Should I Move Back Home? How to Decide When You're Torn Between Two Countries

There is a particular kind of tab that stays open in the minds of people who live abroad.

It is not a browser tab. It is a question. Should I go back? It sits there for months, sometimes years, quietly using up memory, slowing everything else down. You close it after a good week. It reopens after a WhatsApp call with your mother, a rainy Tuesday, a birthday you missed.

Most of my clients live outside Türkiye, and many of them are expats. So I hear this question in many accents. It almost never arrives as "should I move?" It arrives disguised. I don't know why I'm so tired. I keep checking flight prices. I feel guilty all the time.

Let's take the disguise off and look at it properly.

Why is it so hard to decide whether to move back home?

Because you are not choosing between two places. You are choosing between two versions of yourself, and only one of them gets to live.

The engineer in me wants to build a spreadsheet. Salary, rent, healthcare, distance to parents, weather, friends. And please do build it. But you already know the spreadsheet won't decide for you, because if it could, you would have decided already.

The difficulty sits in three places that rarely show up in columns: regret, sunk cost and identity. Let's take them one by one.

Will I regret moving back home?

Here is the research that should be on every expat's fridge.

In 1995, Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Husted Medvec published a review in Psychological Review called "The Experience of Regret: What, When, and Why." Their finding, simplified: in the short term, people tend to regret their actions more. Over the long term, they regret their inactions more. The things they didn't do, the roads not taken, grow heavier with time.

Later work has nuanced this, and it isn't a universal law. But the pattern is robust enough to take seriously.

Your future self is more likely to forgive a brave mistake than a careful postponement.

Now notice how this cuts both ways for you. Staying abroad can be the inaction. So can staying "temporarily" at home after a visit. The question is not which option is the action. The question is which option have I been avoiding out of fear rather than choosing out of desire?

A sentence I hear often from expat clients is "I'll decide after this next project." Then the project ends and another one begins. What strikes me in these sessions is that the people are rarely unsure about the facts; they are unsure about giving themselves permission. Once we name the fear underneath, the decision usually gets much smaller.

Is the sunk cost fallacy keeping me abroad?

In 1985, Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer published a set of experiments in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes showing how strongly people keep investing in something simply because they have already invested in it. Money, time, effort. The theater ticket you paid for, so you sit through a terrible play.

Expats are sunk cost champions. I spent six years learning this language. I built this career. I finally got the residence permit. All true. All real. And all already spent.

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." (Søren Kierkegaard, Journals)

The years you invested are not wasted if you leave. They come with you. The language stays in your mouth, the competence stays in your hands, the friendships go on WhatsApp. What does not come with you is the obligation to keep paying for a decision because you once paid for it.

A useful test: If I were arriving here today, fresh, knowing what I know, would I choose this life? If the honest answer is yes, stay with joy. If the honest answer is "only because I've already invested so much," listen to that.

The trap works in the other direction too. "I gave up so much to leave home, I can't go back now, it would mean I failed." That is also sunk cost, wearing a prouder outfit.

What if I'm afraid of making the wrong choice forever?

Here is a counterintuitive one. In 2002, Daniel Gilbert and Jane Ebert published "Decisions and Revisions: The Affective Forecasting of Changeable Outcomes" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. People preferred keeping their options open. Yet those who made a reversible choice ended up less satisfied with what they got than those whose choice was final.

Why? When a door is closed, the mind does its quiet work of making peace with what you have. When the door stays ajar, you keep looking through it.

Many expats live with a permanently ajar door. One foot in each country. The apartment here, the boxes still at your parents' house there. This feels like freedom. Often it is a slow leak of happiness from both lives.

I'm not telling you to burn bridges. Bridges are lovely. I'm suggesting you stop living on the bridge.

Does flipping a coin actually help with big life decisions?

My favorite study on this topic sounds like a joke. Economist Steven Levitt invited people who were stuck on a major decision (quit a job, end a relationship, move) to flip a virtual coin on his website. Heads meant make the change, tails meant stay. Around 20,000 people flipped. The paper, "Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness," appeared in the Review of Economic Studies in 2021.

A good number of people actually followed the coin. And those told to make a change were, on average, happier six months later than those told to stay.

Two lessons, and the second matters more.

First, people on the edge of a big change seem, on average, to be too cautious.

Second, the coin's real gift is often the half-second after it lands. If you feel a little drop in your stomach when it says "stay," you have just learned something no spreadsheet would tell you.

"The machine gives answers. The human chooses the question."

Even a coin is a machine. Use it to hear yourself, not to replace yourself.

Who am I if I move back?

This is the part people don't talk about at dinner. Moving abroad changes you. The you who returns is not the you who left, and the home you return to has also moved on without you.

So part of the hesitation is not about the country. It is about identity. Will I shrink back into the old version of myself? Will my family still see me as the 24-year-old who left?

Those are legitimate fears, and I'll write about them more in the essays on expat identity and reverse culture shock. For now, one reframe: you are not going back. Whatever you choose, you are going forward into a place that happens to share a name with a place you once knew.

"You can't go home again." (the title of Thomas Wolfe's posthumous 1940 novel)

Wolfe was right in a way, and wrong in another. You can't go back to the old home. You can build a new one in an old place.

How do I decide whether to move back home?

Not a listicle. A few small experiments.

Write two obituaries, gently. Not dramatic ones. Just one paragraph each. "She lived in Amsterdam until she was 80, and..." and "She moved back to İzmir at 44, and..." Read them aloud. Which one makes your chest open, and which one makes it tighten? Tightness is data.

Separate the place from the season. Are you tired of the country, or tired of this year? A breakup, a bad boss, a long winter. Ask yourself: If my job were great here tomorrow, would I still want to leave?

Name what you're actually missing. Is it your mother, the sea, the language of jokes, being understood without explaining? Some of those can only be found at home. Some of them can be built where you are. Make two lists.

Run a reversibility audit. Which parts of this decision are truly irreversible? Usually fewer than you think. Your career, your visa, your network can often be rebuilt. Time with an aging parent cannot. Put your weight on the irreversible things.

Set a deadline for the question itself. The Unopposed Mind is a brilliant mind with no one left to disagree with it, and an expat's mind circling the same question for years alone is a perfect example. Tell one honest person your deadline. Let them argue with you.

Flip the coin. Then watch your face.

In my sessions with people weighing a move home, the same moment keeps coming back. They have built a careful spreadsheet, and then I ask which column they secretly hope wins. Almost everyone already knows. The work is not finding the answer but agreeing to trust it.

A last thought for the torn

Being torn between two countries is not a defect. It is the price of having loved two places. People who never left don't feel this, and people who never loved where they went don't either.

So the pull you feel is not proof that you made a mistake. It is proof that both lives are real.

The question is not which country is better. The question is which life you want to be accountable for when you are old and looking back.

So let me leave you with this. If no one would be disappointed in you, not your family, not your colleagues, not the younger self who bought that first one-way ticket, where would you wake up next year?

With love,

Gizem

If this raised a question you'd like to think through, we can look at it together. Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call.