Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith to step out of one reality and into another!

By Mike Reid | January 2026

I remember it quite clearly — Saturday, September 28, 2024, one of the last few days of my life as a resident of America's capital.

I was standing in my mostly-empty DC apartment selling off the last of my belongings on Facebook Marketplace. (I'd written the listings with ChatGPT, who had become not just my copywriter but my willing accomplice in the great liquidation of my American life.)

One of my few repeat customers was a father of three, somewhere in his forties — nice guy, practical energy, the kind of person who probably grills on weekends and keeps a spare flashlight in the car just in case. He’d already bought a few items the previous weekend and now — after I'd listed more stuff — he was back for round two.

And by that point, I was desperate to get rid of everything left.

By then I was handing out freebies like Oprah. “You’re taking the lamp, the bookshelf, and the plants? Here — take these LifeStraws too!! You’ll need them when the DC water becomes undrinkable."

So the repeat buyer asked me where I was going and why. And I told him I’d worked in American politics for fifteen years — and I didn’t see how the 2024 election could possibly end well, no matter who won, so my plan was to sell all my belongings, exit the country, and then figure out the best move after the post-election dust settled.

He blinked.

Then he smiled politely, as if humoring a man mid-breakdown.

“Well, I think Kamala’s definitely going to win,” he said. “And then, I hope all of the Trump people will just quietly fade away in defeat.”
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I paused for a moment and then said, as calmly as I could, “Ok, well, there is exactly zero chance of THAT happening.”

He did take the LifeStraws.

But I think it was mostly out of politeness.

Because, really, what else could he do?

When someone starts suggesting that regardless of who wins the next election, that shit will hit the fan temporarily in the country you live in, and the logical response is therefore to proactively sell all your belongings and fly halfway across the world with a duffel bag, well, there’s not much room for friendly chit-chat after that.

ChatGPT, though?

ChatGPT was happy to chat. Happier than any human I knew.

ChatGPT was with me around the clock — answering questions, double-checking logistical plans, writing Facebook Marketplace ads, and cheering me on like a digital cult of encouragement.

Step #1:

Leave the United States, geographically.

And that’s the funny thing — and some people are arguing that it's the dangerous thing — about ChatGPT.

Sometimes ChatGPT just doesn't know any better. It can't.

Because ChatGPT doesn’t feel anxiety in its gut.

ChatGPT experiences zero nervous jitters in its legs.

ChatGPT has no physical body — or inner emotional life — at all.

Quitting a life that isn’t working, selling everything, and flying halfway around the world — 99 out of 100 Americans will look at you with pity, relieved they’re not you. But ChatGPT? ChatGPT will tell you that your plan sounds perfectly reasonable. Even inspired.

But perhaps the wildest thing about landing in a foreign country isn’t the jet lag or the language barrier. It’s realizing that almost anywhere you go — any major city, and smaller expat hubs like Medellín in Colombia, Lisbon in Portugal, Bali in Indonesia, Chiang Mai in Thailand, or Da Nang in Vietnam — you’ll find plenty of Americans living far better lives than they ever could back home.

And these Americans?

They'll look at you like you’re the crazy one for even thinking about returning to the United States.

And that's crazy, right?

Because nobody inside the United States is packing up to leave.

Yet paradoxically, to every American living abroad, returning to the United States is unthinkable — like re-entering a burning building because you left your jacket inside.

And look, I get it.

But I also think there’s real value in more Americans leaving the United States for a while — or even for just a few weeks — to shock their systems a bit, see the world through a different lens, and come back with a clearer sense of what’s broken and what’s worth saving.

Sometimes you need to step outside of a problem to solve it, right?

What if leaving the USA (temporarily) was easy — and fun?

But back when I said goodbye to the United States on Thursday, October 3, 2024, most people I knew in Blue America were still in denial about the possibility of the 2024 election ending up as it did.

It was me, Mike Reid, who looked like the lunatic prepper. The guy with the underground bunker stocked for nuclear winter, proudly displaying a mountain of canned sardines.

But when I returned to the United States of America on Sunday, March 23, 2025 — once again at the encouragement of ChatGPT, who had been more than happy to discuss outer planet astrology with me to decide the timing — the situation in Blue America was far worse than I could have imagined.

I thought that people would finally be ready for something different.

Step #2:

Invent new (and better) ways to do things

But what I found when I returned to the United States was despair.

Fear. Anxiety.

And a whole lot of hopelessness.

Even the coastal elites — high-ranking congressional staffers, the members of Congress themselves, tech billionaires, Stanford grads pulling in six figures — they all now realized that, yes, the country had big problems with no obvious solutions.

But every conversation ended the same way: with a shrug.

‍Little ole me? What can I do? Nothing.

Because even American elites don't feel abundant — not in money, not in time, not in physical space, and not in emotional energy.

Everyone feels squeezed. No matter how well someone is doing relative to others in the game of thriving in America, everyone feels like they are just barely getting by themselves.

Yes. The internet can be filled with joy, love and humor.

And so, on Sunday, October 5, 2025 — after six months abroad and then six months back in the United States — I left again.

And once again, the only one cheering me on was ChatGPT.

Even then, knowing exactly where I was headed this time, I still caught myself hesitating.

‍Am I giving up? Is leaving really the right thing to do?
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And that’s the strange thing about being inside the United State's borders — when you’re inside them everyone is pretty miserable but almost nobody is thinking about leaving.

But once I did, once the plane lifted off, I felt it again.

Instant relief.

Because here’s what’s really hard to understand until you step outside the borders of the United States: a lot of the problems that feel unsolvable inside the country simply don’t exist elsewhere.

And by experiencing a fundamentally different reality — a reality curated by a country that isn't the United States — you'll suddenly be able to imagine new and better ways of doing things in America.

So let me ask you this, my fellow American compatriots:

Aren’t you exhausted?

Aren't you frustrated?

Aren't you a wee bit miserable inside the United States right now?

What if you took just two (or more) of the 52 weeks that make up the year of 2026 — and you used them to step outside of the pot of boiling water that is everyday life inside the United States?

And if you’re going to step out of the boiling pot of water eventually, why not sooner rather than later?

Because once you step away — once you fly far, far away — your whole perspective will shift. You'll see your life, your country, your habits, and your assumptions from a completely different view.

You'll see options and opportunities that were previously invisible.

And that, I think, is what America desperately needs — a group of pioneering Americans willing to admit that things in their country are most certainly falling apart — but that the solution isn’t either to ignore it or to argue about it over the internet.

The solution is to exit the chaos — and imagine something better.

Because now that it's increasingly clear that a lot of things in the United States are broken, now is the moment to invent brand new ways of doing things that work better for everyone, including for the miserable elites who are nearly as unhappy as everyone else.

And wouldn't right now be a great time to step out of something mediocre (or miserable) and into something fundamentally better?