Hello from Mexico. Today’s video is a little different — I’m responding to some of your comments and questions. Some funny, some thoughtful and interesting. Next time I’ll be back to the usual rhythm: nature, beauty, life in the mountains here. But today, let’s get into the comments.
Thank you so much for your wonderful comments and emails the last few months. I thought it a good time to talk about some of the interesting questions and points of views some of you have shared, and hopefully get you a deeper look at what it’s like to live here in the mountains of rural Mexico.
After my last video about living in Michoacan someone asked me if I own a firearm.
As a foreign resident living in Mexico I would never break the rules. And I would never break the law in any country.
Next question.
But let’s talk about why that question comes up, because it’s interesting.
The assumption is that living in Michoacán requires some kind of tactical preparation. That danger is everywhere here, and I’d be foolish to step outside without some kind of protection.
Before I lived in Mexico I assumed civilian gun ownership here was illegal. But it’s not. You can legally own a firearm as a civilian, but the process is involved. I think there’s one place in the entire country where you can register a weapon, and it’s a military installation in Mexico City. Apparently the hoops you have to jump through are difficult, but legal ownership does exist.
What I’ve experienced here is that guns are not part of regular conversation here the way they can be in the US. Nobody’s talking about them, nobody’s showing them off. I don’t see many youtube channels espousing the gun lifestyle here.
There are three kinds of people who have weapons here that I can tell: the police, who are visibly armed, the criminals, who don’t particularly care who knows, and civilians. And civilians don’t seem to talk about it. Maybe some of those guns weren’t obtained through legal channels, they could have been inherited, passed down through farming families, acquired on the down low. And maybe partly because if someone’s coming for you, they don’t need to know what they’re up against. But I think most guns on farms and ranches here are probably just used to keep animals safe.
But I’ve lived here long enough now to have a different read on what danger actually feels like in this place, and it’s interesting.
I was at the fair recently, a farmer’s market really. And there was a loud boom; really close by and sudden, the kind that in the US would have every head swiveling. And I nearly came out of my shoes and dove for cover under the nearest table.
But not one Mexican around me reacted. Not one. They kept eating, kept talking, kept walking, whatever. Because they knew what it was.
Cohetes. Fireworks. The kind that get set off for saint’s days, holidays, any occasion to celebrate, which in Mexico is most of them.
I was the alarmed one. My nervous system said threat! Threat! Everyone else’s said it’s just a Sunday afternoon. And if there are other Americans nearby when it happens, we find each other’s eyes, our eyes meet, just for a second. And we all know why. We’ve all absorbed the same thing: the school drills, the news alerts, the horrible stories, the awareness that a loud sound in a crowd might mean something different than a celebration.
So think about it: Because the country that gets described as violent in American and other international media is full of people who don’t flinch at loud noises. And in the country where I came from, where I absorbed some of that fear of Mexico, mass shootings are no longer shocking. They’re becoming just part of the news cycle.
And yet I’m the one being asked if I need a gun to feel safe.
By the way, many of the questions in this video are exactly the kinds of things people worry about before they move. If you’re in that stage of planning, I put together a practical guide called Move to Mexico with Confidence. It’s the guide I wish I’d had when I started this process. I’ll put a link below.
Someone left a comment that I keep thinking about. They described walking through their neighborhood one day and noticing a small sign on a mailbox. It said: “Be a good neighbor and stay on your side.” Like, stay in your lane.
This person moved away the following year. Said that sign pretty much summed up how the whole neighborhood felt.
And I keep turning that over, because that sign is trying to say two opposite things at once. It’s invoking neighborliness: be a good neighbor, while telling you to stay away. Don’t interact. Don’t cross over. Keep your distance.
When I was growing up, “mind your own business” and “it’s a free country” were things we used to say to each other. And I think people meant it. There was an understanding that your life was yours, and your neighbor’s life was theirs, and that boundary went both ways.
Somewhere along the way that changed. Social media turned everyone into a commentator. A judge. And paradoxically, as we got more opinionated about each other’s lives, we also got more regulated. HOAs telling you what color to paint your house, what kind of drapes you can have, noise ordinances, leash laws, rules about everything. You can’t escape scrutiny and judgement but you also can’t count on connection. And I’m talking about in the United States here.
So you end up with the worst of both worlds. A neighborhood that regulates everything and connects nothing. The rules multiplied as the relationships disappeared in many cases. And I’m not sure which came first.
We stopped knowing our neighbors. We stopped joining things. We retreated inside our own lives and then started making rules about what everyone else should do with theirs.
The irony is that the mailbox sign asks for freedom from neighbors, while many people today are searching for the very thing neighbors used to provide: community.
