Reverse culture shock: Why I now feel ‘technologically homesick’ in the First World

We used to travel to the West to see the future. We would land at Heathrow, JFK, or Charles de Gaulle and marvel at the efficiency, infrastructure, and systems that seemed light-years ahead of home. For decades, the definition of “developed” was them, and “developing” was us.

But last summer, I experienced a disorienting phenomenon that no one warned me about: the friction of the First World.

Standing in a queue for a train in Europe delayed by archaic signaling problems, fumbling with paper tickets, and dealing with bureaucracy that required physical stamps, I realized something profound. I was not missing the food or the weather of Saudi Arabia; I was missing its operating system.

I was homesick for the efficiency of the Saudi ecosystem.

This is the untold story of Vision 2030. We often talk about the giga-projects — the physical skyline of Neom or the extraterrestrial shapes of the Red Sea. But the real revolution is invisible. It is the user experience of the nation.

In Riyadh, my life is a seamless stream of digital integration. My government interactions are handled through an app. My banking is instant. My healthcare history is centralized. The city, for all its traffic, operates on a hyper-modern digital layer. Yet when I travel to cities that have been considered “modern” for a century, I feel as though I have stepped back in time.

I encounter credit card machines that do not support contactless payments, subways with no signal, and streets that feel less safe at 7 p.m. than Riyadh does at 4 a.m.

We have moved from being a nation that consumes technology to one that is natively digital. Because we built our infrastructure late, we did not need to retrofit old copper wires or dismantle centuries of legacy systems. We leapfrogged — going straight to fiber, straight to the cloud, and straight to artificial intelligence.

This has created a new kind of soft power that marketing magazines have yet to quantify: the expectation of excellence.

The Saudi citizen today has become one of the world’s most demanding customers. We have been spoiled by the speed of our own transformation. When we visit the so-called “developed world,” we are no longer looking up in awe; we are looking around in confusion, wondering why the Wi-Fi is so slow and why we still need to carry cash.

This is not arrogance; it is a realization of shifting baselines.

The narrative used to be that Saudi Arabia was racing to catch up with the world. That race is over. We are now running on a different track entirely. We are beta-testing the future of urban living — a fusion of hyper-safety, digital integration, and aggressive modernization.

So, to the editors and analysts asking about the “Saudi ecosystem,” look beyond oil prices and construction cranes. The true metric of our success is the frustration a Saudi feels when they land in a foreign capital, tap their phone, and nothing happens.

The future is not a place we visit anymore. It is the place we fly back to.

• Abdulelah S. Al-Nahari is a business and marketing communications partner at a marketing solutions firm and leads strategic growth initiatives in line with Saudi Arabia’s digital-first vision.