Hey, I know that feeling. That was me just a few months ago. I went to Germany to live for a year and change with my girlfriend. We lived in a small town. While the town itself was beautiful, after a few months there was little to do and it was difficult to make friends. (I didn't speak the language, and while I was taking language classes there, my heart wasn't in them.)
I eventually fell in to a similar funk: without friends to chat with, and as a sole business owner, I'd find myself working through the day on my laptop, going to sleep, then waking up and working more. It turned in to a grind and I realized I wasn't enjoying myself anymore. So when my visa ran out I decided to return home and see what happens next. While I greatly prefer the German (and European in general) lifestyle, and things like health care are much less stressful over there, in the end I realized I need people to connect with on a day-to-day basis for me to be happy.
I've spent much of the last 5 or so years traveling the world and I don't regret a minute of it. But eventually I think you need some kind of familiar stability, an anchor, to feel more at peace.
> "I've spent much of the last 5 or so years traveling the world and I don't regret a minute of it. But eventually I think you need some kind of familiar stability, an anchor, to feel more at peace."
Hear hear. I've lived in 8 cities in the last 9 years - intentionally. I don't regret any of it, and it was definitely a deliberate plan to see as much of the world as I can while minimizing career sacrifice (i.e., not just quitting everything and traveling), but the isolation becomes taxing after a while.
Hitting the big Reset button on your social circles every year gets tiring after a while. I think I'll stick around my current place for a while.
Have you tried a city with a US army base? They usually have and attract a substantial English speaking crowd, and there's culture events as well (not just from the base).
Alternately a "cosmopolitan" city like Berlin and Copenhagen could work. Most of the locals speak English, and there are so many foreigners that English is heard pretty regularly in bars and on the street. (Some of the foreigners are swaps between the two: lots of Danes in Berlin and Germans in Copenhagen.)
I would have preferred a larger city like Munich but my girlfriend's work was in our town and it was far enough away from a big city to not be able to commute.
I've been working remotely from Seoul for the past nine months and have had similar experiences at times. Sometimes I would look back and not feel like I had had a good reason to get out of the house the entire week. Luckily Seoul is a large city, so I meeting people has not been incredibly hard. My solution was to create my own network. I started a Seoul Ruby meetup group and eventually got connected with a co-working space here.
I eventually fell in to a similar funk: without friends to chat with, and as a sole business owner, I'd find myself working through the day on my laptop, going to sleep, then waking up and working more. It turned in to a grind and I realized I wasn't enjoying myself anymore. So when my visa ran out I decided to return home and see what happens next. While I greatly prefer the German (and European in general) lifestyle, and things like health care are much less stressful over there, in the end I realized I need people to connect with on a day-to-day basis for me to be happy.
I've spent much of the last 5 or so years traveling the world and I don't regret a minute of it. But eventually I think you need some kind of familiar stability, an anchor, to feel more at peace.