green plants on garden during daytime

A Generation Is Opting Out. Here's What They're Opting Into.

Remote work unlocked something that changed where a generation decided to live. What they're doing with that freedom tells a much more interesting story than anyone expected.

Max Stephens

7/6/20267 min read

Something seems to have shifted in what young adults in America are actually choosing to do with their lives.

Not in a dramatic, all-at-once way. More like a pressure that built quietly for years and is now impossible to ignore. A generation raised on screen time, convenience food, city apartments, and the promise that optimization was the path to a good life has started asking whether any of that was actually working. And a meaningful number of them are arriving at a similar answer.

Remote work moved the door

The shift as an actual movement has a concrete starting point. That isn't to say people weren't living like this before, or the conditions behind it weren't already being built in the background.

Remote work didn't just change where people worked. It changed where people could live. For most of the 20th century, your job determined your geography. You either lived within commuting distance of your employer or you didn't have that job. Remote work broke that equation in a way that still hasn't fully played out.

Millennials now make up the largest share of remote workers in the United States, accounting for nearly half the remote workforce according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Sixty-seven percent of Gen Z and millennial workers say they would leave their job if forced back to the office full-time. The flexibility isn't a perk they're willing to negotiate away. For a generation that came of age watching their parents commute two hours a day for decades, remote work represents something closer to reclaimed time and reclaimed choice about where to be.

What they're doing with that choice is where this gets interesting.

The move away from cities

Rural and small-town real estate markets have felt this shift directly. Property demand in areas with acreage and outbuildings suitable for raising animals and growing food increased noticeably through 2023 and into 2025, with professional homebuyers citing it as one of the clearest market signals of the period.

The Homesteaders of America survey found that nearly half of their roughly 4,000 respondents were under 39, placing them squarely in Millennial and Gen Z demographics. Almost 47 percent were relatively new to homesteading, with more than a fifth having started within the past four to six years. These are not people who grew up farming. These are people who actively chose to start.

The motivations people cite consistently don't sound like nostalgia. They sound like a rational response to specific conditions. Control over the food supply. Environmental concerns. A desire for self-reliance that supply chain disruptions made suddenly concrete. A lifestyle more aligned with what they actually value rather than what the city apartment economy made available by default.

Remote work didn't cause this shift. But it removed the main practical obstacle that had been preventing it for people who already wanted something different.

The food question

Alongside the geography question, something has been changing in how a generation thinks about what they're eating.

The shift predates the political conversation around it by several years. Younger consumers were already moving toward cleaner ingredients, shorter label lists, and skepticism of processed food long before it became a legislative agenda. Organic food sales have grown steadily for over a decade. Demand for products with simple, recognizable ingredients has consistently outpaced demand for conventional equivalents in most natural food categories.

What happened more recently is that the conversation became impossible to ignore at a policy level. In 2025 alone, roughly 75 bills aimed at food dyes were introduced in 37 states. The FDA banned Red Dye No. 3 in January 2025, its first action on synthetic food dyes in decades. Nestlé, Hershey, and PepsiCo have pledged to eliminate certain artificial dyes from their products. Roughly 35 percent of the American food industry, including Walmart, has agreed to eliminate artificial dyes from their products entirely. Dyes aren't everything, but it is seen as a good starting point.

What's notable about this moment isn't the political vehicle it arrived in. The MAHA movement is politically specific in ways that divide people. What's notable is the rare bipartisan nature of the underlying consumer demand driving it. Senior health policy analysts have publicly noted how unusual it is to see California and West Virginia at the front of the same issue simultaneously. The ingredient question has started cutting across political lines because it isn't fundamentally a political question. It's a question about what's in the food and whether the people making it have been fully honest about that.

Young consumers arrived at that skepticism through a different route. TikTok made ingredient lists legible to an audience that had never been taught to read them. The ability to photograph a label, search it, and immediately find detailed research on every component changed consumer behavior faster than any regulatory action has. ChatGPT has changed this further. A generation that grew up trusting the internet more than institutions applied that same skepticism to food labeling in a way that caught the industry genuinely off guard.

