What's Your Exit Threshold? — Community Piece
"When It Gets Bad" Is Not a Plan.
I want to ask the community a direct question this week. Not a rhetorical one — an actual one that I want actual answers to.
The United States is in a hot war with Iran. The institutional analysis I published at The Long Memo has reached a point where I’m writing about the first direct US-Iran talks since 1979, which collapsed before they produced anything, about an extraction economy operating at the state scale, about the category error that has broken American foreign policy at the civilizational level.
This is not abstract anymore.
It is the news.
Which means the question I’ve been asking implicitly in everything I write here is now worth asking explicitly: what is your exit threshold?
Not the vague version — “when it gets bad enough.” I’ve written before about why that formulation is a cognitive trap. “When it gets bad enough” is an open-ended commitment that moves with the circumstances. People who said “I’ll leave when it gets bad” in 2020 didn’t leave. They said it’s not that bad yet. The threshold moved. It keeps moving. That is how the threshold is designed to function — as a permission structure that never quite triggers.
I want to know your specific threshold.
Is it a specific political event — an election outcome, a court ruling, a piece of legislation? Is it a financial threshold — a tax rate, a capital controls event, a dollar devaluation? Is it a security event — a draft, a civil disruption, a change in travel freedom? Is it a family event — your kids reaching a certain age, a health situation that makes US healthcare untenable, a professional transition that untethers you from geography?
Name it. In the comments. Seriously.
I ask because the most valuable thing this community does is make the abstract concrete. When someone says “my threshold is if they reinstate selective service” or “my threshold is if the capital gains rate hits 40%” or “my threshold is when my youngest graduates in 2028,” they’re not just sharing information. They’re committing to a position. And commitment to a position is the first step toward building a plan that actually reflects it.
What’s your threshold?
We our threshold even before the 2024 presidential election as the handwriting of what was/is happening in the USA was on the wall. It took about 13 months to put our affairs in order and extricate ourselves, but very glad we joined the tens of thousands of other Americans who’ve emigrated to the EU.
We decided in early July 2024 that the election would be our threshold, and began actively preparing for a possible move -- fresh passports and other documents, a deep pruning of offices and closets, research into building the team (immigration attorney, movers, brokers, etc.) that would help us execute.
When I woke up at 12:30 am on November 6 and saw the election results, I didn't go back to bed. Instead, I started working my way through the tabs that were already open on my computer. When my husband woke up to the bad news at 7 am, I could tell him we'd already been in touch with the entire team. By noon, I was making appointments, signing contracts, and formulating a schedule for dismantling our very complicated life.
We left the US 74 days later, on January 19, and have not returned since.
Knowing your hard threshold is important because it gives you a date to work toward. Even if the election had gone the other way, we'd have had fresh documents, a cleaned-up house, and a plan in place against another day. The clarity of knowing what we were going to do, and having the map already charted, made what came next far more rational.
The goal is to survive this with your family, health, and wealth intact. Every day you wait, the odds of pulling that off without significant losses goes down.