I’ve been spending way too much time lately looking at screens that don’t belong to me, watching lives I haven’t lived. You know those videos, the ones where the lighting is always golden, the air looks like it’s vibrating with peace, and someone is walking through a garden in the “upcountry” picking herbs for a morning tea? I find myself stuck in those loops for hours.
It’s strange, really. I’ve never actually lived in the upcountry. I’m a visitor there. I’m the one who goes for a week during the holidays, complains about the lack of high-speed internet, and then rushes back to the gray, suffocating embrace of the city. But lately, when I see those green hills or that morning mist settling over a patch of kale, I don’t feel like a tourist. I feel like an exile.
I feel like my body is remembering a place I’ve never stayed, and it’s pulling at me with this relentless, quiet gravity.
The truth is, I think I’m done with the “better pastures” lie. We’ve all been sold this script, haven’t we?
You leave the countryside to come to the city. You chase the noise, the traffic, the concrete, the status. You trade your years for “prospects,” and then you realize you’ve spent twenty years doing nothing but paying for the privilege of being stressed, congested, and exhausted.
I look at the urban skyline sometimes and all I see is a monument to wasted time. It’s noisy. It’s crowded. Everyone is breathing everyone else’s exhaled anxiety.
And I wonder, is it just that I’m getting older? Or is it that my introversion has finally hit its limit? I’m tired of being perceived. I’m tired of the performance of city life. I’m drawn to the greenery now, not because it’s “pretty,” but because it’s the only place where I don’t feel like I have to apologize for existing in silence.
I have this vision now. It lives in the back of my mind like a sanctuary, a blueprint for a life that actually makes sense.
I want a vast garden. I mean truly vast, not a manicured lawn that looks like it belongs in a magazine, but something that breathes. I want to wake up and step out into a kitchen garden that smells like damp earth, rosemary, and mint.
I want to grow things that nourish me, things that didn’t come out of a grocery store crate with a barcode attached. I want fruit trees that have no hurry to them, mangoes, avocados, lemons, standing there like old friends who know exactly how long a season should last.
And the animals. God, I want the life that animals bring. Not as a business venture, but as a family of sorts. I see myself rearing chickens and ducks, watching them wander around with their own little dramas.
I want rabbits that stay quiet in the grass and doves that make that specific, hollow cooing sound that feels like a physical balm for the soul. I want a vast space where I can create “nooks”, little corners of the world tucked away under trees where the light hits just right, where I can sit with a book or a sketchpad and know that nobody is going to find me.
A big part of me, the most honest part, just wants to disappear.
I want to go off-grid. Not in some radical, “doom-and-gloom” way, but in a sustainable, “I’ve-reclaimed-my-life” way. I want to build something that doesn’t require me to plug myself into a broken world just to survive.
My place wouldn’t just be a house; it would be an ecosystem. My sanctuary. You see people pay thousands to go on a “getaway” or a “camping trip” just to feel human for forty-eight hours. Why should my life be something I have to escape from? Why can’t my home be the getaway?
I’ve started obsessing over the house itself. I don’t want the standard concrete boxes we see everywhere, cold, sterile, and unimaginative. I want something made of the earth itself. I want a house built from wood and rammed earth.
There’s something deeply spiritual about a house made from the ground it stands on. I’m drawn to those curved, flowing forms you see in some traditional Chinese architecture, the way they honor the flow of energy, the way they prioritize health and longevity over aesthetic vanity.
And honestly, my interest in these ancient techniques is a rebellion. Our current health systems have gone to the absolute gutter. We’ve been conditioned to be dependent on a greed-based government and a corporate-led medical industry that cares more about its own pocket than the person in the bed.
I want to learn the old ways. I want to know about natural saunas, about the healing properties of the herbs in my own garden. I want to take my health out of their hands and put it back into mine.
I’m tired of waiting for permission to be well.
Maybe it is my “introvertedness” talking. Maybe I’m just socially awkward and I’ve finally decided to stop fighting it. I realize that for a lot of people, my dream looks like a nightmare. They’d see my house off in the distance, with its willow tree trailing over a fish pond and its strange, curved earth walls, and they’d assume it was haunted. They’d tell stories about the person who lives there alone and doesn’t “interact.”
And the beautiful thing is… I don’t care.
In fact, I find it lovely. If they think my house is haunted, they won’t knock on the door. If they think I’m strange, they’ll leave me to my silence. Peace of mind is such a rare currency these days; I’d happily be the “villain” in someone’s story if it means I can spend my afternoon under a willow tree, designing, knitting, or just sleeping without the hum of the city vibrating in my bones.
Imagine that day. You wake up with the sun, not an alarm. You go out to check on the doves. You spend your morning drawing something that will never be for sale. You go to your own sauna, heat up with wood you’ve gathered, and sweat out the last traces of the urban poison. You sit by your fish pond and watch the ripples, realizing that you haven’t checked your phone in three days and you don’t even know where it is.
We are so distracted. We spend our lives building someone else’s empire, and then we wonder why we’re depressed at forty. We trade our sanity for convenience. We trade our health for “stability” in a system that would replace us before we were even cold if we died today.
People move to the town to “find themselves,” but you can only truly find yourself in the silence. Everything else is just an echo of who the world wants you to be.
I see the countryside as more than just a location now. It’s a return to sanity. It’s the realization that life was meant to be small and local and tangible. It’s about the curve of a wooden beam, the feel of mud between your toes, and the understanding that we aren’t separate from nature, we are nature.
I’m tired of the noise. I’m tired of the greed. I’m tired of the “hustle.”
I’m dreaming of the upcountry not because I’m a romantic, but because I’m a survivor. And I think, deep down, a lot of people feel this same pull. They feel it when they look at the cracks in the pavement. They feel it when they’re sitting in traffic. That tiny voice that says, “This isn’t how we were supposed to live.”
I might be socially awkward. I might be a loner. I might be building a “haunted house” in the middle of nowhere. But when I’m finally standing there, under that willow tree, with the ducks swimming in the pond and the scent of rosemary in the air, I know I’ll be something that most people in the city have forgotten how to be.
I’ll be free.
The realization that I could actually just leave, that I could rebuild sustainably, catered to my own rhythm, away from the gaze of a society I never really clicked with, is the most deeply emotional discovery of my life. It’s a homecoming for a soul that’s been wandering through a concrete maze for too long.
I’m done with the pastures they promised us. I’m going to go grow my own.
I think about the people I leave behind, still rushing to meetings, still checking notifications at midnight, still living in boxes stacked on boxes. I don’t pity them, everyone has their own path, but I know mine has diverted. I don’t want to be “upwardly mobile” anymore. I want to be “downwardly grounded.”
I’ll build my rammed earth walls thick. I’ll make my gardens vast. I’ll let the willow tree hide my sitting nooks. And I’ll live. Not a “better” life by their standards, but a real life by mine.
For the first time, looking toward the future doesn’t make me anxious. It makes me hungry. I can almost smell the herbs. I can almost hear the breeze.
It’s time to go home. Even if I’ve never actually been there before.
The city thinks it’s the center of the world, but I’ve realized that the center of the world is wherever you find peace. And mine is somewhere off a dirt road, where the only thing I have to submit to is the cycle of the seasons and the speed of the growing trees. That is a life worth rebuilding. That is a life that matters.
Let the city have its noise. I’m choosing the green. I’m choosing the silence. I’m choosing the “haunted” life on my own terms. And I have never felt more sane in all my years than I do right now, planning my disappearance.
