Once you've been out of the US for a few years, it can stop making sense to you.
bpp, you've "gone native"?
It is interesting how a different environment can start working on your perceptions, your thought patterns, your reflexes.. only after a few short years.
I used to sometimes feel like I was
dying for a cheeseburger, a taco, an egg roll... anything but more Italian food. But when I visited recently and had had a bit of Thai take-out or whatever.. I just found myself kind of put off by ALL the food and found myself trying to stifle an impulse to go to the grocery store and get the fixings for some cannellini beans or linguini in tuna sauce, chicken marsala, or braised fennel.
In the US, one usually talks until done, and then the other person responds, except around NY & Boston where it's commonly accepted that to speed things up it's OK to step on the end of people's sentences or finish them for them, then the other person does the same thing and you ratchet ahead in that way--once you know where the other person is going you snatch the ball and run with it.. Here in Italy, it can be normal for everyone to talk simultaneously in a kind of crazy embroidery; everyone more or less gets the general sense and freewheels along but it is hard for me to get the sense of whether facts and concepts are actually "sticking." I imagine in Japan there is a whole other conversational dynamic to adapt to. Point is, these ways of speaking, I think, can actually modify your mental processes, making it feel awkward to go back "home."
Living abroad isn't for everyone, but it does open your horizons. If you are FI, you can already avoid a lot of the issues that make the locals yearn for the US; you have to some extent the best of both worlds. A lot of the things that you think you couldn't live without and suffer for not having in the short term, you tend to stop missing with time. Anyone who can RE by denying themselves some of the everyday "necessities" like a $3 latte or a new car every 2 years is likely to be able to adapt just fine to the different standard of living that one finds outside of the US. The biggest drawback is that if you have very strong ties to family & friends, those may not be easy to maintain or to replace.