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I’ve been spending time in Dubai, as in weeks or months at a time, since around 2017. I finally moved to Dubai full-time in February 2021. This means that I’ve lived here for almost four years if you don’t count the many months I was visiting Dubai before then.

I remember how excited I was during my first visit to Dubai. I wrote about it all in this blog article here. I had never seen a city like it before. Oh, I had visited amazing cities before, Hong Kong and Shanghai being my all-time favorites (not that I would necessarily live in those cities, but they are my favorite cities).

But I had never seen a city quite like Dubai. A city with:

• No homeless people. Even wealthy cities like Hong Kong have some homeless people you’ll see occasionally. I’ve said many times that every time I go visit the USA I’m almost immediately accosted by homeless people as soon as I step out into the airport, and I’m speaking literally. London is similar.
• No old or run-down buildings. Every building in Dubai is new and fresh.
• No protests or civil unrest, ever. That crap is now the norm all over the Collapsing Western world, but in Dubai, nothing.
• No wokeism or any other extreme-left ideologies. I’m not exactly a big fan of the right either, but at least the right doesn’t shove their shit into my face like the left does in places like London, Australia, or California. None of that in Dubai, anywhere.
• No taxes, or at least they didn’t have any in 2017. Since then the added 5% sales tax and a 9% corporate tax if you make over a certain amount of money and own a business here, but that’s the lowest corporate tax in the world and there are no other taxes. So no payroll taxes, income taxes, capital gains taxes, property taxes, and so on.
• No crime. Dubai has a near 0% crime rate. After living in Dubai for almost four years I regularly leave my apartment unlocked when I leave for brief trips and I’m not worried about it at all. Of course, I always lock up when I go to any other country in the world, but in Dubai, you don’t need to. It’s like suburban America in the 1980s when I was a kid.

As soon as I mention the positives of Dubai, people who know nothing about Dubai, have never been to Dubai, and think they know all about Dubai because they watched two YouTube videos about it, will swoop in and state negatives about Dubai, which are almost always factually inaccurate.

They’ll say things about “poop trucks.” Well, I’ve lived in Dubai for four years and driven all over the city hundreds of times and I’ve never seen them.

They’ll say things about how authoritarian it is, how people get thrown in prison for saying “fuck” or something stupid like that. Incorrect, it was authoritarian more than ten years ago. If you look at the scary articles you’re reading, they always give examples of things that happened back in 2012 or so when Dubai was authoritarian. It’s not anymore.

When I’m in the USA, Mexico, UK, and places like that, I hear police sirens all the time, almost non-stop. In Dubai, I seldom hear them. When my wife and I went back to the USA to visit, we were pulled over by cops within 48 hours. In Dubai, after four years of living here, I’ve never seen a police car anywhere on the roads unless I’m driving by a police station.

They’ll talk about women doing “port-a-potty” stuff here. Nope. 99% of women who come to Dubai for sexual reasons (and, to state for the record, they shouldn’t do that because that’s illegal here) never, ever have to do anything gross or weird.

They’ll say that things like premarital sex is illegal (nope, not since November 2020), or that living with your girlfriend if you’re not married to her is illegal (nope, not since November 2020), or that alcohol is illegal (nope, that’s never been the case for non-citizens, and now for citizens it’s legal since March of 2022), and so forth and so on.

They’ll talk about how expensive it is. Incorrect. It’s WAY cheaper to live here in Dubai than it is to live in London, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Oslo, Seoul, San Francisco, Miami, Boston, Sydney, Chicago, Montreal, and… need I go on?

Also, if you live in Sharjah which is just 20 minutes away from Dubai it’s even cheaper. That’s probably why Sharjah is the seventh-fastest-growing city in the world.

They’ll sometimes mumble something about Sharia law and then freak out. Um, women walk around here with their boobs and butts hanging out all the time and no one gives them any shit about it. Banks here loan people gazillions of dollars (dirhams, actually) and charge shitloads of interest just like anywhere in the civilized world. People get fucked-up drunk at literally hundreds of bars and clubs all over the city seven nights a week, rivaling anything you see in Vegas, Miami, or Ibiza. Does any of that sound like Sharia law?

Even I thought some of this inaccurate, outdated, stupid shit when I moved here and I’m shocked at how wrong I was about all of it.

Statement of fact: Dubai is one of the few best places to live in the entire world. Period.

Is Dubai perfect? No. No place is perfect. There are things about Dubai I don’t like.

It’s really damn hot here from June to September. The air quality is also bad during those same months. No problem, I just live in Paraguay during those months instead.

There’s a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy in Dubai that is super irritating. But… is that not a problem in most Western and/or first-world countries too? (Have you ever bought a house in the USA?)

The traffic is pretty bad in Dubai, and I’ll be honest, it’s getting worse since everyone in the world wants to move here. No problem, I don’t own a car. I use a personal driver, taxis, and Uber which are literally 2-3 minutes away anywhere in the entire Dubai region, even in the suburbs, at any time of day or night. So I let them deal with that crap while I relax or work in the back seat.

Some people say dating is hard in Dubai and they’re right. Not relevant to me, I solved all of my dating problems many years ago (but that’s a topic for my other blog).

So yeah, there are disadvantages to living in Dubai just like there are disadvantages to living anywhere. I just make sure that I alleviate the few things I don’t like about Dubai with a few simple lifestyle changes, and boom, problem solved.

Is Dubai for everyone? No.

If you hate living in a city, don’t live in Dubai. (Though you could live in other places in the UAE like Fujairah or Ras Al-Khaimah. They’re not cities, they’re beautiful, and there are no taxes there just like Dubai. Look into it.)

If you hate the desert, don’t live in Dubai.

If you hate living in a place where white people are the minority because you have a thing about that, don’t live in Dubai.

If you hate living in a place where the women look like Instagram models (some people actually don’t like that), don’t live in Dubai.

If you worship democracy for some weird reason (look at what democracy as done to the West, my friend), don’t live in Dubai.

If you prefer to be around people who are lazy and aren’t really going anywhere (some people actually like that), don’t live in Dubai.

I’ve been here for almost four years and I love Dubai. I plan on living here for the rest of my life. (Unless they raise my taxes, in which case I’ll be outta here in under three months due to my five flags lifestyle, but I don’t plan on that happening.) It really is one of the best places in the world, and with the Collapse of the West at our doorstep (and no, Trump won’t fix it or prevent it) it’s one of the best places to be.

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