Danger or Opportunity. Bhutan Doesn't Need to Become Somewhere Else

On progress, migration, screens and what one of the world's smallest countries might want to protect while it changes.

10 years ago I travelled for the first time to Bhutan and I fell in love with the culture, the people, the energy. One thought keeps me currently up at night, especially since the country changes with every time I go back. Therefore, I decided to share that thought. In the Bhutanese highlands, I watched a mother sit with prayer beads in her hands and pray for the protection of her crops.

She was asking the local deities to look after the land. Friends had been invited over to pray with her. It wasn't a performance, a festival or something staged for visitors. It was simply part of the day.

Next to her was her child, around two years old.

And for most of the time I was there, that child had a phone.

Walking around with it. Sitting with it. Eyes fixed on YouTube and TikTok. Every time I saw the child, the screen seemed to be there too.

I remember looking at the two of them and thinking that I was probably staring at one of the most important questions facing Bhutan in a single frame.

A mother speaking to the mountains.

A toddler speaking to an algorithm.

I am a photographer, so perhaps this is how my mind works. I notice contradictions before I know what I think about them.

And I haven't stopped thinking about this one...

The fastest cultural experiment in the Himalayas

Bhutan did not officially introduce television and the internet until 2 June 1999. Bhutan Broadcasting Service describes itself as having launched television that day; the country famously entered the television age remarkably late.

Think about that for a moment.

Someone my age was already alive when an entire country switched on television.

A child growing up there today can now sit in a remote Himalayan settlement and access essentially the same endless stream of videos as a child in London, Delhi or Los Angeles.

Technology itself isn't the problem. I don't think Bhutan should turn off the internet, keep young people isolated or preserve itself as some sort of living museum for foreigners who enjoy photographing traditional clothes.

That idea would be both unrealistic and deeply unfair to Bhutanese people.

But the speed of the transition matters.

In 2025, Bhutan's Ministry of Health was already warning about excessive screen exposure. Its guidance recommended no screen exposure for children under two, no more than one hour a day for ages two to four, and no more than two hours for children and adolescents aged five to seventeen.

So the concern I felt in the highlands isn't mine alone.

A few days later in Paro, I was talking to a boy of around ten. He asked whether I knew a particular children's superhero show.

I did.

He immediately gave me his review:

“It's brainrot. Like everything on YouTube. It's brainrot and I love it.”

I laughed.

And then I thought about it.

There was something almost brilliant about a ten-year-old being perfectly aware of what the internet was doing to his attention and consuming it anyway.

“Brainrot is cool,” he told me.

Coming from a child growing up in one of the most culturally and spiritually distinctive societies I have ever encountered, the sentence stayed with me.

Not because Bhutanese children should somehow be more enlightened than children everywhere else.

They shouldn't.

But because Bhutan has something that much of the rest of the world is now spending enormous amounts of money trying to recover.

Attention.

Community.

A relationship with nature.

A sense of ritual.

Time.

What does a better life look like?

Then there is Australia.

Almost everyone in Bhutan seems to know someone there.

Whenever I spoke to young Bhutanese about leaving, the story often sounded similar.

Their friends were in Australia. They had jobs. They had cars. They had apartments. They could go to the beach. They could study. They were earning money.

Of course that is attractive.

And this isn't simply an impression.

Australia recorded 40,560 Bhutan-born residents as of June 2025, making it home to Bhutan's largest community abroad. Bhutan's own projected population for 2025 was only 784,043.

By April 2026, the World Bank estimated that approximately 9 percent of Bhutan's population had emigrated. Youth unemployment remained above 20 percent.

And these aren't only young people leaving Thimphu.

A World Bank migration study found that the average recent migrant was 29 years old. More than half had a university education, compared with around 7 percent of Bhutan's working-age population. Perhaps most strikingly, 63 percent of households with a migrant were located in rural areas.

The outflow accelerated dramatically after Bhutan reopened its borders following Covid. Before the pandemic, departures through Paro International Airport averaged fewer than 500 per month. In early 2023, they exceeded 5,000 per month.

It would be easy to turn this into a moral argument about young people abandoning their culture.

I don't think that's fair.

People want opportunity.

They want financial independence. They want to see the world. They want careers that reward their education. They want to know that working hard can change their circumstances.

The World Bank found higher earnings and better educational opportunities to be major drivers of the Australian migration wave. Almost half of respondents cited better opportunities abroad as their main reason for migrating; among student migrants, expectations around education and future earnings were especially important.

The economic difference is real.

But another statistic stopped me.

Before leaving Bhutan, 46 percent of migrants surveyed by the World Bank had worked in professional occupations. Abroad, only 3 percent did. Six in ten were working in lower-skilled cleaning or care roles.

That doesn't make migration a failure. A cleaner earning several times their former salary may quite rationally decide that the trade is worth making. Migrants send money home, gain independence and create possibilities that Bhutan's labour market currently cannot always provide.

But it complicates the photograph of the car, the apartment and the beach.

Because a better income and a better life are not necessarily the same question.

And almost every Bhutanese person abroad or connected to the diaspora whom I have spoken to eventually talks about something else too.

They miss home.

They miss their family.

They miss the food, the mountains, the community, the rituals, the familiarity of being somewhere in which they don't have to explain who they are.

That doesn't mean they all want to return tomorrow.

It means progress has a price that does not appear on a payslip.

