Trading cubicles for crops: One couple’s ‘Exit’ from the corporate grind

An estimated 80% of people hate their jobs. They fantasize about quitting in a blaze of glory, hurling their lanyards across the office like a frisbee, and riding off into the sunset to raise goats, bake sourdough, or at least remember what eight hours of sleep feels like.

Sean Carlton was one of them.

‘Nobody wakes up one morning ready to raise animals and turn them into food.’ Change begins with one thing you can actually change. Lower one bill. Learn one skill.

The difference is that he didn’t stay. Two years ago, he and his wife, Alexys, walked away from their corporate careers and bought an acre of land in West Virginia. The experience also prompted Carlton to write “Exit Farming: Starving the Systems That Farm You” — a book that reads like both a confession and a call to arms.

The Carltons didn’t step into a new job, but into a new way of being. They rolled the dice with no promise of a soft landing, and in doing so they exposed something uncomfortable: Many of us aren’t trapped by circumstance so much as by the stories we tell ourselves about what we are allowed to want.

Sean Carlton

Questioning ‘normal’

Carlton is no professional commentator or pundit. “Exit Farming” is a cri de coeur from the American cubicle.

So when asked what exactly he means by “systems that farm you,” he doesn’t reach for theory. He answers with the simplicity of a man who finally recognized the shape of his own confinement.

“Systems farm people by taking more from you than they give back while convincing you this arrangement is normal,” he says.

Work dictates your hours. Debt dictates your decisions. Health care dictates your fears. Even your phone becomes, in his words, “the delivery system for apps that track you, profile you, and sell what they learn.”

It might sound melodramatic. It isn’t. It’s simply Monday morning in America, with millions waking up already weary of the hours ahead.

Slow and steady

But Carlton insists the way out is rarely a dramatic jailbreak. It’s the slow, steady act of starving the system’s influence. You “bring one thing at a time back under your control.” Lower an expense. Learn a skill. Build a sliver of income that doesn’t depend on a single institution. These small shifts break the spell. Every small act of independence starves a machine that has grown used to feeding on your time, your attention, your identity, even your sanity.

Of course, independence comes with a price, and Carlton tallies it honestly and without self-pity. One of the most striking sections in the book addresses the loss of family once he stepped off the expected path. Not through screaming matches or slammed doors, but through slow erosion: “Phone calls got shorter. Conversations turned tense.”

Disapproval had less to do with the specifics of his life than the simple fact that he no longer fit the template.

When asked how Americans can balance honoring their families with refusing to, as he puts it, “participate in systems that drain your energy and compromise your values,” his answer is as clean as it is compelling: “If a relationship survives you making choices that improve your health, your time, or your stability, then it survives. If it falls apart the moment you stop living the way they prefer, then it was already conditional.”

It’s a hard truth, but Carlton refuses to dress it up. Long before any institution closes a door on us, we’ve already built the cell ourselves. The ancients understood this well: People cling to the comfort of captivity, obeying expectations set by those who would rather see them worn down than transformed.

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Stacy Tabb

Work with consequences

There’s also a spiritual undercurrent to his critique of modern work culture. Carlton never lapses into sermonizing, but his diagnosis reads like a measured moral warning. Modern work “follows you home,” he notes. It takes evenings, weekends, and whatever fragments of peace remain. It erodes sleep, attention, and the mental steadiness that previous generations recognized as the bedrock of a healthy life.

Americans worship productivity with almost religious devotion, even though the devotion always seems to cost them more than they can spare. Two-thirds of the workforce is burned out, but the cult of busyness marches on. Another day, another dollar … but also another headache, another email chain, and another reminder that coffee can only do so much.

When asked whether “exit farming” is a return to older ideas of work and stewardship, he rejects romantic myth-making. “Exit farming isn’t about finding something spiritual,” he says. “It’s about doing work where the consequences are real.” If you don’t feed the animals, “they suffer and then they die.” If you don’t tend the crops exactly as needed, the season is lost before it begins. Nothing waits for permission. Nothing reschedules itself for your convenience. This realism is its own kind of grounding. And you don’t need a farm to reclaim it, but only work that doesn’t demand the erosion of dignity as its hidden price of admission.

Grow one thing

The final question in the book’s conversation is the one most Americans are actively wrestling with: What about those who feel trapped? Trapped between institutions they no longer trust and a life of greater self-reliance that feels too big, too frightening, too foreign?

Carlton’s reply is the opposite of theatrical bravado. “Nobody wakes up one morning ready to raise animals and turn them into food.” Change begins with one thing you can actually change. Lower one bill. Learn one skill. Grow one thing you eat often. Build one dependable relationship. Reduce one vulnerability. These are small, almost humble acts. But they mark the beginning of a life that no longer runs on someone else’s terms.

Over time, he says, these small adjustments stop being adjustments. They become a different kind of life, one that is sturdy enough to withstand the failures of the systems around it.

That’s the heart of “Exit Farming.” It isn’t about rejecting society or romanticizing hardship, but about reclaiming stability in a country where stability has become a cruel joke. It’s not about storming out in some “Office Space” fantasia with a baseball bat.

It’s about one couple choosing a different path and showing that others could do it too. Not through dramatic destruction, but through the refusal to be drained of the very things that make a life worth living — time, purpose, and peace.