The “RV Entrepreneur Summit,” held at a mountaintop lodge overlooking Alabama’s Lake Guntersville, promised attendees a long weekend of networking with full-time R.V.ers, workshops, and gear training with brand ambassadors from outdoor recreation companies. For as much as $300 a pop, attendees—22-year-olds living out of self-built vans, families with children in pop-up trailers, and grey-haired empty-nesters in house-size R.V.’s who hadn’t quite reached retirement and still needed to work to pay the bills—gathered in the lodge’s conference room, swapping Instagram handles and eating energy bars. I was one of them. At the time, I had been living in a van for nearly a year. Here we would learn how to live out a counterculture lifestyle but keep making money while doing it.

On the surface, the confab looked like any typical trade show, complete with corporate-sponsored happy hours and keynote speeches. Christina Gambino, a full-time R.V.-dweller who, at four feet and 11 inches tall, claimed to be one of the shortest competitors of the reality show American Ninja Warrior, kicked things off with a motivational pep talk. Panels featured successful couples who started online businesses from the road, bloggers who earned a living writing about R.V. designs, and ridiculously attractive YouTube influencers. Brands like Camping World and Dometic sponsored product giveaways: The most coveted gifts included a tire-pressure monitoring system, a low-energy refrigerator, and a free box of scented toilet pellets.

The R.V. companies that sponsored the event, in a way, were promoting a new version of the American dream. It is no longer one of stability and rootedness but one more fit for the current age that promises that you can have it all: The so-called “dream job” can be yours, all while enjoying an endless vacation.

That dream appealed to Jeff and Candace Smith, a married couple who had been living in Austin, Texas, when he was laid off from his desk job and then reassigned to a remote position. They were looking to buy a house at the time but gave up when they saw how much that would cost. “The real estate market there is crazy,” Jeff told me over drinks at one of the post-session happy hours. “We were looking for a house to buy, and our budget kept creeping and creeping.” That trend hit the rental market just as hard: Total costs in Austin rose faster than in any other U.S. city over the last decade.

Driven away by the high cost of traditional housing, the Smiths bought a used fifth-wheel instead and started traveling while Jeff held down a nine-to-five shift online and Candace worked as a nutritional consultant. But moving around the country while working normal hours wore thin after a few months. “When we traveled, it was a matter of working eight hours then driving six hours. It was miserable,” Jeff said. “We really screwed that up. I don’t recommend it at all.” They hoped that they could learn how to work for themselves instead of a company that required so much of their time.

The Smiths were representative of most people who came to Lake Guntersville that week: ambitious, educated, and with a financial cushion that allowed them to gamble with a life on the road. Many were still grinding out full-time jobs from inside their R.V.s, and looking for ideas for how to escape even more. The politics of the event, if they existed, were vaguely articulated: lots of talk about feeling empty and purposeless in the rat race, lots of yearning for something better than punching a clock.

Full-time travelers like these comprise a developing subculture of American life that has grown in recent years. In 2018, as many as one million people lived nomadically in the United States. The pandemic only further upended people’s sense of place and possibility. It’s impossible to pinpoint just what is driving this uprooting, particularly among young people, but the present moment might offer some hints: nearly 50 million people straddled with billions in student loan debt, many with minimal savings or no straightforward path to homeownership. In 2019, when the median age for millennials was 31, members of the generation owned just 4 percent of the nation’s real estate value, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve. In 1990, when the median age of Baby Boomers was just four years older, their generation owned more than 30 percent.

There isn’t a single profile of a full-time traveler. There are solo travelers, families full of children, modern-day hippies, and seemingly normal professionals who hold down conventional full-time jobs. People who, by choice, lived in trailers inside national forests and commuted into town, or others who parked at night on city streets in SUVs, showered in local gyms, and worked from coffee shops and public libraries. As much as nomadic living is painted as an escape from the crisis of capitalism, it’s a choice that carries costs: Building out a vehicle for full-time living can range from a few thousand dollars for a small used van to hundreds of thousands for a fresh-off-the-lot, rockstar-style mega-rig. (Building out my own van cost around $5,000, for supplies plus the cost of the vehicle.) In the nearly two years I spent living on the road, I met a nurse who lived in his van while parked in the hospital garage between shifts and in the woods during his time off, and many “social media strategists” and “content creators” earning a living from the digital envy economy.

A lucky few of these travelers were financially independent and living a carefree “retired” life in their thirties, while others barely scraped by, choosing to sacrifice a steady work life in exchange for freedom. Still, there were those who lived in vehicles out of desperate necessity. (Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twentieth Century, and subsequent 2020 film adaptation, shone an overdue spotlight on this oft-overlooked community.) Many shared physical spaces, whether in public forest land or while parked on unwelcoming city streets. Lines between these groups often blurred. The lifestyle tends to attract mostly white and young people (like me), although there is a movement to build greater networks of community through groups like Diversify Vanlife and the National African American RVer’s Association.

But growing interest in the lifestyle has fed a small cottage industry of podcasts, newsletters, seminars, conferences, services, and political advocacy groups that exclusively cater to people who refuse to stay in one place.

One of the most well-known of these groups is based in the woodlands of southeast Texas. Six days a week, a semi-trailer from the U.S. Postal Service backs down a slanted driveway behind a brick building about 75 miles north of Houston to deliver mail for some 10,000 people who do not live there.

