i am leaving canada
Nine years of questionable language jokes and eighty-six average-sized poutines later; after arguing for the hundredth time that Tim Hortons isn’t for coffee but for the best Boston Cream donuts; after driving through the entire country to make sure Ontario really does take three days to cross, it's time to say goodbye to Canada, my favorite place to live so far.
the reason
In December, I reflected on my second year of not having a job. The post went viral on HackerNews, and the readers fell into two camps:
- Those who cheered for me to have taken a leap of faith
- Those who panicked on my behalf for running out of money
Both were right. Quitting my job was the right thing to do. But hoping that my finances would somehow fix themselves was naive, if not stupid.
Earlier this year, a friend gave Blymp a check that extended our runway by five months. This extension gave me time to try more things within the company and helped join an accelerator in Montreal. The insights from the accelerator were unflattering—although I still hope to see a successful pivot—and I needed a more sustainable plan.
In other words, I ran out of money and faced two choices: getting a job or moving to a cheaper place.
more on money
Living in Canada costs me about $4,000 CAD every month. That's $2,800 USD. Depending on your comfort level, that’s either too high, too low, or about right. But over the years of optimization, cutting back on food, entertainment, and nights out, this number is what I always come back to. The only way to bring it down would be to find a partner, move in together, and share the finances. As logical as it sounds, it’s not something I would do for financial reasons.
Canada is expensive, and the US tariffs are only going to make things worse. It got to the point that having a full-time software engineering job isn't enough. An average SWE salary in Montreal is $89K a year 1. After taxes, that's $4,900/mo. At this rate, I’d save $900 a month and retire in 111 years 2. Isn't that a beautiful, optimistic future?
why not getting a job
I did the math in 2021 and realized a stable job doesn't guarantee financial freedom. Four years later, post-COVID, job stability is becoming more of an oxymoron. What sealed it for me was that I wasn’t happy at work anymore. I was tired of exchanging my loyalty for imaginary security from a company that cared a lot about its stock price and little about my future. They all do—and I say this as a business owner. That’s the purpose of a private company.
The fact that my input was so detached from the results (the money made) didn’t help either. As engineers, we are five or six levels away from a customer, making a small change to a feature used by a tiny subset of users once a week on a Sunday night.
All things considered, I had enough. In his book "Unscripted", MJ DeMarco calls this a "fuck-you moment". It didn't come to me at once. It crept in over the years, like a Netflix subscription, until it got too expensive to keep no matter the cost.
These days, I still get job offers. And I decline most of them. The ones left, I negotiate until it becomes uncomfortable to ask for more. Then I negotiate it further. I stopped selling my time. Money is not the metric I want to optimize. If you want my attention, offer something better.
i don't want to go
I am not new to moving cities. I came to Canada nine years ago—ah, dear, time does fly!—previously having changed three places in Moscow. Then I moved four times in Montreal, lived in Gatineau, Ottawa, and Toronto. Moving cities is like peeling off a forgotten band-aid over a scratch on the knee after three days. Fast or slow, it hurts. And moving countries is like ripping off a band-aid that covers your whole leg.
It was traumatic to say goodbye to my hometown. Without a sense of belonging in Canada, I had developed an impostor syndrome, no matter where I went. Brodsky and Nabokov wrote aplenty about life in immigration, and I would rather not sound like a broken record.
Perhaps the divorce forced me to socialize, or I learned to accept Canada after all, but my last two years in Montreal were some of the happiest of my life. Here, I have everything I need and even more. So why would I turn away from it?
Nima, my friend who must be eighty if judged by his wisdom, once soothed my rising anxiety about not having a stable income,
“People chase jobs to take better care of themselves.
So they join a gym.
Take vacations.
Spend time with family and friends.
But that’s backwards, Sergei.
You already have what most people want.
Your body is in great shape.
You have close friends and strong relationships.
You eat well, sleep well, and take care of yourself.
Work is the only piece that hasn’t fallen into place yet.
With time, it will."
Darn you, Nima, why do you always have to be so right…
why chiang mai
I chose Asia because it's cheap, Thailand because it's safe, and Chiang Mai because of its connection to spirituality. Moving places this time, I am not seeking a quick change—I want a deeper reset. To take time and think about my career. About life beyond work, seen through the lens of an educated white man living in a First World country. I want to find what happiness is outside money and fame. To find what happiness is.
