In 1985, Bill McKibben, then all of twenty-five years old, was enjoying an arrow-straight trajectory toward the upper echelons of American journalism. Soon after graduating from Harvard, where he had served as president of the Crimson, he was hired by William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, as a staff writer. Shawn began to consider McKibben a potential successor, and assigned him extra editing duties in preparation for a larger role. But then the Fleischmann family, who had used the fortune from their eponymous yeast business to help start The New Yorker, back in 1925, decided to sell the magazine. Its new owner, S. I. Newhouse, Jr., brought in the editor Robert Gottlieb to replace Shawn, and McKibben quit in protest. (He later came to revise his opinion of Newhouse’s stewardship of The New Yorker.)
Suddenly unemployed, and with only a modest amount of savings, the young writer decided to move to the woods. About two years earlier, McKibben had ventured north for a six-week writers’ retreat held near the Adirondack town of Blue Mountain Lake, New York. The opportunity sprung up when a colleague asked McKibben if he wanted to take his place there after discovering, at the last minute, that he couldn’t go. “I didn’t know where the Adirondacks were,” McKibben told me, when I spoke with him about this period. “But it sounded like fun.” The location was remote and beautiful. “I completely fell in love,” he said. With this memory still fresh after leaving The New Yorker, McKibben convinced his wife, the author Sue Halpern (a current staff writer for the magazine), that it might be a worthwhile adventure to return to the Adirondacks to live full time.
They had enough money for the down payment on a “ramshackle” old mill house, situated on a small creek. “It was great,” McKibben told me, before adding, after a beat, “It was kind of falling down.” The property abutted protected forest near the small town of Johnsburg. “I could walk out my door and on to Lake Ontario without ever leaving public land,” McKibben said. He and Halpern lived frugally. They gathered their firewood from the neighborhood and enjoyed the free entertainment provided by the wilderness that surrounded them. McKibben took up cross-country skiing and went on long hikes. The couple satisfied their modest cost of living with freelance writing commissions for publications like Ms., the New York Times, and Adirondack Life. “One thing Sue and I really discovered is that you make your household economy work by either increasing income or reducing expenses,” McKibben said. “Living in the middle of nowhere is a great way to reduce your expenses.”
The reason McKibben is so well known today is what happened next. Soon after moving to the woods, he began reading deeply into the emerging science of climate change. As he explained, living in the wilderness made the impact of these reports tangible in a way that they wouldn’t have been had he remained in the city. He channelled this frustration into “The End of Nature,” one of the earliest general-audience books about climate change. When the book came out, in 1989, it was a sensation. A review from the Baltimore Evening Sun captured the swirl: McKibben “may well already have taken his place next to Rachel Carson and Silent Spring.”
Suddenly flush with success and influence, McKibben could have ridden the acclaim to a more luxurious standard of living and to all the bustling activity that would be required to support it. He chose instead to lean into his low-cost life style in the woods, staying in his ramshackle house by the creek and embracing the professional autonomy that this decision granted—an autonomy exemplified by McKibben’s next writing project, “The Age of Missing Information,” published three years later. For the book, which has become an underground classic, McKibben spent a full year watching the programming that had aired during a single twenty-four-hour period on all ninety-three channels offered by a cable carrier in suburban Washington, D.C. He then compared that experience with what he perceived while spending twenty-four hours camping on Crane Mountain, an Adirondack peak a short day hike from his home in Johnsburg.
My recent conversation with McKibben was not the first time that I encountered his story. A decade ago, I was preparing to hit the lecture circuit to promote a contrarian book that I had written about career satisfaction. It’s called “So Good They Can’t Ignore You,” and it argues that the common advice to “follow your passion” is too simplistic. When you study people who end up passionate about their work, I argue, you typically find a richer and less predictable path, one that is fuelled not by a clear initiating passion but instead by a combination of serendipity and ability. The subjects I studied focussed on mastering rare and valuable skills that, once interesting opportunities arose, they could use as leverage to shape their working lives in radical and deeply meaningful ways. My curmudgeonly conclusion was that young people who are still early in their careers should focus more on getting better at their current job than questioning whether that job exactly matches some ill-defined dream.
It was as I struggled to write a presentation capturing these ideas that I first came across McKibben’s tale, which seemed to neatly package my thesis: McKibben lived an enviable life in which he enjoyed immense autonomy over his time while still producing meaningful and creative work. Achieving this setup, however, wasn’t simply about him having the courage to follow some long-simmering passion to live in the woods. What mattered instead was that, by the time he left The New Yorker, he had become a really good writer. This enabled the solo writing career that could support his slower life style in the Adirondacks, when the opportunity to try something new arose.
I made McKibben’s story a major part of my presentation, even going so far as to impertinently dig up some sample prose from one of his first bylines for the Crimson, a short report on a Celtics game, which I put onscreen to demonstrate that he wasn’t born a masterly writer—he had to improve his skills through practice. I paired this setup with an over-dramatized vision of McKibben’s life at the time: rich in long days spent amid nature, the author presumably returning to tend to his wood-burning stove as evening fell.
