A few months ago, my partner Anthony and I packed most of our belongings into a storage unit, rented out our house, put our pup Porkchop in a carrier, and flew to start a new life in Barcelona.

We had agreed on a year trial, but as the weeks have turned into months it’s become pretty clear—we likely won’t return to the United States to live, or at least not anytime soon.

But the reason we’re staying isn’t what you might think.

On election night, Anthony set up a makeshift NOTICE News headquarters in our living room. As the results rolled in and it became clear Trump was going to win, we looked at each other. We knew what we were going to do.

But here’s the thing: it wasn’t because of Trump. We’d been planning this move for a while. His win just sped up the timeline.

If Europe has taught me anything, it’s that fascists come and fascists go. Fascism never lasts—it’s doomed from the start. That’s because fascism is a symptom, not the disease.

Fascism arises when capitalism reaches its logical end: maximum exploitation that hollows out the working class. Faced with a system rigged against them, a depressed and hopeless working class starts looking for a way out.

They can find it in systems that guarantee security—where wealth is fairly distributed and decisions are democratically made—or they can find it in beating up on minoritized people. But the scapegoating never delivers what it promises. And eventually, the whole thing crashes in on itself.

That’s not to say fascist regimes aren’t catastrophic for everyone involved. They are. It just means there’s hope for the future. Ask the older Spaniards in my neighborhood. No one in 1970 could have imagined what this country would become after Franco’s death.

What’s keeping us away isn’t Trump. It’s something deeper—something that will still be there long after he’s gone.

Before we left the States, I weighed the most I had ever weighed in my life. According to my watch, I averaged maybe a thousand steps a day.

Anthony and I worked from home. We only left the house to get groceries, take a walk along the boardwalk (if it was nice out, which outside of summer was rare), or grab dinner. Everywhere we went—even just to take a walk—required getting in the car.

And when we got there? Ultra-processed foods filled with starches, simple carbs, and massive amounts of sugar.

I’m not saying I had no agency. I made choices. But looking back, I’m struck by how hard it was to make any other choice. The healthy option was always the inconvenient one—the expensive one. The one that required time we didn’t have.

We were living the new American Dream: a terrible diet, almost no exercise, stress from work, no time to cook—a lifestyle that almost certainly ends in nightmare.

Because in America, the things killing us aren’t accidents. They’re business models.

Ultra-processed food is everywhere because it’s cheap to produce and wildly profitable. Car-dependent sprawl exists because real estate developers and automakers spent decades reshaping our cities around their products. Healthcare is expensive because sickness is a revenue stream. And a population struggling just to get through the day has no energy to demand anything better.

The diet and lifestyle of the American working class is so catastrophic that nearly a third of all deaths are caused by cardiovascular disease—a condition that is almost entirely preventable. More people die from it every year than from every form of cancer combined.

How is this not front-page news every single day?

Because what felt like personal failure—my weight, my diet, my health—wasn’t personal at all. It was structural. I was living inside an economy that couldn’t care less about humans. I was living in an economy built to make the rich even richer.

In Barcelona, our lives are normal. Not luxurious. Just human. We walk miles every day without trying. We have time to cook. Fresh food is cheap. Healthcare doesn’t bankrupt you. The stress that felt inevitable in America was never natural—it was engineered.

This isn’t about Europe being perfect. It’s about America being built on economic incentives that are fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing.

And until that changes—until the economy is structured around meeting people’s needs instead of maximizing extraction—the outcomes won’t change either. No election can fix a system designed to produce these exact results.

To be fair—it’s not that I’ll never come back. I may even eventually move back. But until something fundamental changes, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

And leaving doesn’t mean I’m giving up on changing things. I know it’s an incredible privilege to have the means to move out of the country—to escape what American capitalism does to your body and your mind. There are very few days I forget that.

But sometimes you have to step outside the machine to finally see it clearly. To feel what it’s like when an economy is built around human flourishing instead of human extraction. To remember that the way things are isn’t the way things have to be.

That’s what I want for everyone—not just the people who can afford to leave. A moral economy where health isn’t a luxury, rest isn’t laziness, and the point of life isn’t just to work until you can’t anymore.

That’s why I left America. And that’s what I’m fighting for—from over here.