Cameron Carling, 38, left to pursue a dream life in Costa Rica. Then he ditched that, too.
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I moved to New York in 2007 from Los Angeles, where I had been living after college at U.C.L.A. You show up in New York for a week in September, and you’re like, This is the most magical goddamned place on the planet. This is where all of the things are happening in the world.
I had no job, and figured that New York would just provide for me, and it nearly didn’t. I was on the verge of running out of borrowed money when I landed a job at a huge tech company via a temp agency. That turned into a full-time gig, and I ended up working there for 11 years.
I met my wife, Marcella, two weeks after I arrived, at a party. New York was awesome as a couple with no kids. We would go to outdoor movies in Bryant Park, see the symphony in Central Park.
But after a decade or so, I started to burn out. Part of it was that my wife and I had two kids and we were living in an 1,100-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn. It’s a common refrain, but trying to raise a kid in New York is like growing an oak tree in a thimble.
Also, I’m originally from Utah, and wanted to be closer to nature, but in New York it’s hard to find a tree that’s not growing out of cement. One day I was out on a terrace at work and listening to the hum of the city, and it just felt so unnatural.
“Menacing” is too harsh a word, but it’s this hum of anxiety. Everyone is so tense, so hunched. Even the cars feel hunched. I thought, I’ve got to get out of here.
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A buddy of mine had already given me a book called “Tools of Titans,” and that got me into the FIRE movement. It stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. The idea is that you learn to cut out luxuries and extra expenses and try to boost your personal savings rate as high as 70 percent of your income.
There’s this concept called geo-arbitrage, where you take your savings and move to a place with a lower cost of living.
My wife had always wanted to live abroad, so I started running the numbers. If we moved to a cheaper country, I thought I could just retire, and we’ll all be happy. I could write a book.
My wife speaks Spanish, and wanted our kids to learn it as well, so Spain was one option. We went on a fact-finding trip to Grenada and Valencia, but life there rhymed too closely with New York. We’d still be living in an apartment building, in a city. It was New York with an accent.
We figured we couldn’t look at every single country, so let’s just zero in on one. Costa Rica comes up on the list of everyone’s favorite places to vacation. It’s beautiful, there’s tons of outdoors stuff, and it has good international schools, which became sort of the tail wagging the dog for us.
The whole family went down there on spring break and ended up in a town called Playa Potrero. It had this great view of the ocean, and you could hear howler monkeys in the jungle. You get swept up by the beauty of it. Also, it is very New York opposite. There’s one road.
My wife was an elementary schoolteacher, but she took time off for the kids, and was just working part-time. She loves New York and was hesitant, but she felt outnumbered. She felt everybody needed more space.
For the most part she was trying to support me on this I’ve-got-to-get-out-of-here mission. I was in this mind-set of, I’m never going to work for a company again, so I put in notice at work, and then it was a mad dash to start packing up our lives.
We moved to Costa Rica in June 2018. Soon after we got there, Marcella took a job teaching first grade at the dual-language school our kids went to. So we did a swap. I became what they call an “amo de casa,” a house husband.
We ended up spending a little more on housing than we wanted to. We knew people who lived a little more rustically, with no washer, dryer, no air-conditioning. You can get that for $300 a month.
But we didn’t know how long we were going to be down there and we wanted to land in a good spot. So we rented a modern two-bedroom place on the beach. It was $3,000 a month, but it had a pool, and we would open up the gates to the backyard, and that was the sand.
I took about three months to decompress, but I realized pretty quickly, I couldn’t retire. This is insane. I’ve worked all my life. I get a lot of joy and fulfillment by creating things.
And so, I started writing a book with a friend of mine back in Utah who wanted to adapt his podcast into a book. That was an interesting part of the move. I was 38 and just starting out as a writer.
People said you can’t do that, it’s too hard. But moving to a new country was this way to uproot some of these limiting beliefs, the idea that you can’t just go and do something totally different. Sure you can.
So I was writing the book, but my full-time job was mostly taking care of the house and grocery shopping. I had this very silly, not-real vision of riding my bike to the store and filling up my little basket with fruits and vegetables, but in reality, the roads are obscenely dangerous.
There’s so much rain that they’re designed with a drop-off of three feet on either side for drainage, and everyone uses the same road — and when I say everyone, I mean cars, people on foot, people on bikes, dogs. You try going down the road and all of a sudden a cow appears out of nowhere.
We ended up having to buy a car, a big Toyota S.U.V., but you pay at least 50 percent more for a car there than you would in the United States, because of all the taxes.
The nice thing about the town was that there was a very intense, small-town feel, so breaking into the expat community was not super-difficult. But we were looking for an integrated experience, and it was much harder to break into the local community.
I tried to volunteer a couple of times, but my Spanish wasn’t up to snuff. Also, my wife has always been more the social connector, and I’m the introvert who can sit inside all day long. But she was working full-time, so we were in the wrong roles.
Our kids loved it there, and probably would have stayed forever, but we already knew by about three or four months that it wasn’t the right place for us. That December, we took a weekend trip to see the Arenal volcano, and I was like, This is going to be great, we’re going to go out into nature.
We were staying at this random Airbnb, this giant place like a furniture showroom way out in the middle of nowhere, and there was a bat in the ceiling that was making all this noise. I had just tried to hack a coconut in half with a dull machete and almost cut my toe off, and it was like, All right, what are we doing?
We were already planning to head back to New York for the winter break, and when we got there I met up with a former colleague of mine at my old company, and she was setting up a new team in Austin. I thought, O.K., we’ve got to start making some moves in another direction.
We moved from Costa Rica to Austin after 11 months, but I think we had to move to Costa Rica to end up in Austin. It was all about that relativity. Speaking for myself, I had to have that swing, to go there and say, “That’s not right, the answer is somewhere in the middle.”
I now ride my bike to work, safely, every day. It’s 15 minutes along the lake. It’s beautiful. The kids are going to a Spanish immersion school and they’re doing great.
We live in a historic neighborhood called Clarksville, and we checked all the boxes: We got the rescue dog, and my daughter got some cowboy boots. We’re settling into this new life. But again, who knows? I might just be a serial leaver.
I Quit!
This interview has been edited.
Photo Illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