The building is the headquarters of the Escapees RV Club, a members-only group that serves part of the nation’s surprisingly large population of people who live full-time in motor homes, vans, and retrofitted buses. Escapees’ 70,000 members are spread across the globe, according to the organization, but as far as local and federal governments are concerned, many who participate in the mail service “live” on Rainbow Drive in Livingston, Texas, on a single street, inside one building. Their ghost address allows them to vote, obtain a driver’s license, register a vehicle, and, because it’s in Texas, avoid paying a state income tax while they travel and work.

Originally, Escapees received its mail through the local post office in nearby Livingston, but as membership grew into the thousands, the town’s local postal service—where the population is just more than 5,000—could no longer handle the amount of mail each day. So the mail now comes directly from a loaded 18-wheel semi-trailer. Inside the building, an industrial sorting machine processes tens of thousands of pieces of mail delivered each day. The rooms are filled with long rows of plastic bins and hanging file folders with lanes between them for workers who collect and drop each piece, one by one. Once the mail is organized, it’s either forwarded, scanned, shredded, or kept for safekeeping. Escapees claims to operate the largest private mail service in the country.

The club’s members have access to a stable of recommended consultants who cater specifically to the needs of road-lifers, including accounting and tax experts. Attorneys are available to provide legal counsel and advice. These services require extra cost on top of the annual $49.95 membership fee. As part of their membership, travelers can participate in free training seminars for living on the road and workshops on working remotely. In webinars like “Domiciles for RVers,” Escapees employees show newcomers how to establish permanent addresses, at least for legal purposes, in states like Florida or South Dakota, which, like Texas, impose no state income tax. Obtaining residency in South Dakota, for instance, can be as easy as showing a receipt for an overnight stay at a campground and signing a form indicating that you intend to settle there once you finish traveling. (Not everyone actually follows through on that pledge. Plans, after all, can change.)

Escapees also acts as a lobbying shop that pressures local legislatures to pass rules and laws that benefit full-time travelers. In 2000, when officials in Texas challenged members’ right to vote because they didn’t actually live at the address they listed on their voting cards, Escapees led a caravan to the Texas Supreme Court in protest. They won the case and organized similar campaigns when voting rights were challenged in Tennessee and South Dakota. The group has also organized against laws that make it illegal to sleep in cars, impose new taxes on travel-trailers, and require a brick-and-mortar residence to secure a driver’s license. And most recently, the group has put pressure on local officials to keep R.V. parks open during the pandemic.

The group also curates a jobs board full of listings for seasonal and remote-friendly work: software engineers, cooks, campground hosts, a “tea ambassador” to sell tea at festivals, and a security guard at an oil field, to name a few.

In response to an influx of interest among nonretirees, Escapees launched a sister organization called Xscapers in 2015, which caters to a younger crowd. Since then, interest among young people living in R.V.s or vans during their working and child-rearing years has only increased. According to a study by the R.V. Industry Association, just 35 percent of those surveyed who choose to live in an R.V. instead of a traditional home are over the age of 55. Nearly 60 percent are still working.

While some lucky few have made a living in the influencer economy by promoting their own version of nomadic life, earning a living this way, even with services like Patreon or Substack, is difficult. Instead of trying to monetize the lifestyle, many supplement the small income they earn from personal content creation with seasonal work, remote gigs, or, as many of the RV Entrepreneur Summiters gathered in Alabama had hoped, by launching a successful business.

Summer Slevin, a 28-year-old from Peoria, Illinois, who attended the Alabama summit and lived in an old Ford Transit van with her shitzue-chihuahua-terrier mix named Rocky Roadtrip, was one of them. After studying broadcast journalism in college, she had struggled to find a job in media, so she worked part-time at an Escape Room near home and then got a job in marketing for an author. When she was laid off in 2018, she decided to try a new approach. She bought the van and built a rustic camper inside. “I was like, screw it, let’s do it,” she said.

On the road, Slevin spent $150 per month to pay off the van, about $500 for gas, and $300 to $400 for groceries. She parked the van in national forests, rest stops, and parking lots to sleep for free. To earn money, she started a podcast about America’s national parks and raised funds from supporters on Patreon.

Slevin had imagined that the new scenery would transform her into the person she always dreamed of being, just as we try to convince ourselves that a new pair of sneakers will motivate us to start running. She thought she’d somehow become that person who always wakes up for sunrise yoga, who follows their passion, and who spends downtime reading Important Books instead of doomscrolling Twitter. Gone would be the insecure, self-doubting, anxiety-filled imposter we all see ourselves to be. It wasn’t long before Slevin realized that it would take more work than a van.

“I’m the same person on the road as I am at home. I took my procrastination with me. I’m still the same shitty person,” she said. “I still feel anxieties about if I’m doing the right thing in my life. I’m not having the soul-gripping desperation that I was before van life, but I still don’t want to work.”

As Slevin’s experience attested, living on the road is often subject to many of the same traps as living anywhere else: unexpected costs, unpredictable work, rising health care expenses. (As the pandemic shut down much of the country, people lost access to showers and bathrooms they had come to rely on.) After Slevin spent a year visiting dozens of national parks, her her van broke down; she eventually moved to Montana, found a job, and now lives in a log cabin. Despite best efforts on the road, it’s nearly impossible to declare true independence from the realities of American economic life—workshops and webinars or no.