Mexico is not without its own frustrations on this front. Foreign residents complain about noise all the time. I don’t know what the noise laws are here, but I can tell you enforcement is not a word that comes up often. Your neighbor can have a loud party all night and you just have to put up with it.
But then again, you’ll probably be invited to the party.
There are pros and cons everywhere. But at least here the cons come with tamales.
Someone else left a comment that I’ve been thinking about. They suggested that my contentment here came from me, not from Mexico. That I could have found this anywhere if I’d just told myself it was possible. That satisfaction and happiness are a matter of how we respond to our circumstances, not the circumstances themselves.
It’s a thoughtful argument, and it’s partially right. We do take ourselves with us wherever we go, and your mindset matters. Reframing a situation can really change your experience of it. I’ve seen that in my own life.
But In the same comment, this person mentioned that he’d moved out of a big city, bought a house a mile from the ocean, and that his new neighborhood is wonderful. He was sitting on a bench overlooking the water when he typed it.
And I thought: why are you telling me that?
And it’s because it matters. Because where you are matters. Because a bench overlooking the ocean is not the same as a bench overlooking a stinky, rat infested, chemical dump, and your nervous system knows the difference even if your philosophy says otherwise.
People are affected by their environments, and by the people around them. By the pace, the light, the temperature, the way strangers treat each other on the street. You can do a lot of internal work, and you should, but there are things a mind and body need that reframing can’t provide by itself.
He didn’t stay in the big city and think his way to contentment. He moved somewhere better. We just disagree about whether that part counts or not.
And to bring it back to what started this conversation; the video he was responding to was about the culture of Mexico. Not just the scenery. The way people interact here, the collectivism, the pace, the warmth of daily encounters. Those things are real and they have an effect, not because I decided they would, but because that’s what a different culture actually feels like in your body when you’re living inside it.
And then another commenter jumped in. They’d lived in four cities as an adult: three in the US and Mexico City. And they said that each place allowed them to discover new things about themselves, to experiment with different ways of showing up in the world. That changes of place open up possibilities that simply aren’t available elsewhere.
That’s it exactly. It’s not that you leave yourself behind when you move, you bring everything with you. But a different place can bring out parts of you that had nowhere to grow before. And Mexico does that for me.
Someone asked me whether I speak Spanish and whether I have daily contact with locals or live among other expats.
I do speak some Spanish. Not perfectly, but enough for basic conversations. And no, I don’t live in an expat bubble.
But I want to talk about the question itself for a moment. Because I don’t think it was really genuine curiosity. I think it was a position being staked out. A little test, with the correct answer already decided.
There’s a popular view right now that immigrants should assimilate. Learn the language. Become part of the culture they’ve adopted. And I agree with that. If you don’t love a place enough to engage with it, why are you there?
But what I thought was this person asking that question probably isn’t lying awake at night worrying about cultural integration in Michoacán. Questions like that usually aren’t really about Mexico. They’re about scoring a point. And I’d rather just talk about why people move and how they navigate it. That’s the question I’m actually happy to answer.
One more comment, and I want to end on this one.
Someone wrote in to say they were genuinely happy I’d found my place here. And then they shared something harder — that they had lived in Michoacán themselves, and that time left them with real trauma. Not the place itself, exactly, but the culture, the experience of trying to live here. It affected him for years. For a long time he couldn’t imagine even visiting the friends he’d made.
He moved back to his hometown in the States. And that, for him, was the right call. He found community there. He found peace there.
And he said something I think is exactly right: neither country is the same everywhere. Every town, every city, every region is different. What didn’t work for him here is working for me. What might not be working for someone in the US is working for someone else two towns over.
I think that’s the actual answer to most of what we’ve talked about tonight. Not whether Mexico is safe, or whether America is broken, or whether it’s all just mindset. It’s that place matters, people are different, and the same place can be someone’s healing and someone else’s wound.
He found his peace in a place I might not have. I found mine here. Both of those things can be true.
One thing I’ve learned from reading your comments is that moving doesn’t create the same outcome for everyone. The same place can feel like freedom to one person and completely wrong for another.
That’s actually why I created the Relocation Clarity Framework. It’s not a guide to moving to Mexico. It’s a process for figuring out whether a major move is really the right answer for you, and if it is, what you’re actually hoping to find on the other side.
If you’re wrestling with that question yourself, you’ll find a link below.
Thank you for reading!
🔹 The Relocation Clarity Framework A structured way to think through the financial, emotional, and practical realities of moving before you commit. https://payhip.com/b/8ejoI
🔹 Moving to Mexico Guide Residency, costs, driving down, healthcare, and the logistics you need. To the point, not a lot of fluff.
