen. The move is an interruption, a way of buying time before the self solidifies.
The forties move: running from what already set
The person who moves abroad in their forties is running from something they can name, even if it takes them a while to say it aloud. A marriage that flattened. A career that delivered everything it promised and left them wondering why the promise felt so small. A social world that stopped surprising them a decade ago. Sometimes it’s a single event: a death, a divorce, a diagnosis. Sometimes it’s just the accumulating weight of a life that worked but stopped meaning anything.
This is the group that knows what it’s running from. And that knowledge is both their advantage and their burden.
The forties move tends to be more deliberate and less impulsive. There are school enrolments to consider, pension transfers, the question of what to do with the house. But the emotional core of the decision is often rawer than any twentysomething departure, because the person making it has enough life behind them to know exactly what they’re leaving.
There’s a particular tension in the generation now entering their forties who grew up with the most freedom of any modern cohort and are quietly asking what all that freedom was for. The forties mover is often someone confronting exactly that question, and deciding the answer requires a new country.
That the forties mover still makes the leap — despite children’s stability, career capital, ageing parents, despite research showing that the brain structures governing motivation and cost-benefit evaluation become less active with age — tells you something about the intensity of what they’re leaving behind.
The difference in what gets packed
I don’t mean suitcases, though those differ too. I mean what people bring with them psychologically.
The twenties mover arrives with openness and almost nothing else. They’re willing to be changed by the new place because they haven’t yet decided who they are. They’ll try the language, adopt the local coffee habits, date someone from a different culture, and let the experience rewire them. Research has shown that values like openness-to-change and self-direction shape how people perceive and experience the situations they encounter in daily life. Twentysomethings moving abroad tend to score high on exactly these values. The new country doesn’t just change their circumstances; it changes their perception of what’s happening to them.
The forties mover arrives with a more fixed set of values and a clearer picture of who they are. They know what they like, what they need, what they won’t tolerate. This makes the adaptation harder in some ways and easier in others. They’re less likely to lose themselves. They’re also less likely to be genuinely remade by the experience. The move serves a different function: not transformation but escape from stagnation. The forties mover wants to feel something again, not to become someone new.
I wrote recently about how learning a second language as an adult can unlock a version of yourself that never had permission to exist. That phenomenon is more accessible to the twenties mover, whose identity is still being drafted. The forties mover can access it too, but it takes longer and costs more, because they have to consciously set aside the self they already built.
Self-knowledge as a double-edged thing
The title of this piece claims only one group knows what it’s running from. That group is the forties movers. They have enough life experience to name the dissatisfaction, the loss, the deadening routine. They may not announce it at dinner parties, but they know.
The twenties mover genuinely does not know. This is not a criticism. It’s almost an advantage. Not knowing what you’re running from means you can’t be haunted by it in the same way. You arrive in your new city with a vague sense of relief and an inability to explain why. You attribute it to the novelty, the beauty of the architecture, the different light at 4 p.m.
The forties mover arrives with the awareness that changing countries doesn’t change what’s inside. They’ve lived long enough to know the cliché about running from yourself. They came anyway, which means whatever they’re running from was bad enough to justify the attempt.
Both groups misjudge loneliness. The twenties mover underestimates it, treats it as a temporary phase that will pass once they find the right bar or the right language class. The forties mover overestimates their resilience against it, assuming that decades of adult social skill will translate to a new country. They don’t, always. Copenhagen winters have taught me that loneliness has nothing to do with social competence and everything to do with whether you have people who knew you before you arrived.
As Scandinavia Standard has covered, packing up your life and moving to a country where nobody knows you is one of the most clarifying things a person can do. But the clarity it produces is different depending on whether you’re twenty-six or forty-four. At twenty-six, clarity looks like discovering what you actually want. At forty-four, clarity looks like accepting what you already knew.
A close friend of mine, Australian like me, lived in Copenhagen for years before moving back to Melbourne. She once asked me whether I feel Danish now, and I realised I don’t feel purely anything anymore. I feel Copenhagen, which is different from Denmark or Australia. That’s a twenties-mover answer. The identity blurred before it had time to harden. I suspect someone who arrived here at forty-three would give a different answer. They’d know exactly which identity they left, and they’d feel its absence like a phantom limb.
Both moves are legitimate. Both take courage. But they are fundamentally different acts dressed in the same language of suitcases and visa applications and forwarding addresses. The twenties move is a draft. The forties move is an edit. Only one of them knows what’s being revised.
Photo by Philippe Bonnaire on Pexels