Still, for many who have chosen or been pushed by circumstance into this alternative way of living, the nomadic route at least provides options. Particularly for a generation that has lived through a dystopian parade of economic upheavals, it’s understandable why they’re skeptical—or just unable—to put down roots in one place. Having wheels beneath their feet at least means that when the next catastrophe comes, they have some hope to escape.

© 2021 Chris Moody, as first published in The New Republic.

The world changes fast when you live in the woods.

A few years ago, my wife and I moved into a 72-square-foot tiny house we built in the back of a cargo van. We lived mostly off the grid, so to speak, beyond reach of the emotional crests and troughs of this hyper-connected, anxious era.

Our tiny home on wheels generated electricity through solar panels strapped to the roof. That, combined with limited cell service, meant we had to forgo most forms of modern home entertainment. Our subscriptions to video streaming services and access to movies were hardest hit. While the rest of the country logged millions of hours on streaming channels, we opted out.

As a lover of film, the transition was painful. But I found that my brain, after years of being trained to run on constant entertainment, returned to its pre-Internet state after only a few weeks in the woods. Instead of arguing with my wife about what to watch on Netflix each night, we read books aloud to each other, listened to university lectures, taught ourselves to cook over open fires, and explored the outdoors. I still watched movies in theaters during visits to cities, but without a library of unlimited content at my fingertips, the limitation forced me to be more selective.

We eventually returned to civilization, and, like a modern Rip Van Winkle — when a year out of the loop may as well be a lifetime—I found that the media and cultural landscape had drastically changed.

Into the streaming-verse

When we left for the woods, there were only a few important players in the streaming world. Netflix was the undeniable king, though Hulu and Amazon were strong runners-up. Competing services were still in their developmental stages, but were hardly pressing on the national mindset.

Today, there’s an expanding universe of entertainment options to choose from beyond traditional television, services as diverse as The Criterion Channel, Peacock, and Shudder. Streamers such as Netflix, Apple TV, HBO Max, and Disney+ have invested billions in original content. Cinema legends like Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers are releasing their work through Netflix instead of pursuing wide theatrical releases. Streaming is everything, everywhere, all at once.

When we returned to civilization, we found that every catch-up with friends revolved almost exclusively around shows they had recently watched. Conversations at parties that were once diverse and wide-ranging seemed limited to the question, “What have you been watching lately?” I listened to people chat on the subway about their latest “binges,” a word that has adopted a new, weirdly positive, meaning. I just sat back and listened as people described the plot details of the most recent Netflix fare. I had little to contribute. I hadn’t seen…anything. When I asked about other topics, I was surprised at how little people had to say. They often found a way to bring the conversation back to recapping a show.

We Never Went Back

Now that we live in a house, we are trying to be thoughtful about the media we consume. We never signed up for a streaming service again.

In our home today, where we don’t have access to the Internet, we watch DVDs borrowed from the local library using a projector and a pull-down screen. Watching a movie or TV series takes planning and about ten minutes to set up each time. The friction required keeps us from consuming mindlessly. It’s like the 90s in our house: Physical media reigns supreme.

Our setup might not be as austere as life in a van beneath a couple of solar panels, but it still forces us to remain intentional. When I do end up watching a show, it’s usually a few years old by the time it gets to me via library DVD. (I just got around to seeing White Lotus. ) There’s nothing inherently wrong about streaming entertainment, but the ease of access can easily become addictive.

Our son has also benefited from the arrangement. It keeps us, as tired parents, from relying on video as a crutch. Our son knows that film is a special event, something that comes only at certain times of the week. Setting up the screen ushers in a special time to be together as a family. He knows that when the credits roll, it’s over. There’s no endless scroll, no suggested titles, no additional content. Our son is learning that media is finite. Stories are better when they have a definitive beginning, middle, and end.

I want our son to cherish film, as I do. I want him to bask in the spell that visual storytelling can cast upon the viewer, ushering him into the dream-like state that cinema is known for.

But when it’s over and his eyes adjust to the returning light, I want him to wake up, too.

I have a new essay in The Atlantic about my ongoing project of reading Homer’s Odyssey to my three-year-old son. If there’s one lesson our nightly ritual has taught me, it is that young children are far more capable of rising to a challenge than parents might expect. With Christopher Nolan’s larger-than-life IMAX adaptation of the epic in theaters, now is a great time to pull out the 3,000-year-old poem.

Over the past several months, my son and I have chipped away at Daniel Mendelsohn’s wonderful 2025 translation after I first introduced him to the story through illustrated versions. It’s more than 12,000 lines of war, bloodshed, one-eyed monsters, murder, seduction, and revenge. And to my surprise, he absolutely loves it. He begs me to skip ahead to his favorite sections: He wants to hear about the goat-herding cyclops, the deadly passage between Scylla and Charybdis, and Odysseus’s field trip to Hades.

The poem is long—we’ve been reading it over the course of several months now—but not having the internet or television in our home provides plenty of time for sustained family reading. After dinner is served and the dishes are done, there’s little else to do other than read together.

Homer has opened an entirely new world for our son. After studying a map of the ancient Aegean world, he asked if we could one day visit the world of The Odyssey.

“Daddy, will you take me to Mount Olympus?” he asked. “Where the gods live?”

I said that I would.

“Can we go to Troy, too?” he asked.

