I am standing in a field on a windy afternoon, trying to sprinkle powdered fertilizer from a bag, and currently losing the battle to the breeze. It is in my hair. It is on my clothes. I smell horrible, and the tractor is still waiting for me.
This exact moment was not in the small print of any brochure I’ve ever read.
There’s a version of my life that exists in other people’s heads – and then there’s the one I actually live. This post is about the gap between them.
Somewhere between the romanticised idea of the expat dream and the Tuesday morning reality of cycling to work in the rain, something true lives. I’m not sure what to call it. But I’m starting to think “dream life” might be the wrong question entirely.
Table of Contents
What the “Dream Life Abroad” Actually Looks Like
There is a version of living in Japan that exists in travel writing and social media feeds. It involves temple visits, bullet trains, perfectly arranged bento boxes, and a daily sense of wonder that never quite fades.
I live in Japan. I can confirm that some of that is real.
I can also confirm that I spent last Tuesday cycling to work in the rain, that my local 7-Eleven sees me often enough to be concerning, and that my budget would not impress anyone.
People hear “expat life in Japan” and assume you have unlocked some secret level of existence. That you traded the ordinary for the extraordinary. That Tuesday feels different here somehow.
It doesn’t. Tuesday is still Tuesday. The laundry still needs doing. The bills still arrive. The difference is that the instructions on everything are in Japanese, which adds a layer of low-grade confusion to even the most routine tasks – and occasionally requires asking for help with things you’d rather handle alone.
I sometimes think about my ex, who lived here with me for years before eventually moving to the USA. If Japan was this magical dream life people imagine it to be, that wouldn’t have happened. Geography didn’t hold any particular magic for either of us. It was just where we were. Where we worked. Where we had good days and hard ones and completely unremarkable ones.
That’s not a complaint. It’s just evidence.
The Farm, the Classroom, and the Commute
If the location doesn’t transform your life, maybe the work does. That’s the other romanticised idea worth looking at.
I have two jobs here. One puts me in front of students. The other puts me in a field. Between them, they cover most of the idealised versions of what people think a meaningful life abroad looks like – teaching the next generation, working the land, connecting with something real.
In practice, they are both just jobs. Good ones, mostly. But jobs.
The Farm
There is a substantial PR machine behind farming right now. People exhausted by office life love the idea of escaping to work the soil – something honest, physical, connected to the earth. I understand the appeal. I felt it too.
The reality, at least in a Japanese summer, is mosquitoes. Lots of mosquitoes. It is also buckets of sweat, the kind of heat that makes you recalibrate your ambitions by ten in the morning, and the genuine agricultural necessity of staying slim enough to last until lunchtime without overheating. Some days I don’t quite manage it.
And then there is the fertilizer. Powdered, pungent, and – as previously established – easily airborne on a breezy afternoon. I have cycled home smelling like something that would clear a room, looking forward to a shower the way some people look forward to a holiday.
Those shower moments, by the way, are genuinely excellent. You earn them in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t spent a morning losing an argument with a bag of fertilizer.
The Classroom
Teaching has its own mythology. The inspirational teacher, the lives changed, the moments of connection that make it all worthwhile. Those moments exist. I’ve had them. They are real and they matter.
What the mythology leaves out is the energy it costs to be present and engaged for every single lesson. Teaching requires you to be on – properly on, attentive, responsive, warm – regardless of how you slept or what’s going on in the rest of your life.
The students I can usually manage. It’s the occasional conversation outside the classroom – the ones where someone needs to be heard, and you’re the one doing the listening – that can empty the tank by the time you get home.
There’s also a subtler layer that comes with working in a mixed-gender environment in Japan, where certain curiosities about your personal life are best met with a diplomatic vagueness. Not dishonesty – just a gentle glossing over. You learn to box clever with what you share and how you share it. It’s a small thing, but it adds a quiet background hum to the working day.
The Commute
I cycle to the farm. In the rain, when it rains. For the teaching – the schools, the community centres, the other spots dotted around – I take the train. There is nothing glamorous about either of these things. They are just how I get to places.
Maybe the Problem Is the Word “Dream”
I visited the UK recently. Not for long, but long enough to notice something.
My YouTube feed, shaped by years of algorithm drift, mostly shows me content about leaving the UK – why people do it, why they don’t regret it, why the weather is bad and the taxes are high and the general vibe is declining. It’s a particular genre and it does well for a reason. Discontent is clickable.