As I often do nowadays, I outsourced the most important decision of my year—where to move—to ChatGPT. The search took me twenty minutes. I typed in, "suggest places to relocate to for digital nomads with a budget under $1000/mo, a strong sense of community, and access to meditation retreats." Then I took the top-five options and checked them on NomadList. This left me with three cities, then two, until I stopped at Chiang Mai as my entry point. In truth, the real prompt was a four-paragraph existential outburst, but I’ll spare you the essay.
By the way, NomadList dropped free access to location details, so here's a free hack: google "NomadList + city name", and look for a link like https://nomads.com/city-name. For example, https://nomads.com/chiang-mai. You are welcome!
i am not scared of moving to a new city
A friend asked me at my climbing gym the other day, "Are you going to be safe traveling to Asia?".
To that, I deadpanned, "No".
No, moving to Asia isn’t safe—but neither was moving to Canada. By Numbeo's Crime Index for 2025, Canada's safety is at 54 points while Thailand's is at 62 (the more, the better). And if you look further, Asia will beat North America by many criteria. Even with its universal healthcare, Canada is 31st globally, after Taiwan (1st), Japan (3rd), Thailand (9th), Sri Lanka (27th), and Malaysia (30th). If you get in trouble, you might have better odds of survival in Thailand than in Canada.
Depending on your background, job, race, and gender (or a lack of), it can be either safe or dangerous to travel to any country, be it in America, Europe, or Asia. Use your own judgment to pick where to go. The world is, with a few exceptions, only as dangerous as we make it seem.
But unlike moving cities, there are a few things I am scared of.
i am scared of losing shape
In Montreal, I have a routine. I climb three days a week. Two more days, I run. When not in the gym or running, I step outside for a walk or to read in a park. Getting new healthy habits is hard. Before I started climbing three years ago, I played video games every night. A workout felt like a burden. A short run—like listening to Justin Bieber's "Baby" on repeat for thirty minutes. Now, exercise is one of my favorite ways to spend a morning, an evening, or a full day.
But as it takes years to build a healthy habit, it only takes a month to lose it. I don't know if climbing is as popular in Asia as it is in Canada. Neither if I'll have access to the gyms. I can't tell if I will enjoy running in a hot, humid weather as much as I do on a fresh spring morning in Montreal. Changing the routine shakes up the habits, and as much as I am excited to make space for new activities, I am worried about letting go of the ones that make me feel better.
In case I lose shape and grow a belly on Asahi Super Dry, here’s a picture of my three-year-long progress. Perhaps to commemorate the results, or maybe so you could show it to your grandkids one day and say, "he trained like a god until he moved to Asia".
i am scared of losing friends
Having mentioned two friends already, I can't make it any more obvious that I value my relationships. As someone who, for 7 months in Ottawa, kept going to networking events and consistently failed, I know the true cost of building a friendship as well as of losing one.
For thirty-two years, I underestimated the importance of friends. I was so busy proving my independence that I failed to notice the moments that made it all worthwhile. Friends don’t come and go like spring flowers. And they won’t stick around if we vanish for months—choosing meetings over dinners, and business trips over weekends at their chalet.
I became deliberate with my relationships. For people I love, I make time instead of fitting them into a thirty-minute break on a busy Wednesday afternoon. If you are my close friend, everything else comes secondary. And unlike a job offer, this for me is non-negotiable.
I am sad to leave Canada because it means saying goodbye. Cutting ties never feels necessary, and the cost is seldom justified. There’s one popular quote about friends that I disagree with.
“True friendship isn’t about being inseparable. It’s being separated and nothing changes.”
I don’t believe it works that way. Like romantic relationships, friendships take effort. They take time, honest conversations, and some healthy conflict to grow real connection. They’re built in shared hours—laughing, listening, doing life side by side. And when you separate, all that stops. It gets harder to keep up with friends’ lives, so we often stop trying. It doesn’t mean we are bad at being friends. It only means our environments changed, and so did our interests.
Leaving Canada, I don't know when I'm coming back. I don't know if I'm coming back. Guessing which friendships will last is like predicting which leaves the wind will carry off and which will cling through winter.
it will be alright
I’ve managed it this far in life. No matter how rough I imagine things to be, they always unfold better than expected. I stopped anticipating life and started giving into it more. Tomorrow will be as good or as bad as you will want it to be. You can’t control the external events, but you can control your reactions to them.
Making changes is normal. A lot of it will be mistakes, and that’s normal, too. Until recently, I rarely took control of my life. The best time to act was yesterday. The next best is now. I am tired of hiding in a shell, waiting for the tide to carry me around. It’s time I pick myself up and start walking.