I currently live in Ecuador. Things aren’t bad for me—I’m actually doing really well financially. I live in a luxury apartment, and my wife and I even just bought a new car.
However, the situation here is not good, not at all. I increasingly feel like I’ve trapped myself inside a bubble just to ignore everything bad happening outside (robberies, murders, extortion, kidnappings). In fact, two years ago my wife and I were kidnapped, and they stole a large amount of money from us. Kidnapping here basically means they force you into a car and drive around the city while they withdraw money from your accounts and buy things with your credit cards.
We managed to recover from that through hard work and effort, and honestly, the reason we live in one of the most exclusive areas in the country today is not because of money or luxury, but mainly for the safety — it’s the only place where my wife can sleep peacefully.
Recently, we traveled to Japan — it was my wife’s dream — and of course we were amazed by how safe the country is. My wife even started crying when she saw an ice-skating rink in Tokyo, and I understood her. She was watching happy people skating late at night, while in our country the chances of something happening to you at night increase by the hour. By 8 p.m. you should already be home, locked in, with all the security measures in place.
Even though we earn very well, our jobs don’t really make us happy. They’re stressful, and although we work from home, we end up working all the time. Once again, as I said, we’re stuck inside the house because you can’t even take your laptop to a café — doing that is practically asking to be robbed.
We both have a strong background, with experience working for a U.S. company (that’s why we earn well). We only studied our bachelor’s degrees — she’s a chemical engineer and I’m a computer engineer — from a well-known U.S. university, so we speak English fluently.
I am a bit worried about the job situation, because even though I studied computer science, I have more experience as a manager than as a programmer, and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad for Japan. I know there are strict hierarchies there. It’s not like you can arrive and immediately get a manager position… or maybe you can, I honestly don’t know.
And why Japan? Originally, our plan was to move to the U.S., but with the way things are going there — where they don’t really want immigrants — we started considering Japan instead. Europe doesn’t appeal to us much; between Europe and Japan, we feel we’d prefer Japan.
Our plan is to go before summer 2026 ends and first go to a Japanese language school while we look for jobs, our main goal the first year is try to get an N3 or N2 we just started learning as soon as we arrived from our trip (a week ago) And by the third year we should be working in good companies with N1 I know we can do it my wife is even smart than me (she graduated from engineering with a 3.98 GPA Purdue University 💀) so I know we have good chances but like for real we have ?
by __Levii