My American Experience: Finding a New Freedom

By Emmye Tolbert Wilson

Being a millennial and growing up during the dot-com boom, I found myself constantly seeking the perfect image, the perfect life, and the feeling of being seen as significant. In high school, we created our very own Facebook accounts where everything revolved around us — our favorites, our carefully chosen profile pictures, and the image we wanted the world to see. It suddenly felt like the entire world lived in one glowing screen. Significance and value seemed measured in likes, comments, and shares.

Then the age of influencers arrived, and everyone wanted to make money from the brand of life they depicted online — edited, filtered, curated, and most of the time impossible to maintain in real life. It was only the beginning of a long road of image protection and seeking affirmation from a virtual world.

Somewhere along the way, while trying to keep up with that trend, I began losing sight of my actual dreams. I felt like I was slowly losing my grip on real life while trying to perfect the digital version of it. On paper, I had everything I thought I was supposed to want: my dream home, a loving husband, two beautiful daughters, and the freedom of being self-employed.

That’s the American dream, right?

But having “everything” and still wanting more is an exhausting way to live. Something had to change. I was unhappy. I wasn’t fully present as a wife or a mother because my mind was constantly distracted by the unrealistic lives I consumed online. Even when I sat beside my family, part of me was somewhere else — scrolling, comparing, chasing.

Then I was introduced to a podcast called 1000 Hours Outside, and for the first time in a long time, something inside me shifted. I realized I was spending most of my life indoors or mentally distracted. As a mom, it was easy to fall into the trap of following other moms for the latest tips and tricks on how to do motherhood “perfectly.” One scroll would turn into an hour, sometimes several, comparing my life to everyone else’s highlight reel without realizing I was missing the one thing I could never get back…time.

My husband, Seth, and I decided to join this movement of spending 1,000 hours outside in a year. Nearly three hours a day outdoors sounded impossible at first. We started in January.

The cold mountain air stung our cheeks, as our toddlers made it known they wanted to go back inside for cartoons and sugary hot chocolate. But we pushed tiny bikes down the sidewalk toward Brow Park despite the chill. Some days I questioned why we were even trying.

But little by little, something changed. The slower pace began to soften us.

We learned how to simply exist together again without needing constant stimulation. We traded screen time for long walks where we listened to gravel crunch beneath our shoes and watched the sunset spill soft pink and orange across the brow. We rode bikes beneath towering trees on Cutler Avenue while the smell of woodsmoke drifted from nearby chimneys. We began setting aside one day every week to hike somewhere new — chasing waterfalls, climbing over moss- covered rocks, and listening to our girls squeal when they found the perfect spot to pretend to be monkeys or birds.

Eventually, we took it one step further and started tent camping just so we could fully live outside among the trees. Somewhere between all those ordinary outdoor moments, I fell in love with life again. The adventure wasn’t in expensive vacations or perfectly curated experiences. It was hidden inside the mundane things we had overlooked for years. Tent camping soon turned into dream shopping for an RV — just a small place to sleep, eat, and shower between adventures and all the “have-tos” of life. But what we didn’t realize was that the life we were searching for had already been sitting right in front of us the entire time: our blueberry farm and the little 800-square-foot office building we would eventually call home.

We downsized from a larger house to a much smaller life. At first glance, it might have looked like we were giving things up. In reality, we had everything that mattered to us. Living close together and more outside changed us. For us, it meant living humbly, being together, and building a meaningful life side by side on the farm. It meant putting the phone down when our 2-year-old wanted to show us a tiny frog she discovered near the blueberry bushes instead of half-listening while scrolling social media or answering a hundred text messages.

Before, when I spent more time on screens than outside, I constantly craved more alone time, more distractions, and more of what society told me I needed. Now that I spend more time outdoors than online, I crave more time with my husband and children. I want more slow evenings. More porch sitting. More barefoot mornings. More of what our girls call, “cooking chicken with the bone in it” over campfires.

I’ve fallen in love with what the Danish call hygge (hoo-gah) — creating warmth, slowing down, being fully present with the people you love, and finding joy in life’s simplest pleasures. This lifestyle has inspired us to become more intentional in every area of our lives: how we spend our time, what we consume, whom we surround ourselves with, and how much of our life we are willing to trade for things that ultimately do not matter to us.

Today, no one has to be convinced to go outside. As soon as we get home from work or school, the doors swing open, the windows rise, shoes get kicked off onto the porch, and fresh mountain air rushes through the house, carrying the sweet smell of honeysuckle. Our children rarely ask to watch movies anymore. Instead, they spend their evenings dancing through blueberry bushes, singing lullabies to the ducks, making homemade dirt soup in the mud kitchen, and howling at the moon like nobody is watching — or simply not caring if they are.

Maybe that’s the kind of freedom we were searching for all along.