“You bet,” I said. “Anywhere else?”

He thought for a moment.

“Let’s go to Hades!”

I have been reading aloud to my son since the week he was born. Days after he arrived, while I sat feeding this frail, birdlike human in the dim winter light, I pulled out a book to pass the time. As I silently scanned the words, I realized that it wouldn’t hurt to read it aloud. So, at two weeks old, he heard Dad read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.

Even though he couldn’t understand the words, I wanted him to hear the cadence and rhythm of the English language. Since I spent most of the day at work, it was important to me that he hear his father’s voice. Reading aloud ensured that. (Children whose parents read to them every day are more likely to hear from mothers than fathers, and I wanted to even the score.) I went a little overboard: In his infancy we read Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Renault, and John Updike. After his first birthday, we plunged into Moby-Dick. (Melville wore me out; I never finished.) When he turned two, we read Macbeth at Halloween, and I began to see evidence of real recognition. He was captivated by the Weird Sisters and insisted that I skip ahead to their spooky spells. Each night at bath time, we recited their incantation together: “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble!”

Researchers have long documented the benefits of reading aloud to children. Children who are read to show higher rates of visual imagery and story comprehension. The nightly ritual of reading to children is correlated with adult literacy and language development. Even reading to infants can accelerate the rate at which they learn to comprehend language. With reading on the decline in our culture, it’s imperative that parents make the effort.

“The rewards of early reading are astonishingly meaningful: toddlers who have lots of stories read to them turn into children who are more likely to enjoy strong relationships, sharper focus, and greater emotional resilience and self-mastery,” writes Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction. “The evidence has become so overwhelming that social scientists now consider read-aloud time one of the most important indicators of a child’s prospects in life.”

Our experience underscores the importance of reading aloud, even if it means exposing children to classics intended for older audiences. Young children can rise to the occasion if parents allow them the space and context to do so. For those worried about the violence in books like The Odyssey, consider that millions of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim children know all about David and Goliath, a story that ends with death by slingshot and a beheading. Poking out the eye of Polyphemus isn’t much different.

I have my own father to thank for introducing me to Homer and the classics. As an amateur archeologist with an interest in antiquity, my dad often traveled abroad to excavate remnants of ancient Mediterranean wars. I got to wear armor that hadn’t been donned in thousands of years, handle the sharp edges of arrowheads, and roll a Roman ballista stone around our suburban living room. When I was 11, he sat me down in front of the television to watch the 1997 Odyssey miniseries starring Armand Asante. I was only vaguely familiar with the story at the time. I loved the monsters, the sword fights, and the shipwrecks. (I think Bernadette Peters’s on-screen performance as Circe kick-started puberty for me.) The timing was perfect: A few months later, my sixth grade teacher assigned the book for class reading, and I was ready.

Now, decades later, I’m passing that legacy onto my own child.

The Odyssey is, after all, a story that emphasizes the bond between fathers and sons. One reason it takes Odysseus so long to get home is because Poseidon, enraged that Odysseus blinded his son, the cyclops Polyphemus, sends storms to thwart him. Mendelsohn’s commentary reminds us that the climax of the poem is not the long-awaited embrace of Odysseus and his wife, Penelope, but the emotional reunification of three generations of men. This is a story about grandfathers, dads, and sons, and the sacred covenant they share.

Even if you think your child isn’t ready, give The Odyssey a chance. We tell children stories about slaying giants because we know there is more to them than mere bedtime entertainment. They teach our children crucial, universal lessons about life. I’m hoping that images of Odysseus being tied to the mast or of suitors getting their comeuppance will be buried deep within my son’s earliest memories. These will help him form a framework for understanding his own journey through the world as he grows up. Today they might just be fun adventure stories; tomorrow those images will help him bear the slings and arrows of his own life’s challenges.

With Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey finally here, parents may be wondering how they should expose kids to this epic poem—or whether they should at all.

I say: Go for it.

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I recently received a surprise email from author Cal Newport, one of the finest thinkers when it comes to tech, artificial intelligence, and living a rich life. Newport’s best-selling books, such as Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, and Slow Productivity, are must-reads for anyone aiming to thrive in our distracted world. They have certainly inspired me.

Newport wanted to know more about how our family lives without the internet. “I feel like I talk about you to people all the time,” he told me.

In our hour-long interview, Newport and I discussed how our family went from living in New York City to a log cabin in Southern Appalachia. We talked about our years crossing the country while living in a van and what we learned about marriage, family, and building community. We also discussed parenthood and the challenges of raising a child without digital connection in the home.

Watch our full conversation below or listen to the episode on Newport’s excellent podcast, “Deep Questions.”

I recognize that most households won’t be throwing their Wi-Fi routers into the nearest lake anytime soon. But I hope that my family’s experience will inspire people to consider the effects of at-home digital life. To that end, here’s some practical advice for what most people can do:

Create a “Sabbath Space” in your life

The reach of digital tech has permeated almost every physical space in our lives. It’s nearly impossible to escape it. There are hardly any spaces where it doesn’t reach anymore. Ask yourself: Do you have one single place or time in your life where you can abandon digital technology? I call this a “Sabbath Space,” the practice of identifying a distinct space for disconnection. We made it our entire house: the world stops at the threshold of our door and goes no further, unless we actively invite it in.

