Why does someone leave home when part of them clearly doesn’t want to? It’s a question that doesn’t fit neatly into the usual story we tell about migration, the one where people simply choose to go because life will be better elsewhere. In my research, I kept meeting people who wanted to leave and felt they had no real choice but to leave, both at once, in the same breath, sometimes in the same sentence. That contradiction isn’t a flaw in how people explain themselves. It’s the actual emotional logic driving migration in many parts of the world, and it deserves far more attention than it usually gets.
Two feelings can live in the same heart without cancelling each other out. Wanting something and feeling forced into it are not opposites, they are often the same decision wearing two different faces.
To make sense of this, I leaned on two Nepali words that came up again and again in conversations during my fieldwork, rahar and badhyata. Rahar is aspirational desire, the pull of hope, the wish for a bigger, more dignified life. Badhyata is a felt compulsion, the sense that a person has no real choice, that they must go because of family pressure or economic need. Conventional thinking likes to sort migrants into two neat boxes, voluntary or forced, free choice or desperate necessity. But when I actually listened to people, this tidy division fell apart. The same young man who spoke with excitement about opportunities abroad would, minutes later, describe leaving as something he simply had to do, with no alternative in sight. Rahar and badhyata were not competing explanations. They were feeding each other.
This matters because it changes how we should think about migration decisions altogether. Consider a family that watches a neighbour build a beautiful new house with money earned abroad. That single event can spark both feelings at once, rahar, the desire to achieve the same success, and badhyata, the pressure to keep up and the fear of being left behind if they don’t. The same social moment produces desire and duty from the same soil, and it is precisely this combination that makes migration feel less like a personal preference and more like something almost impossible to resist. Once enough people in a community begin to feel this way, migration stops looking like an individual decision at all and starts to look like a shared, almost automatic next step into adulthood.
