alt Hacker News> Speaking of which, a lot of German natives complain and some are even leaving the country (around 100k left last year), but honestly I have visited / lived in nine countries, and people have no idea how good they have it here.
The grass is always greener on the other side ... until you actually dare to find out. Having lived and worked in many a country, I second your opinion that it is often about trade offs. Problems will come and go. You have to choose the problem you want to work with.
Germany certainly is one of the top countries to live in.
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"The grass is always greener on the other side ... until you actually dare to find out. "
Definitely. I hated germany and after school the first thing I did, was to go away as far as possible. Good for getting perspective. There are things that work nicer elsewhere and things were we actually are pretty advanced.
There are also circumstances and other factors that may be unknown to you when you move to a new place (your first flatmate, the city you move in, the company etc), or factors you did not choose or had little control of up to some age (the area you grew up, the people around you etc) that can affect one's experience. The article's author also talks about that.
A person who moved to ostwestfalen or in a small town in eastern germany will probably not have the same experience as a person moving to hamburg (no offence to any of these places). A person moving as an intern to a relatively international environment will not have the same experience as a person who moves to a 100% german environment. It definitely matters how you act in your environment, but the environment restricts what you can get out of it as experience. Similarly, this applies to moving to any country, but also to where you were born.
Imo and ime people who do not get a good experience out of a country (the one they were born in or where they moved) is most of the times not about having unrealistic expectations of other places (they may have, but it is not the point) or they do something wrong, but due to a big chunk of factors and general character/compatibility issues that one has little control over, and may even be unaware of until that point. This holds for the "success stories" as much as the "failed" ones. It is hard to accept sometimes because having little/no control over stuff can be uncomfortable. The experience of different people can be different for things out of each one's control mostly.
In any case, getting different experiences in places out of where one was raised can always be helpful and help one grow.
My opinion (immigrant for the 2nd time, currently in Germany since 2013- so I've lived in 3 countries when counting my native one):
Basically, all rich/"western" countries are pretty decent. Some better than other, but they're all 'ok' or rather they all have plenty of 'ok' options for people able to work at somewhat in-demands fields (despite the financial situation of the last couple years a career in tech or tech adjacent generally still fits that category).
If you go somewhere where there's "real" problems, countries like Egypt, India, Ethiopia (altho of course there are nice areas in these countries too) you realize most of the time you'd rather live in any rich country than in a poor country. And there are more people worldwide living in countries ± like India than in countries ± like Germany.