I moved to Lisbon for the perfect life. Of course, it didn't work

Times

a day ago

'You know we're happy, right?' I was folding socks inside the London flat my partner and I had just bought, in what is a well-regarded miracle, without parental help. 'Everything is sort of perfect.'
We'd just painted the bedroom walls olive, settled the disagreement on which cutlery set to buy and I'd successfully coaxed green shoots from a balcony herb garden I knew I could never maintain. There was this sense we'd just blossomed. I'd clawed my way back from severe burnout, having to leave my job after six months of not being able to work, and it had put immense emotional strain on our relationship. But I was feeling myself again, or maybe a new, softer version: rooted, comfortable. My new literary agency was off the ground and doing well. My sister lived at the end of my street and I was surrounded by the network I'd accumulated since moving to London when I was 18.
'But that's why we need to leave,' Mark said with the kind of soft finality he uses when wanting to make a radical suggestion sound reasonable. 'We're comfortable. This is the time to shake things up.'
If happiness is something we can't stop striving for, satisfaction is something we are suspicious of. I'd often assumed people leave a city because they're itchy, restless or something is 'missing'. We left when everything was working. Not out of desperation or dissatisfaction, rather from a place of fullness. Remote working as a trend continues to grow: estimating numbers is difficult, but one puts the global population of digital nomads at 35 million — if this community were a country it would rank 43rd by population size, not far behind Morocco and Poland. In the UK polling this year found that 7 per cent of adults think they are 'very likely to work as a digital nomad' in the next three years, a desire fuelled by post-pandemic flexibility, lifestyle inflation and a cultural rebranding of escape as empowerment.
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But there's something unnerving about reaching the top of your own mountain, especially when you've spent your life climbing. Comfort, as it turns out, can be its own form of friction. It presses up against the part of you conditioned to chase. The part that believes ease must be earned, and rest is only temporary. At the time Mark had a photography book to shoot — tennis courts across Europe — and I was writing my second novel and struggling to find the kind of stillness finishing it required. We moved to Lisbon two months later, in summer 2022.
Trading in London's brilliant churn for warmth, quiet and the romance of a fresh start. The lifestyle propaganda was compelling; a sun-drenched ode to grilled sardines and terracotta rooftops, low taxes with writing-from-the-beach levels of freedom. It was a place where things moved more slowly and the sea was visible from yellow tram windows. It wasn't false advertising either. Lisbon delivered on all counts, and the friends we made surpassed even our most hopeful expectations. It was perfection. Slow walks around Estrela park, an after-work 'imperial' at a sunlit kiosk, endless beaches to discover and nature on tap. We even invested in a camper van: who were we? Two adults on the slippery side of youth with no dependents or bosses to hold us back.
Of course, sorting my visa, relocating the dog and finding somewhere to live threw up its own problems. But we were entering a new golden age, dipping our toes into the expanse of what was possible — and I've got to tell you, the cold, rumbunctious Atlantic felt good. Until it didn't, and something started to shift. Because here's the thing about 'perfection': it's nothing if not a moving target.
Recently shortlisted for the International Booker prize, Vincenzo Latronico's book Perfection is creating a lot of waves, especially among digital nomads. The novel follows a couple living their curated dream life in Berlin. They have a stylish apartment, progressive values, digital freedom, late-night parties to attend — and yet they're disillusioned, bored. 'We had perfected everything we could. There was nothing more to arrange, improve, renovate. And that, maybe, was the problem.' Still, they feel the need to move on. Their existence in Berlin reveals itself as merely a tapestry of Instagrammable moments — their home a curated backdrop for a life they can't be sure they chose — and beneath the surface of it all lies this profound sense of dissatisfaction. Moving to Lisbon and then Sicily, they become lost in their pursuit as they struggle to locate what it is they are truly searching for.
This book has sparked real questions within me, and the remote-working community I've found in Portugal. After all, we are a generation caught between the pursuit of individuality and the homogenisation brought about by globalisation and digital culture. One of the outcomes of this is a need to optimise our lives to reach so-called perfection. If the boomers were 'keeping up with the Joneses' next door, every person we follow on social media has become a Jones. For the boomer generation, for instance, there was one 'perfect' room in the house, kept intact, used at Christmas to open presents or when important guests came over. Millennials, however, seem to have been engulfed by this performance of perfection, smearing it across every facet of their lives. But if we keep renovating for the future we want to live in, we will never fully appreciate all that's remarkable in our present.
And in this relentless pursuit of the ideal, remote work becomes a new badge of success: a marker of flexibility, autonomy, even enlightenment. It promises a life beyond the commute, beyond the grind. A kind of curated liberation. But it's worth asking: are we moving forward or simply shifting the scenery around an unchanged self?
After two and a half years of living in Lisbon, it's impossible to ignore the privileged, immigrant bubble I float in. But if we look at the digital nomad life honestly, there is a kind of weightlessness to it, a sense that you might not truly land. One friend, contemplating relocating her family back to the UK after living remotely for seven years, describes the sensation: 'I feel like a skipping stone here where, however much I try, I can never drop deep enough.' To live abroad is to live on the edge of belonging — grateful, sometimes enchanted, but never fully anchored. 'Of course the language barrier is an issue, even if you're committed enough to learn,' she continues. 'Access to simple institutions like education, healthcare or even the act of volunteering is kept behind higher walls in a culture or place that doesn't belong to you.'
And then there's the lingering question of when or if you are 'coming home' — asked by everyone, at every turn.
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I've long been puzzled by the way we speak of 'home' as if it must exist in the singular — as though a life, in all its phases and pluralities, could be anchored to just one place. Wales, where I was born, holds the deep-seated rhythms of origin. London, where I spent 15 years building a self, carries the architecture of ambition and community. And Lisbon, once a romantic abstraction, is slowly shedding its holiday sheen, becoming something weightier, something with the contours of home. Success for me became measured in freedom and the 'new'.
But there is no comfort in what is new. And the freedom of remote working has turned out to be a prettier version of life's standard pressures. Last week I viewed a community-led office space with a knowing grin: it would come freshly packaged with an underground commute. Something I'd strived so hard to work out of my life. But I am craving something, and I think that's the tangible physicality of life and regular human connection.
When the buzz of reinvention wears off. When the beach loses its sheen. When that same whisper returns: is this it? You realise the real story isn't about finding the perfect place to escape to, it's about what happens when you stop trying to outrun your own desire. When you stop curating and start confronting.
I've stopped planting seeds for a life that might one day feel good. I'm sitting in the one I have, even when the sun doesn't shine. Especially then. What we need isn't a new location but a new literacy for contentment. Because maybe peace isn't found in the next city, or job, or flat with better lighting, even though the internet is insistent on making us feel like it does. Maybe peace is learning to stay when things are good, and not always seek out 'better'.
Selfish Girls by Abigail Bergstrom (Hodder & Stoughton £20 pp272). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members