CNN has a UK-based “travel” writer named Francesca Street. As best I can tell, all of her stories are long form romance short stories – 15 to 20 pages each. Every story is the basically the same:
Attractive, highly educated young American woman is not sure what she is doing in life, travels to Paris, falls in love, marries a European, obtains EU residency (or citizenship) via marriage, and lives happily ever after. Always told from the woman’s point of view.
Literally, nearly every CNN Travel story over the past two years! Occasionally, they feature gay or lesbian couples – solo straight guys do not exist, and straight guys exist only as the other half of the romance.
CNN Travel stories are always the same story:
America is awful – this woman traveled to Europe – fell in love – got married – and they lived happily ever after!
In Part 1 of my series summarizing nearly 300 “I moved abroad” stories, I ended Part 1 with this text – which is worth promoting to a separate post of its own – answering the question, Why are these stories so absurdly silly?
And the answer is that like the fake “cottage core” social media phenomenon, these are romantic nonsense stories providing escapism as entertainment. They are not news.
Here’s the quoted section from the Part 1 “Myth” series about people moving abroad.
The above begins with the 30-year-old woman who has moved to Italy, where everything is wonderful and she fell in love. These exercises in story telling are romance novels packaged as fake news, providing escapism – similar to the “cottage core” videos on YouTube and TikTok. “Cottage core” is an aesthetic based around an attractive young woman, always with long hair – and usually a shade of blonde, almost always white, living a carefree life in a (typically) small home in the woods, wearing frilly dresses, having beautiful gardens, baking bread, painting pictures and enjoying a calm life resembling a stereotypical English countryside. And like the emigrants to “better countries”, they are usually writers or artists.
“Cottage core” is based on a fantasized, idyllic simplified farm life imagined as it might have been in Europe in the distant past (but with access to fiber Internet, 5G cell phones, 4K video cameras and computers for digital editing – so quaint!)
“Cottage Core — the word “core” basically means enthusiasm — is a daydream of Generation Z, who have lived much of their lives online. This is the contradiction it holds: it promotes dreams of a technology-free world using only technology.“
The wicked truth about Cottage Core – UnHerd
It’s the stuff of flowy prairie dresses and sourdough starters, of hand-dried wildflower arrangements and hand-stitched quilts strewn on antique beds, of handmade pies cooling in open windows with the sun shining in. In an era where just about everybody wishes they had a bucolic getaway, cottagecore brings the stylized movie set dream of a fairytale cottage in some magical woods or an enchanted English countryside meadow to you, wherever you are.
….
What makes cottagecore distinct is that it was born on the internet and largely exists there, far away from the realities of country life.
What Is Cottagecore? A Simple Guide (thespruce.com)
(Much more here from the BBC. Worth reading.)
This genere started before Covid but grew rapidly as a form of escapism during lock downs. Unfortunately, some of these cottage core stories were faked – and some didn’t really live these lifestyles but played the part for TikTok and YouTube. As some have noted, many of these fantasy lifestyle video content creators would not last a full day on a real farm or ranch.
Travel stories have degenerated into the same escapism format, wrapped up as a romance novel, or the ever popular “America is awful but I found heaven in another country”. (The linked item, above, is by a writer, who has native language skills in English and French, and thus, is international, who has bought into the myth that the end of the world is near. Of course. Everything is awful.)
Like all romance novels, you may note these stories all take the following form:
- a (usually) young woman moved or traveled to another country and fell in love (sometimes it is a gay man or a minority – white guys are only mentioned if part of a married, or an older or retired couple.)
- America is a stunningly awful country
- Life at the destination country is so much better than in America
- All your problems would be solved if you too left America for a better future in another country.
Having seen these stories my own perspective has changed. I no longer view America as so awful after seeing how the media is manipulating our perspectives with a constant barrage of negativity and doomerism.
It’s always bad news, and even good news is spun into negativity. The result is an entire generation (Gen Z) addicted to social media sharing and a media that is inundated with nonstop bad news, lacking historical context.
Watching this unfold has changed my views – a lot. I was going down the America is awful path until I saw how I was being manipulated by bull shit media story tellers pretending to be reporters.
Reality: Moving Abroad Requires Immigration Privileges
The real story is some people have immigration privilege – as most of those in the above stories have – and moving abroad ranges from very difficult to impossible for most Americans – a point omitted from all of these creative writing exercises in the media. [Immigration privilege is having prior dual citizenship, right of descent ancestry, or being an attractive, highly educated young American woman – about 1/3d of those who move abroad are in this category – who falls in love, marries a foreigner, obtains residency visas and lives happily ever after.]
Also omitted is that few Americans move abroad. About 1% of retirees (estimates are 0.7% to 1.3%) are living abroad, and 2-3% of Americans are currently living/working abroad at any given time. Perhaps half of those living abroad are on temporary work assignments – and most of the other half had immigration privileges, notably dual citizenship or right of descent ancestry.
One story looked at costs of moving abroad for a couple – and found that it was generally $15,000 to $30,000 including travel, visa fees, moving expenses (typically moving very little), costs of finding accommodations, and so on. A few places cost less than this range. Those seeking permanent residency or future citizenship saw legal fees in the $5,000 and up range (not everyone has these, particularly if you already have right of descent privileges – literally, my wife could get Canadian citizenship for a few hundred US $s in fees).
A huge number of these stories are about people who work as – surprise! – writers or sometimes teachers. Writers tend to write about themselves, or about other writers. Their lifestyle is often very different from people who have to work “regular jobs”. We don’t see, say, truck drivers, construction workers, factory workers, retail workers, and mechanical engineers living nomadic lifestyles (there are some exceptions, but it is not common). Because writers mostly write about writers, who do not need to work in fixed locations, these stories present a skewed perspective that anyone can pack up and move off to another country – and live wherever they want. We do not see the blue-collar workers who do the work that makes our civilized lives possible, uprooting to go overseas.
These fluffy stories are a generic meme of content mill media. The meme pattern is that the U.S. is the worst country in the world in which to live and you will achieve nirvana, if you move to another country. That narrative gets old fast – especially when so many of those bashing the U.S. have tremendous privileges as a result of growing up in the U.S.