Making things from scratch

The homesteading data points to something broader than a desire for rural property, it also points to specific activities that are growing alongside it.

Sourdough starter searches peaked during the pandemic and never returned to pre-pandemic baseline levels. Home canning, bread baking, fermenting, and preserving have all maintained elevated interest. Backyard chicken keeping expanded during the pandemic to millions of households that had no previous experience with it, and a large number of those households kept the chickens.

This isn't difficult to understand once you step back from the data. A generation that grew up with extraordinary convenience, where almost anything could arrive at the door in two hours, discovered during a supply chain collapse that they had built an entire life on systems they had no relationship with and no ability to influence when those systems stopped working.

The response, for a lot of people, was to start building a more direct relationship with the things they depended on. Not necessarily to go off-grid in any dramatic sense (although this saw a rise as well), but to close the gap between themselves and what they ate, what their house looked like, how the food in their kitchen got made.

There's a satisfaction in that kind of direct relationship that's hard to replicate in a service economy. The bread you made yourself tastes different not just because of ingredients but because of what the process means. The eggs from chickens you raised carry a completely different weight than the ones in a carton at a grocery store. It's the difference between participating in something and consuming someone else's participating in it.

The traditionalism question

It's worth being careful about calling this a traditionalist shift, because the word carries ideological freight that doesn't quite fit what the data shows.

The people moving to rural areas are not uniformly conservative and the people choosing cleaner food are not uniformly anything really. The Homesteaders of America survey respondents are using TikTok and YouTube to learn traditional skills. They're maintaining remote technology careers while raising chickens. They're not rejecting modernity. They're picking which parts of modernity they want to keep and which parts they've decided weren't worth what they cost.

That's a different thing than traditionalism in the cultural sense. It's closer to selectivity. The generation that grew up with more options than any before it is exercising those options in ways that involve choosing less, not more. Less processed food. Less screen time. Less urban density. Less convenience that comes at the cost of agency.

What it shares with traditional life is a certain groundedness in place, in labor, in the rhythms of what you can grow and eat and make. It's a way of spending your days, and a lot of people are discovering that it produces something that the optimized, convenient, always-connected version of a day often didn't.

What the loneliness data says

There's a thread running through all of this that the data keeps pulling on.

Gen Z is the loneliest generation on record by multiple measures. Gallup found they are almost twice as likely as Gen X and nearly three times as likely as Baby Boomers to report experiencing loneliness on a given day. Run clubs, homesteading communities, rural relocation, making things with other people or for the people around you. These aren't unrelated trends. They're different expressions of the same underlying condition.

The convenience economy optimized for transaction speed. It did not optimize for belonging. And belonging turns out to be what a lot of people were missing and couldn't quite name until they started finding it in unexpected places.

A Saturday morning farmers market visit produces something that a grocery delivery app doesn't. A neighborhood where you know your neighbors because you're all raising chickens and trading eggs and sourdough produces something that an apartment building of busy strangers doesn't. The run club that meets every Wednesday before work produces something that the basement treadmill session doesn't.

None of this requires a political frame. It's just people building the kind of life that actually feels like something, and being surprised to find that it involves more of what their great grandparents did than they expected.

Where this lands

The generation making these choices is not anti-technology. It is not anti-progress. It has more access to information about nutrition, agriculture, soil health, fermentation, and food science than any previous generation of home cooks and small-scale growers has ever had, and it's using all of it.

What it's skeptical of is the assumption that more convenience, more outsourcing, more optimization, and more urban density was the obvious direction for everyone. That assumption turned out to have a lot of hidden costs that took a while to become visible. The pandemic made some of them suddenly obvious. The loneliness data made others harder to ignore. The ingredient label research that kept circulating on social media made the food supply question impossible to dismiss.

The result is a shift that doesn't fit neatly into any existing cultural or political category. It's a generation doing what generations tend to eventually do: looking at what the previous version of the world gave them, deciding what to keep, and building something slightly different with the pieces.

In this case, a lot of those pieces have roots, gardens, and a sourdough starter on the counter.

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