Do you have a room in your house that can serve that purpose? A favorite trail to walk, phone-free? Perhaps even a communal space, such as a coffee shop. Establishing a daily practice of spending time separate from digital technology can transform your life.

The Power of Friction

To avoid mindless digital consumption, put up barriers to your ability to consume media. Make it a little hard to watch videos or endlessly scroll.

Since we don’t have a television to watch videos or movies in our home, we painstakingly connect a DVD player and watch films on a pull-down screen with a projector. Because it takes 10 minutes to set up, media consumption becomes a premeditated choice with a clear beginning and end, rather than an easy, endless scroll. Without access to streaming, we can’t make a spur-of-the-moment decision to watch something. Picking out films from the library forces us to think about it beforehand and consider how we want to curate the weekend’s visual entertainment. And when the film is over, it’s over.

Look to community—not short-form video—for answers

As first-time parents, there was a lot we didn’t know about raising a baby. Without the internet, we couldn’t search online when our child did something that seemed “off” or if he appeared ill. Instead, we had to rely on our community and family as our first layers of support. My wife, Cristi, often found herself on the phone with other mothers in our town, especially older moms and grandmothers who had decades of combined experience raising children.

Is this less efficient than a Google search or an AI chatbot? Absolutely. But every phone call and visit between families created an opportunity for community building. A quick question often led to a visit, which sometimes led to long periods of rich and comforting in-person conversation. The interactions strengthened the bonds between us and the kind people on whom we relied for help.

These are just a few takeaways from my chat with Cal Newport, but listen to the full interview and you’ll hear a lot more. And of course, we’ll have loads of new posts on related topics coming soon at The Opt Outers.

One Friday afternoon 10 years ago, Andrew Heaton, then a cable-news writer, joined his colleagues for a meeting. The show’s producer asked the staff to keep an eye on their email over the weekend in case they needed to cover a breaking news event. No one seemed to mind—working full days in person while remaining on call in the evening and on weekends has always been a standard practice in the news business—but Heaton had a simple request.

He said he would be happy to go in but asked if his boss could call him on the phone instead of emailing him. He didn’t want to spend his time off continually monitoring his inbox for a message that might not even come.

“It would have been just me, tethered to my phone all weekend, checking email for no purpose,” Heaton, who now hosts a political podcast, told me. “I think it’s a very valid request that you just call me so I don’t have to dedicate 10 percent of my brain to this job forever.”

His boss agreed. The big news never materialized.

Heaton was onto something. In the United States, employees work more hours than those in many other rich nations. As more white-collar employers require their staff to be in the office full-time again, workers have the right to demand something in exchange: a return to the norms of the 1990s, before smartphones made everyone instantly reachable. (Bosses, of course, have the right to say no to all this.)

I’m aware that offices in that era were not perfect—satires such as Office Space and Fight Club brilliantly mined the hopelessness of cubicle life then. But at least Lumbergh couldn’t ask about your TPS reports while you were in your home bathroom. Smartphones have created a culture in which Americans are constantly at work in one form or another, even when they’re at home. And it is stressing people out. A 2016 study found that the mere expectation of unread email can cause stress and emotional exhaustion. The presumption that workers should respond to email at any time, the study’s authors concluded, “contributes to experience of work overload” because it inhibits employees’ “ability to psychologically detach from work-related issues.”

For most of my career, I measured an embarrassing level of self-worth through my job. I spent years as a political correspondent obsessing over work at all hours, even in the middle of the night, when I routinely answered emails and made story edits in the dark between bouts of sleep. Jonathan Malesic, the author of The End of Burnout, told me that work defines many people. “We just can’t imagine that a person is worth something if we aren’t working,” Malesic said. “You’re anxious about your worth. And the only way you know how to prove it is you’re working all the time. As soon as you’re not, your value is in question.”

I have recently gone to great lengths to draw a line between home and work. Two years ago, my family and I disconnected the internet from our house. I recently traded my smartphone for a flip phone. As much as possible, my work as a writer and university instructor is completed at the workplace, and my attention is on my family while I’m at home, a balance I was never able to achieve before we disconnected. I still bring some work home with me—papers to grade, books to review, articles to write—but I’m not constantly checking whether someone is trying to contact me. My employer knows my landline number and can call if needed.

Though the always-on work culture has existed in many companies and industries since the advent of BlackBerries and iPhones, the expectation to be reachable at all times was solidified during the coronavirus pandemic, when millions of Americans worked from their couches, relying on communication apps such as Zoom, Slack, and email. The pandemic era also made the workday looser, which allowed people to complete tasks while attending to home or family needs but meant that working hours could begin early in the day or extend late into the night.

For millions of people, those days of flexible work are ending. Many corporations and organizations, including the nation’s largest employer, the federal government, are winding down or ending remote work. McKinsey & Company reported that in 2024, the number of people working at least four days a week from an office had doubled to 68 percent, from 34 percent a year earlier. Disney, Amazon, and JP Morgan Chase have called employees back to their desks over the past few years. As in-person attendance again becomes the norm, workers risk having the worst of both worlds: the requirement that they give their days fully to the office and remain available to their bosses from home on nights and weekends.

