As a psychologist working with expats and digital nomads, I often notice certain themes emerging simultaneously across my client sessions and conversations with friends who live internationally.
One of the most common is loneliness.
Last August, I became particularly aware of this pattern. Almost everyone I was in contact with described recurring waves of loneliness, despite having active social lives.
Across much of Europe August carries a distinct atmosphere. Cities slow down, offices close, and social media fills with images of travel, gatherings, weddings, festivals, and holidays spent with loved ones. It creates the impression that those around us are deeply connected and alive in their relationships.
Yet social connectedness does not mean that we are immune from feeling lonely.
Many of the people I spoke with were partnered, living with friends, travelling with others, parenting, dating, or surrounded by social opportunities. Still, they described a persistent sense of loneliness that did not align with how their lives looked externally.
This challenges the common assumption that loneliness is primarily the result of social isolation, singleness, or a lack of meaningful relationships. Instead, it points to something more fundamental — that loneliness can exist even within socially connected lives, particularly for people living across cultures and countries.
Loneliness is, in many ways, universally human. No one else moves through life with our exact history, perceptions, losses, and gains. Even our closest relationships cannot fully replicate our lived experience.
Paradoxically, while loneliness can make us feel isolated, the experience itself is shared by everyone.
When Your Life Is Abroad, This Feeling Often Intensifies
For expats and digital nomads, loneliness can take on a particularly complex shape.
Living abroad often involves physical distance from familiar people, cultural environments, and relational continuity. You may have chosen to travel independently, relocated to a country where you know few people, or built a life that requires repeated transitions and goodbyes.
For instance, you might be walking through a city you once dreamed of visiting while deeply missing someone from home. Or watching others share a meaningful travel moment together while you stand alone, feeling a wave of emptiness.
In these moments, gratitude and loneliness can coexist. These feelings do not cancel each other out.
The film Inside Out offers a useful metaphor for this emotional reality. Rather than existing one at a time, emotions operate as parallel experiences within the same internal system. Joy and loneliness, gratitude and grief, connection and longing can all be present simultaneously. For many globally mobile people, this coexistence becomes part of everyday life.
For many expats and digital nomads, this emotional coexistence unfolds within lives that appear full from the outside. Exposure to new cultures, freedom of movement, meaningful work, friendships across countries, and personal growth often reflect aspirations once held from afar.
But having a full or even enviable life does not eliminate loneliness.
Meeting Loneliness with Self-Compassion
While loneliness can feel like separation, it is also one of the most universal human emotions. Recognizing this can make it easier to respond with compassion rather than judgment, particularly for expats and digital nomads who may interpret loneliness as evidence that something is “wrong” with their life abroad.
Self-compassion in moments of loneliness can take many forms:
- Observing the feeling with validation rather than resistance
- Reminding yourself that loneliness is human, not personal failure
- Allowing space for longing without expecting gratitude to override it
- Speaking to yourself with the same warmth you would offer a close friend
Sometimes this can be expressed through simple embodied gestures, such as placing a hand on your chest or stomach while offering internal reassurance: You are loved. You are safe. I am here with you.
Developing a compassionate relationship with loneliness often softens the shame and self-criticism that intensify the experience, creating more emotional room for connection to emerge.
If You Feel Lonely Abroad
Experiencing loneliness does not automatically mean that living abroad or travelling was the wrong decision.
Many expats and digital nomads find themselves navigating conditions that naturally heighten emotional loneliness, including:
- Relationships without shared history
- Geographic distance from attachment figures
- Cultural translation of identity and emotion
- Transient social networks
- Belonging distributed across multiple places
These conditions naturally increase emotional loneliness, even within otherwise meaningful lives.
Loneliness does not mean you chose the wrong country, relationships, or path. Often, it reflects the psychological structure of globally mobile life itself.
Supporting Yourself in Moments of Loneliness Abroad
Loneliness rarely softens through self-criticism. More often, it eases through self-compassion, emotionally honest relationships, and ongoing connection — both with others and with yourself. This may involve naming the experience without judgment, prioritizing depth over frequency of contact, maintaining meaningful connections across distance, and allowing gratitude for your life abroad to coexist with longing for familiarity and shared history.
If you recognize yourself in these experiences, you are not alone — even when loneliness makes it feel that way.
If you would like support navigating the emotional complexities of globally mobile life, you are invited to learn more about my work with expats and digital nomads here: https://www.christinababich.com/
If this article resonated with you, you might also find value in reading How to Pick a Therapist (Especially When You’re Living Life Abroad) — a guide to finding psychological support that understands the realities of globally mobile life.