The things that don't show up in GDP

There are moments from Bhutan that would be almost impossible for me to explain through statistics.

In the highlands I watched a nomadic woman notice a caterpillar crawling dangerously close to a footpath.

She stopped.

Carefully picked it up.

Sang something to it.

Then carried it away and put it somewhere safer.

Nobody else seemed to find this remarkable.

I did.

At temples, I noticed people watching out for one another. People weren't only moving through their own private prayer. They prayed together. For relatives, for strangers, for other living beings, for peace.

I met people who would hike for hours to reach monasteries carrying food for monks and lamas. Not because someone had created a “mindfulness experience” around it. Because this was still part of the relationship between community and monastery.

I watched people make offerings before journeys and ask for protection. Alcohol offerings in Bhutanese Buddhist practice can be made to deities and protective spirits; traditions such as serkem and marchang place offerings of drink inside a much wider system of reciprocity, protection and auspicious beginnings.

I learned how seriously astrology can still enter decisions around life and health. This is not simply a rejection of medicine: Bhutan has formally integrated its traditional Sowa Rigpa medical system alongside modern medicine, and astrological considerations remain part of some traditional medical practices.

Even colour isn't always just decoration. The five colours found repeatedly on Bhutanese Buddhist prayer flags correspond to elements within Himalayan Buddhist traditions, another reminder that symbolism here is often still embedded in the landscape rather than separated into a museum.

None of these things makes Bhutan a saint.

Bhutan has economic problems, inequalities, dissatisfied young people and its own complicated political and social history. I am suspicious of the old Western tendency to turn the country into a Himalayan Shangri-La where everyone is supposedly happy because they meditate.

That version of Bhutan isn't real either.

But neither is it useful to pretend that culture is merely decoration around the edges of economic development.

What I experienced in Bhutan was infrastructure of another kind.

Social infrastructure.

People noticing people.

Generations living close to one another.

Stories transmitted orally.

Religious practice woven into ordinary life.

Communities still spending time together without needing to turn the gathering into an “event.”

A cultural understanding that humans, animals, mountains, crops, spirits and weather do not exist as entirely separate categories.

I have travelled a lot.

I have never experienced another country where culture and religion felt this naturally present in ordinary daily life.

That is subjective. It is not a ranking.

But it is the reason Bhutan affected me so much.

Bhutan cannot win somebody else's race

This is why I sometimes worry when development is discussed primarily as catching up.

Catching up with whom?

India?

Australia?

Singapore?

Dubai?

Bhutan has fewer than a million people. It cannot compete with enormous economies through scale, cheap labour or endless consumption.

And why should it?

Its competitive advantage may be almost the opposite.

The world is becoming richer, faster and more connected while simultaneously developing industries devoted to curing the consequences: wellness retreats because we're stressed; digital detoxes because we can't stop scrolling; community apps because we're lonely; expensive nature escapes because our everyday environments no longer contain much nature; mindfulness courses because nobody taught us to sit still.

Bhutan already understands many of these things culturally.

Not perfectly.

But organically.

The challenge, I think, is not to prevent Bhutan from changing.

It is to become wealthier without first destroying the things wealthier countries are trying desperately to buy back.

That requires jobs.

It requires serious careers for young Bhutanese.

It requires better wages, education, entrepreneurship and the possibility of seeing the world.

It may also require making seeing that world easier. Bhutan's limited diplomatic footprint means that many foreign governments still serve the country through missions elsewhere. Germany, for example, allows Bhutan residents to submit short-stay applications in Thimphu, but some long-term study and employment visas still require an applicant to appear in New Delhi. Bhutan's own foreign ministry similarly routes certain official visa applications through missions in New Delhi.

For a young European, deciding to spend a weekend in another country barely qualifies as a decision.

For many young Bhutanese, international mobility can involve considerably more friction.

So of course a place such as Australia can acquire an almost mythical quality when friends start sending photographs back.

But perhaps the answer isn't telling Bhutanese youth not to leave.

Perhaps it is giving them something compelling to come back to.

And perhaps Bhutan's culture should not sit opposite that economic ambition.

Perhaps it should be at the centre of it.

Looking up

I keep coming back to the mother and her child.

I don't want that child to grow up without a phone.

I don't want the child denied YouTube, Australia, university, AI, pop culture, travel or whatever comes next.

That isn't preservation. That's confinement.

I want that child to inherit everything their generation is entitled to without being taught, consciously or unconsciously, that becoming modern requires becoming less Bhutanese.

To know what the prayers mean.

To know the stories.

To understand why their mother was speaking to the land.

To recognise the colours.

To climb to the monastery sometimes.

To know why a woman might stop walking because a caterpillar is in danger.

And then to decide for themselves what they want to carry forward.

Because culture doesn't survive simply because a government protects buildings, textiles or festivals.

It survives when a ten-year-old believes it has something to offer them.

Bhutan does not need to remain as it was.

No country can.

But it also doesn't need to become somewhere else.

And maybe the most important thing the next generation can be given isn't protection from the modern world.

It is enough confidence in their own culture to enter that world without disappearing into it. Anna-Luisa Ballauf | Cultural Bridge between Bhutan and the West

Anna-Luisa Ballauf is a portrait and documentary photographer working across culture, identity and human connection. Her documentary work started 10 years ago in Bhutan and explores people, traditions and the relationship between cultural heritage and a rapidly changing world.