I ended up giving that talk to many different crowds in many different venues, from a dozen engineers in a conference room at Google to more than eight hundred creative professionals at Lincoln Center. As I discovered more recently, I had many of the details in my presentation wrong. I described McKibben, for example, as living in a cabin. This was not true: he lived in a normal house. I argued that his move to the Adirondacks was not actually that risky, because he had a deal in hand for a book that The New Yorker had agreed to serialize. This also was not true: he left The New Yorker abruptly, didn’t come up with the idea for “The End of Nature” until after arriving in Johnsburg, and was surprised to later learn that The New Yorker was interested in serial rights. But, despite these inaccuracies, the core of the tale—McKibben crafting an uncluttered but creatively fulfilling life—began to affect me. I wrote “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” during an important transition in my professional life, when I was leaving the freedom I enjoyed as a Ph.D. student and postdoc, studying theoretical computer science at M.I.T., and heading into the more demanding and structured routine of a tenure-track professor. I used to spend long afternoons walking along the Charles River, thinking through article ideas or sketching equations in the thick-paged lab notebooks that I would buy from the M.I.T. Coop. I knew that, as a professor, such time affluence would be squandered by an endless stream of meetings and requests. In this context, McKibben’s free life, spent hiking through the wilderness and writing books on his own schedule, became more than just a case study to punch up advice that I was giving to others. It directly challenged what specifically was happening to me.
As I continued to give my lecture, I learned that I wasn’t alone in my wistfulness. People would come up to me after my talks to tell me their own daydreams about leaving a busy suburban existence to find peace somewhere more remote. A decade ago, the “escape plans” I would hear were almost always a comforting fantasy. For all the inspiration inherent in moving somewhere quiet, there’s the nagging need to make a living. McKibben was a freelance writer willing to live frugally: a perfect precondition for moving to an old mill house surrounded by thousands of acres of trees. My job as a professor, by contrast, wouldn’t translate so easily to the solitude of the Adirondacks. The same was true of any number of other knowledge workers who confessed their escape plans to me: the ways in which they made a living were incompatible with a retreat to the country. As the years passed, and I moved on to write new books and talk about the new ideas in them, I started thinking less about McKibben’s story. I became more used to life as a professor, which dulled the edges of the frustration I felt with my administrative workload, and the pristine sheen with which I memorialized McKibben’s creekside autonomy faded some as the author, later in his career, became a major figure in climate-change activism—a noble and courageous decision that, by his own admission, thrust him into a more familiar world of travel and e-mail and logistics. I solidified an uneasy peace with this idea that escape plans would remain largely fantastical for most knowledge workers.
But then, more recently, I began to change my mind. It started several years ago, when I came across a humble blog with the unusual name Frugalwoods. The site followed the life of a young couple, Liz and Nate, who were working standard office jobs and living in a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like many in their situation, they shared a soothing escape plan—in their case, moving to a homestead in the woods. A major theme of the blog was how Liz and Nate were simplifying their life and expenses in preparation for making their escape. I began following their story online, vicariously enjoying their indulgence of this daydream, but I didn’t expect much to come of it; I’d heard similar “maybe one day” schemes so many times before. Which is why I was both surprised and rewarded when, seemingly all at once, Liz and Nate broke the script and actually took action by moving to sixty-six acres in the woods in rural central Vermont. They learned how to use a chainsaw, began tending trails and stacking firewood, and even set up an evaporator to boil syrup tapped from their own maple trees. The factor that made this escape possible is that Nate had arranged to keep working as a software engineer from afar.
Liz and Nate were not an isolated example. Since coming across their blog, I’ve encountered an increasing number of similar stories about knowledge workers, toiling in standard computer-screen and e-mail jobs, leveraging remote-work arrangements to enable an escape from expensive and predictable suburban living to more scenic and affordable settings in the country—allowing them to both work less and enjoy life more. My friend Rob, for example, who runs a video-production firm, moved with his family from a cookie-cutter subdivision outside Washington, D.C., to forty acres of forested land alongside the James River in Virginia, not far outside Richmond. He now runs his company out of office space in a downtown riverside area of the city—which he leases for a price that’s preposterously low by D.C. standards, and enjoys a slower home life that’s unrecognizable from his previous arrangement in the suburbs. (I still can’t get over the fact that he mows his fields with a tractor.) My friend Brian, who is the C.E.O. of a media startup, made a similar move, leaving an expensive house on a small lot in Southern California for a more affordable rural spread in Texas Hill Country, in Bastrop County. He converted a barn on his property into a production studio. Sometimes when we talk on the phone I hear chickens in the background.
The thread unifying these recent examples is the critical role of expanded Internet access. Liz and Nate’s property is remote: there’s no cell service, so if a tree were to knock down their lines their only way to attract help would be to hike over the hills and through the woods to find a neighbor. But, owing to a local coöperative’s efforts, their homestead boasts a high-speed fiber-optic connection to the Internet, allowing Nate to work remotely as easily from their mountaintop as he could from their Cambridge row house. In Rob’s case, his escape to the country wasn’t enabled by Internet access at his house but, instead, the high-speed connection at his offices near Richmond—which allows him to shuttle large video files back and forth between his collaborators without requiring everyone to gather in the same location. For Brian, the key to his successful transition to the countryside is the growing prevalence of high-capacity cell service. He installed a signal booster on his property and can now FaceTime with members of his fully virtual workforce while walking around his pond.