Psychology says people who fantasize about moving somewhere nobody knows them aren't necessarily running away — sometimes they are wondering who they might become without everyone else's expectations attached to them

It usually turns up on a Monday. You are standing over a kettle or stuck on a train, and a whole parallel life assembles itself in about four seconds. A small flat in a city you have visited twice. A different job. A version of you who runs in the mornings and has no history in the room.

Then the kettle clicks and you go back to answering emails.

The standard reading of this is that you are running away. Avoidance with a suitcase. I think that reading is lazy, and the research on how we carry our sense of self around suggests something more interesting is going on.

The place is doing less work than you think

Start with the deflating part. In 1998, David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman asked large groups of students in the American Midwest and in Southern California to rate how satisfied they were with their lives. The two groups came out roughly the same. But when students were asked to guess how satisfied someone like them would be living in the other region, they expected the Californians to be having a far better time of it.

The weather was doing most of the damage. Climate loomed large when people imagined living elsewhere and barely registered when they rated their own actual lives. Kahneman called this the focusing illusion: whatever you happen to be fixated on always feels more important than it will once you are actually living inside it.

So the balcony in the daydream is not what is generating the daydream. Something else is.

Everyone who knows you is quietly holding you in place

Here is the bit nobody says out loud at dinner. The people closest to you run a working model of who you are, and they are motivated to keep it accurate.

William Swann’s research on self-verification found that we want others to see us as we already see ourselves, and that we will actively steer conversations until they do, even when that self-view is unflattering. Your friends are doing you a favour, in their way, when they walk the conversation back to the version of you they already know. A stable picture is what social life runs on.

The cost is that changing in front of an audience that knows you is slow, embarrassing work. You mention you have started learning Spanish and someone at the table brings up the guitar you gave up on years ago. Nobody at that table is wrong. That is exactly the problem.

What people who actually move seem to get

Shigehiro Oishi and colleagues studied people with a long history of moving and found that their personal self sat closer to the centre of how they defined themselves: the traits and preferences that travel with them. People who had stayed put leaned on the collective self instead: the groups, the roles, the family position. Movers felt better in conversation when someone read their personal side accurately. Non-movers felt better when someone read their group identity accurately instead.

That is one study, not a settled consensus. Oishi’s own review of the field is blunt about the trade: at the individual level, residential mobility is linked to lower wellbeing. Moving a lot costs you the deep, obligatory ties that keep most people steady, and rebuilding those somewhere new takes real time.

The fantasy is a rehearsal

Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius gave these imagined versions of ourselves a name: possible selves. Concrete, specific, personal pictures of who we might become, who we hope to become, and who we are afraid of becoming. Their argument was that these do real cognitive work. They give motivation a target it can actually see.

So when the flat in Lisbon shows up over the kettle, pay attention to the casting rather than the set. Who are you in that scene? What is that person allowed to do that you currently are not? Usually it is something small and oddly specific. Be visibly bad at a new thing. Stop being the reliable one. Say no without attaching a paragraph of justification.

Test it before you sell the furniture

You do not need a visa to run the experiment.

Join something where nobody has your backstory. A class, a five-a-side team, a volunteer shift, anything with strangers in it and a fixed start time. Show up as the person from the daydream and see whether it survives past week three.

Take one trip alone and send no photos home until you are back. The audience is the variable you are testing for, so cut it completely.

Then write down what you actually did differently. If the honest answer is nothing, the fantasy was about rest, and a week off will do more for you than a new passport. If the answer is a real behaviour, you have found something you can do on a Thursday in your current postcode, which is annoying and also useful.

Plenty of people move and it works out. I live in Bangkok, which appeared on no list I was carrying at thirty. But the ones I know who landed well had already begun becoming that person before they packed anything. The move gave them room to keep going.