You might not be able to go completely MIA after the daily 9 to 5. But you can insist that anyone who wants to reach you after-hours make a telephone call. Let your supervisor ring you at 7:45 p.m. and hear your frazzled tone as you balance your phone on your shoulder while trying to give your unruly kids a bath. Let your boss hear the clanking of silverware on dishes when he interrupts dinner with your roommates. Employers should stop pretending that doing business at all hours isn’t an imposition on employees, even if it is sometimes a necessary one. Let the person delivering the message bear some of the cost, too.

Before smartphones, leaving the office at the end of the day and enjoying your life without the fear of interruption wasn’t radical; it was typical. And setting boundaries against after-hours intrusions has precedent today as well. In 2016, the French government adopted a “right to disconnect” law that allows workers the freedom to not respond to messages from employers outside of established working hours. Ireland, Belgium, Australia, and other nations have instituted similar restrictions. Last year, state legislators in California and New Jersey proposed their own bills.

But the U.S. federal government is unlikely to pass this sort of legislation, and many American workers may struggle to set clear boundaries on their own. Sarah Jaffe, the author of Work Won’t Love You Back, told me she was skeptical about whether our nation’s workers would ever feel comfortable enough to stand up for themselves like this. “Most employers are not going to go for it,” Jaffe said. “They like to be able to call you at any point in time to lengthen your workday indefinitely.”

As much as many Americans complain about their relationship to work, Malesic told me, we don’t do much about it when it comes to the types of leaders we elect or the labor protections we demand. “If Americans were really as upset about our working lives as we claim, I think our politics would look a lot different,” he said. “People complain about their job invading their life all the time,” but many, for instance, “show very little interest in electing pro-union politicians.”

I know that protecting evenings and weekends can be easier said than done. And doing so might be near impossible for people whose work requires them to be instantly reachable, such as first responders or others in the business of saving lives. But other workers, when they’re done for the day, should be able to power down those Slack and email notifications. When they cross the threshold of their office doors, they should feel free to exit mentally as well as physically. If companies want employees to work like it’s the ’90s, then they should work like it’s the ’90s.

© 2024 Chris Moody, as first published in The Atlantic.

In 2018, we radically reinvented our lives. We gave away and sold most of our possessions, left New York City, built a solar-powered tiny home in the back of a cargo van and set out on a 50,000 mile journey to find a more meaningful way to live. We felt that modern life, focused on material gain, success, and digital distraction, had failed us and many others. Curious to find alternatives, we crisscrossed the country searching for those opting out of mainstream systems and finding new, intentional ways to live.

For a decade we have been experimenting with various forms of a tech-lite lifestyle. For the last three years, we have lived without cellular service or internet in a log cabin in the Appalachian mountains. For two years, we lived full-time in a camper van mostly in forests and with little connectivity. While in the wilderness, we discovered the importance of connecting to ourselves, each other, nature, and the physical world around us. We have also experimented with various forms of digital limitations, including having WiFi on a timer, putting phones to bed so we can have tech-free evenings, giving up streaming, online purchases, and Amazon.

Modern life is broken. Look no further than the rise of loneliness, mental illness, anxiety, depression, and ADHD—something is off about the way we are living. Passive living, going with the technological and consumer flow of society doesn’t work. Our solution is to opt out of whatever is not serving us and to pursue a life led by our truest values. For us, that means living intentionally, choosing to live simply, and prioritizing true connections to ourselves, each other, our community, and to the physical world.

Essentially, we live a tech-lite lifestyle; we use tech as a tool but we do not give it free reign over our time. Our house is set apart from the digital world and we control the messages and information coming in. Our distractions are limited to the analog and mundane. Practically, this means we have to choose what movies to rent at the library, which newspapers to buy, which recipes to screenshot and podcasts to download while we are in town. We don’t have social media and we do not spend time scrolling. Connected tech use has a place and time— for Chris at his office and for Cristi at the library— but it never comes into our home. We choose to live like this as a means to simplify the digital clutter in our lives and minds. For us it is part of a practice of voluntary simplicity.

And we have found that when we simplify our physical and technological clutter it gives us more room for connections to ourselves, each other, our community, and the world around us.

This is why we opted out. We hope that in your own way, you will join us.

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Before our first child was born, my wife and I often deliberated about the kind of parents we wanted to be—and the kind we didn’t. We watched families at restaurants sitting in silence, glued to their phones, barely taking their eyes off the screens between bites. We saw children paw at their parents, desperate to interact, only to be handed an iPad to keep quiet. We didn’t want to live like that. We vowed to be present with one another, at home and in public. We wanted our child to watch us paying attention to each other and to him.

The reality, after our son was born, was quite different. In those sleep-deprived early days, I found myself resorting to my phone as a refuge from the chaos. I fell into some embarrassing middle-aged-dad stereotypes. I developed a bizarre interest in forums about personal finance and vintage hats. I spent up to four hours a day looking at my phone while right in front of me was this new, beautiful life, a baby we had dreamed about for years.

My wife, Cristina, felt abandoned in the isolation of new motherhood and complained of my near-constant phone use.

“When you look at your phone,” she told me, “it’s as though you disappear.”

When it comes to having an unhealthy relationship with technology, I’m in good company. Most of us find that smartphones have made our lives better, but we struggle to use them in healthy ways. Nearly 60 percent of American adults told Gallup last year that they use their phones too often. American adults spend an average of four and a half hours on their phones each day, the research firm Insider Intelligence reported this summer. Almost all of us keep our smartphones within arm’s reach during waking hours, Gallup found, and most of us do so when we sleep.