Being there in person was different. I kept noticing things the algorithm never shows. The countryside. The architecture that nobody thinks to film because it’s just always been there. Afternoons that were calm and relaxed, and frankly, nicer than anyone online had led me to expect after almost 9 years away.
It rained once in two weeks. One day. I mention this because motorcycle and car channels on YouTube have built an entire aesthetic around the relentless British drizzle – as if the whole country exists under a permanent grey drape. It doesn’t. But gloomy sells the narrative of escape better than a surprisingly decent afternoon in the countryside.
It didn’t make me want to move back immediately. But it reminded me of something I think I’d half forgotten: that the place you’re trying to escape from looks completely different when you’re not trying to escape from it.
I wonder if that’s what a dream life actually requires. Not a different location. Not a better job title or a more impressive answer to “so what do you do.” Just learning to notice what is already there.
The idea of the dream life is almost always external. Go here. Do this. Earn that. Become someone who lives like this. It positions happiness as something you arrive at rather than something you build – which is a useful story for brochures and travel content and lifestyle brands, but a slightly cruel one to actually live by.
Because if the dream is always somewhere else, you will always be somewhere else from it.
I’m not sure I’ve fully made that shift yet. I’m not sure anyone does, completely. But I notice the difference between days when I’m looking at my life and days when I’m looking for a better one. They feel different. The first one is calmer.
What You Actually Go Home To
I think about what the word “dream” meant to me at different points in my life.
In my twenties, it meant movement and the courage to change. Getting on a plane and going somewhere. The only dream I ever properly chased back then involved a helicopter flight school brochure from Florida that arrived through my door while I was still living in the UK. I sent off for it on a whim, got a reply, and eventually followed it. That felt like enough. The act of going was the thing.
I’m older now, and the dream has quietly rearranged itself. Movement for its own sake doesn’t do what it used to. What I seem to need more – and I’m still working this out as I go – is purpose. Being useful somewhere. Being part of a team that’s been built over years rather than assembled by circumstance. The kind of loyalty that doesn’t appear on a visa application but is probably the closest thing to home that actually exists.
That’s what community is, in my experience. Not a location. Not a shared nationality or a WhatsApp group for expats. It’s the people who already know the story, so you don’t have to explain yourself every time.
The hobbies help too. Maybe more than people admit. When the compromise of daily life – the work, the weather, the things you gloss over and work around – starts to accumulate, you need somewhere to put the rest of yourself. A passion, a project, something that’s entirely yours and asks nothing complicated in return. I suspect that’s as true in a suburb of Birmingham as it is in rural Tochigi.
Which brings me to the uncomfortable conclusion that a dream life might be a lot more portable than we think.
Not because any place is as good as any other. But because the things that actually sustain people – purpose, community, balance, something worth going home to – tend to travel. They don’t live in a postcode or a passport stamp. They live in the accumulation of ordinary days that, looking back, turned out to matter.
Everyone has their version of the grind. The flight attendant. The entrepreneur who moved to Dubai for the tax and stayed for the lifestyle. The person still sitting at home with a travel brochure they haven’t quite worked up the courage to act on. Everyone has a Tuesday. Everyone has a commute, a difficult colleague, a version of cycling in the rain.
Maybe the dream was never about escaping that. Maybe it was always about finding something worth doing it for.
Maybe This Is Enough
I’ll probably go back to the farm tomorrow. There will almost certainly be something that needs doing that I didn’t expect, in weather that wasn’t quite what was forecast, involving a tool or a bag of something that has other ideas about where it wants to go.
And at some point I’ll cycle home, get in the shower, and stand there for slightly longer than necessary.
That’s not the dream life anyone sold me. But it’s mine, and most days that feels like enough. More than enough, actually – on the days I remember to look at it properly rather than through someone else’s lens.
Keep dreaming though. Just maybe hold the brochure a little more loosely.
Related Reads on OldDogZeroTricks
- When You Realize You Don’t Want What You Thought You Wanted
- Maybe I’m Not Having a Breakthrough. Maybe I’m Just Tired
- Living Abroad vs Returning Home: Belonging, Duty, and the Niken
Grant here. I’m a British expat living in Japan, teaching English, growing vegetables, and writing honestly about aging, purpose, and figuring things out – without the BS.
This blog is where I talk about the stuff most people keep to themselves – the embarrassing truths, the questions we don’t ask out loud, and what it feels like to keep going, one ordinary day at a time.
