During my fifteen-year, three-nation run of full-on expatitude, I kept bumping into the same ideas over and over. Different accents, same patterns. Different flags, same foolishness. Man couldn’t escape it if I tried.

Vacation life is soft-focus. When I’m on holiday, I’m just outside, yeah? Seeing sights, shelling food, ticking boxes from a guidebook like it’s Pokémon. I’m not trying to deep-think geopolitics while I’m ordering something grilled. You’re usually somewhere that’s happy to see you, happy to take your money, happy to keep the rough edges tucked away. The reality of the place stays blurry. And honestly? That’s calm. That’s allowed.

Expatitude though? Different kettle. It always starts like a vacation — sun in your eyes, accent doing bits, everything feels blessed. Then the honeymoon fades, the haze lifts, and suddenly you’re clocking things tourists will never clock. The cracks show. The rules change. For some people, expat life is basically home but warmer. For others, it’s a bubble — guarded, gated, insulated from the real ends. It all depends where you’re from and where you’ve landed. Context is everything.

Over time I picked up this “all roads lead to” philosophy. Simple, almost dumb – but deadly accurate. All roads lead to beautiful women. All roads lead to handsome men. All roads lead to good music, serious art, nonsense behaviour, brilliance, madness – the whole spectrum. Good, bad, ugly. Every road. No exceptions.

Which brings me – very clumsily, I admit – to the concept of the undereducated. And yeah, the fact that I can’t even segway into this cleanly is kind of proving my own point. Mad irony.

Undereducation is the real pandemic. That’s my takeaway. All roads lead to the undereducated. Every country’s got them. No place is immune. Some places just have higher concentrations – and surprise surprise, those places usually move rough.

Take North Korea – extreme example, but useful. Outside of a tiny, foreign-educated elite, the population is starved of real education. Even the people who are considered “well educated” locally are still undereducated by global standards. They’ve learned things – just not enough, and not freely. In places like North Korea and Russia, education is a weapon, and undereducation is the intended outcome. Don’t get it twisted.

But don’t get comfy thinking this is just some far-off dictatorship problem. Nah. Undereducation is everywhere. Worldwide settings. And grifters love it. Charlatans feast on it. Undereducated people are easier to move to. Easier to spin. Easier to gaslight. They’re not stupid – that’s important – they’re just missing tools.

These are the same people you can chat pure rubbish to – tell them horse tranquilizer’s the cure, or that devil politicians are running a kiddie ring from a pizza joint – and they’ll nod along like it makes sense. Mad ideas, but they travel fast. Not ‘cause people are dumb. ‘Cause they’re half-tooled. Enough schooling to talk, not enough to think straight.

So every time you hear about education cuts, clock it properly. Don’t let it slide. Every cut increases the number of undereducated people in circulation. You underfund the system, you manufacture undereducation. Simple maths.

And undereducated societies? They don’t thrive. They get loud. They get angry. They get easy to run.

All roads lead somewhere.
Some places just keep paving the wrong ones.