Such easy and constant access to distraction is having an impact: Overuse harms our sleep and mental health. Constant distraction makes us less productive and can impair our ability to concentrate. Studies have shown that the mere presence of a smartphone can reduce our cognitive ability by taking attention away from other tasks—even if the phone is turned off. A majority of married couples report that their partner’s divided attention has caused strife in their relationship.

On a warm Saturday afternoon this past spring, I reached a breaking point. I had been on my phone for hours a day for the past several weeks. I found myself reaching for the phone whenever there was an opportunity or brief pause in parenting responsibilities. Was this what life was going to be like for the next 30 years? Days filled with a series of small interruptions while I scrolled for scraps of trivia and news?

While our child napped that afternoon, I sat brooding on the porch. I told Cristina that I wasn’t happy with the way we were living and that I didn’t know what to do to get back on track.

“It sounds like we should get rid of the internet,” she told me.

I knew she was right. For years, we had discussed raising our child in a tech-lite home, but we had become so overwhelmed with parenting that this priority had been pushed aside. We had tried half measures before: setting a timer on the Wi-Fi router that shut it off during evening hours, making “no phone” zones in the house. But these were too easy to get around. To achieve what we truly wanted—a home that served as a sanctuary for meaningful family time without distractions—this was the step we needed to take. We talked about how spaces that were once off-limits for technology seemed to dwindle by the day. Our National Parks, public restrooms, even places of worship are now game for digital connection. We felt it was important to have at least one space in our lives that would be set apart. We agreed that our home, the one place where we still had control, would be a fine option.

“When?” I asked.

“Now,” she said.

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As Millennials born in the mid-1980s, my wife and I are part of the last generation to have known life before the introduction of widespread home-internet access. We straddle both sides of the digital revolution. We remember answering the telephone without knowing who was calling, showing up at a friend’s house unannounced, what it was like to be lost and bored. In my 20s, I traveled across Europe, Latin America, and Asia for months without a phone, relying only on guidebooks and advice from strangers. I hitchhiked across the American South with a flip phone. I did a stint on a commercial fishing crew in Alaska, which put me completely off the grid for five months without access to a phone or the internet.

Cristina and I had also gone off the grid together earlier in our marriage. In 2018, we moved into a 72-square-foot tiny house we built into a cargo van, where we lived for two years, mostly on public lands and without Wi-Fi. In the wilderness, cellular data were limited, so we logged on only for essentials when we popped back into civilization. It was on the fringes where we first tasted the joy of a life in which the internet was merely a tool.

Without distractions, the days seemed to expand. We learned to harvest time, an idea that came to us in national forests across the U.S. We realized that days undisturbed by digital interruptions made time slow down and improved the quality of our time together. Life was broken down to its most basic elements: Find a place to sleep; cook simple meals to eat; bathe in a river; explore. We promised ourselves that when our time in the van came to an end, we would continue living this way as best we could. (We didn’t, of course; the pandemic started not long after our return to civilization, making the internet feel essential for work and social interaction.)

So yes, we’d had some practice with this before. Surely we could make it work.

But we did need to plan. We live in a log cabin beyond the reach of cell towers in North Carolina’s rural High Country, and up until that point we had relied on Wi-Fi to make phone calls. We might be crazy enough to cut our home off from the internet, but we didn’t want to be completely disconnected. We were trying to relive the ’90s, sure, but not the 1890s. Opting out of the internet would require us to opt in to a landline, which raised even more questions: If we needed to call a doctor, how would we find the phone number? What if we needed an emergency plumber? Turns out, the Yellow Pages still exist. (They’re actually called The Real Yellow Pages, as though dozens of imposter phone books are out there.)

When the technician from the phone company arrived to put in our landline, I asked him, “Do you install many landlines these days?”

“Mostly just for old people,” he said.

I told him we were doing it in hopes of making our lives simpler. He just nodded as if to say, Sure, man, whatever.

With a couple of twists of his tools, the room filled with a sound I hadn’t heard in ages: a dial tone. That long-forgotten but familiar pitch instantly brought me back to childhood: the anticipation of calling my best friend to ask if he wanted to come outside and play hockey in the street, or the nervous dread in middle school of calling a girl for the first time.

“You know,” the technician said before walking out the door, “most people just use Wi-Fi calling.”

I spent our final morning with internet service on a content binge. I scrolled Twitter. Using a family member’s borrowed password, I pulled up one final movie on Netflix: This Is the End. Halfway through the first act, Seth Rogen and James Franco suddenly froze on the screen. The house went quiet. We were officially disconnected.

Like any form of withdrawal, the first days offline required adjustment. With nowhere to scroll, I developed a voracious appetite for words. I had downloaded digital versions of magazines to an iPad and loaded my nightstand with books from the library. I devoured them all, and started reading anything I could get my hands on.

Over time, the racing pace of a mind that had been hooked on content slowed down. I began to read deeply, sometimes for hours, consuming complex works that I would have struggled to focus on before.

While reading news articles, I still felt an old tug to share links through social media. But now there was no one to share them with. I was reading purely for reading’s sake, sharing an intimate moment with no one but the author. It made reading and thinking a private act, without any temptation to be performative in sharing my opinions. Reading through entire publications, instead of finding stories through a social-media algorithm that fed me a narrow range of content it thought I would enjoy, exposed me to a broader range of opinions, viewpoints, and types of stories. It made me a better consumer of news.

At the end of the first week, my phone reported that my screen time had plummeted by 80 percent. I had reclaimed several hours a day, time that I used to play games with my son, cook elaborate meals, engage in uninterrupted work, and take long walks with my family. Sometimes I just sat and thought, a radical act in our hustle culture. I daydreamed, letting my mind travel where it pleased with no agenda or direction. I realized that it had been years since I’d last allowed myself to do, well, nothing.

Friends and family have responded with bewilderment and concerned amusement. “I could never do that,” people often tell us, “but I wish I could.” One friend—a former chief of staff for a Republican member of Congress—tried to sign me up for a print subscription to Hustler magazine. (This unsolicited gesture of concern for my sexual well-being failed because of a new anti-porn law in his state. And thank heavens for that: We rent our home from a Bible scholar and minister.) Other friends, knowing that our landline doesn’t have caller ID, occasionally prank call us like we did when we were teenagers. (We welcome it; the calls lead to long, meaningful opportunities to catch up after years of texting.) When we aren’t home, callers seem amused to leave a real voice message on our answering machine. It’s fun to listen to younger people leave messages; they are adorably befuddled by what to say. When a friend in her 20s tried to call and got a busy signal, she figured the phone was broken: She’d never heard that sound before.

Of course, this has also come with trade-offs.

One night, while watching a DVD in our basement, Cristina and I saw a dark object flash across the screen. Did a bird get into the house? I stood up to turn on a light and saw another flying object with wide black wings silently swoop past my head.

“It’s a bat!” Cristina yelled. She leaped off the couch onto the ground and threw me a blanket. “Cover your head!”

As our eyes adjusted to the light, we watched several bats stream out of our fireplace, flying in circles around our heads. On our bellies, we crawled up the stairs and fled into our bedroom, shutting the door behind us. In normal times, we would have pulled out our phones and started frantically searching for what to do when your house is infested with bats. But we didn’t have that option. It was nearly midnight, too late to phone a friend, so we just had to pray that the bats hadn’t made it into our bedroom. We covered the baby’s crib with a mosquito net and tried to go to sleep.

The next morning, Cristina called her mother and asked her to search for information while I plunged into the phone book for the number of an exterminator. Over the phone, Cristina’s mother read us information about how to handle bats and whether we’d need a rabies shot. She described in detail how to identify bat poop. My mother-in-law was literally reading us the internet. It felt ridiculous.

Beyond battling bats in our basement, not having access to the internet also makes working from home a unique challenge. As a journalist, being virtually unreachable has done wonders for my ability to write for long stretches without distraction. But I have to leave the house in search of Wi-Fi to finish some tasks, such as responding to emails from editors, participating in group calls on Zoom, or performing other collaborative work that can only be done online. I spend hours during the workday holed up in my office or the local library, time that otherwise could be spent with a laptop on my couch. When coordinating work calls, I have to give out two phone numbers, depending on whether I’m home or not. I sometimes have to hop in the car before bed and drive down the mountain to check a last-minute email. My job as a university lecturer requires me to be present in the classroom, so I aim to accomplish as much work as possible on campus.

Separating spaces for online work and home life has helped me draw a sharp dividing line between my responsibilities to family and employer. The rise of telecommuting, supercharged by the pandemic, seems to have been a mixed bag, even for employees who enjoy it. Workers have more flexibility, but they are now expected to be reachable beyond work hours. Burnout persists. Working from home with children in the house has its own challenges.

Shopping requires careful planning. Without Amazon, we buy most of our goods in person at stores in town. We still order things online, but we can’t do it impulsively, and we buy fewer things as a result. While I was out shopping recently, I called Cristina at home to see if she needed anything at the store. “Just text me a list,” I said, completely forgetting that she quite literally could not. So we made our list the old-fashioned way. We talked about what we needed and I wrote it on a piece of paper.

I acknowledge the immense privilege of being able to choose to opt out of a service that people rely on to get by in daily life. I also benefit from work that can be done partially on my own schedule and a job that provides parental leave, which was when we made this decision. But now that we have made this change in our lives, I will grieve if we ever have to return to the life we had before. Our tech-lite experiment will only become more difficult in the future, as more parts of our society require online connection to function. As our child grows, he will no doubt start to wonder why we don’t have the same access his friends have. What if he attends a school that requires online homework? Will we be those parents who resist? My own work in the future might not be possible offline.

Still, we’re not the only ones exploring ways to limit technology’s role in our lives. England recently advised schools to impose complete bans on cellphone use, a move that is slowly being adopted by some American school districts. A subset of Americans who want more control over their digital life are trading their smartphones for old-fashioned flip phones; Gen Z teenagers are leading the charge. It’s no mystery why vacationers are flocking to vacation rentals that offer “off-the-grid” properties without internet service as though it’s a special luxury.

Most people won’t—or can’t—go as far as we did. But they can set aside space in their lives uncluttered by devices, or their insatiable demand for our attention. Establishing a space beyond tech’s reach is a way of declaring independence from our unsettling reliance on technology. It reminds us that we can live and thrive without it—and happily so. Our family certainly has.

“I like you better without the internet,” Cristina told me recently.

So do I.

© 2023 Chris Moody, as first published in The Atlantic.