Exit Society

Welcome to our new collective aspiration.

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I only pay for two Patreons: Peter Zeihan, a hard-hitting geopolitical analyst who has made it easy for me to understand global politics… and Ben and Emily.

Ben and Emily are a young artist couple that live between their narrowboat on the channels of the English countryside, and their very tiny van that they manually renovated to have a tiny bed, a tiny kitchen and a tiny fireplace. They are always moving and never in one place for longer than a month.

A typical Ben and Emily video.

If I wanted premium van or boat life content, there are plenty of more interesting influencers out there. People with large aesthetic vans, who make videos with cinematic polish and travel to interesting places. Ben and Emily are a little messy, they film on an old camera, and they don’t spend much money so they don’t do much more than walk around the cheaper European cities when they do leave England. I know their entire wardrobe by heart because it’s small.

But what has made me fall in love with them, and want to send them money every month, is that they give me the comfort of knowing I can escape.

I study culture and I can tell you there are very few shared aspirations across society right now. We can’t agree on the most desirable schools for our kids, best diets, best jobs, best lifestyles or best futures, but it does seem like we can generally agree on one thing: exiting society is our new universal status symbol.

Van and boat life content come in so many different varieties, from the slow living of artists that wanted to opt out of “the system”, to the decked out kits of adventurers that want to throw themselves at the landscape, to people who either can’t afford a home or just don’t want one, so they live in stealth mode, sometimes in vans painted like incognito moving trucks or utility vehicles, searching for free but safe parking spots every night.

All of them invest in their transportation, but you don’t have to look around for very long to realize that the boats and vans are incidental. There are many other ways to exit society, and every income bracket has their preferred method:

There is a world of tiny home content that usually highlights students that couldn’t get a job after college, FIRE devotees (FIRE being its own escape hatch), single mothers, and retirees who’ve found relief in not having a mortgage or empty rooms to clean. Tiny homes are often in dedicated communities just like motor homes might be, but they are also commonly in remote areas where land is cheap, offering another layer of the true exit fantasy.

If you move a couple steps up from there and past van life, you’ll see exit fantasies that are more coded for the high net worth individual. Self-sustaining ranches and palatial compound-like homesteads can either lean more granola or prepper, but either way they present the aspiration of ultra independence for the very rich. Creating a world within a world, where you can control more than just your home and finances, but also your food, your environment, and who gets to be in your space.

And at the very top we see the extreme. Tech billionaires and their private bunkers, the fortified island compounds of very powerful people, plans to leave Earth itself for other planets, and the race to upload ones’ consciousness to the cloud - something we joke about in movies like Mountainhead, but we can’t deny the incentive is there.

None of these exit plans are reserved for any particular income bracket. Plenty of people homestead simply to survive, and many others live inconspicuously off grid while in luxury, but the cultural story is still generally packaged according to your financial means. Many don’t have the option to exit no matter how badly they may want it.

The obvious irony is that we are all classless when it comes to exiting society because whatever pushes us out will be coming for all of us, rich or poor, but the point here is not that anyone thinks they’re exceptional.

It’s that we all want the same thing.

We all share the same fantasy of opting out of our current social reality. Leaving this world for a parallel one is a fantasy that everyone can relate to. It’s one of the clearest signals that shows us what our collective relationship is to the world right now.

We first identified and started tracking the exit society ideal over a year ago in Exposure Therapy, and back then it still felt primarily like a mode of entertainment. More of a vibe than a destination. Now it has matured into something a little more considerable. There are more products, services, and even political movements springing up around the idea. We see an infrastructure emerging beneath it and as Michael McGrath says, it has become an “entrepreneurial endeavor”.

When your aspiration is to exit a tumultuous world in order to create smaller, more controlled one, that will change everything you do. It will change how you spend time, spend money, make money, read the news, form relationships, raise children, worship, protest, vote… all the way down to how you see yourself in the mirror.

Exiting society has the makings of what could be our new mythology. It has the right ingredients: a post-collapse origin story, clear moral codes, self-sacrificing ritual, heroes, and even an afterlife.

It’s the beginning of a story we’re telling ourselves about who we are and what power means. Part of it is about the world we’re leaving behind. An even bigger part, however, is the world we don’t want to share.

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Announcing Exposure Therapy’s Strategic Topics for 2026

Every year our team huddles to pull themes that tap into the zeitgeist ahead of us, and then put it to the Exposure Therapy community to vote for the final 12. I’m really excited to announce our final 2026 topics below, and you can read their full descriptions here.

We’ve also got a slate of awesome member dinners in 2026:

• March: “Deep Cozy Pajama Party” in NYC

• June: “Midnight Solstice” in LA

• September: “The Animal Within” in NYC

• December: “Ceremonies of Joy” in LA

If you’re a brand strategist, creative director, executive, marketer, researcher, or anyone who plays and works in culture, come join us.

Good information gives you a bigger dopamine hit than:

- Food
- Water
- Sex

This is science. Good information literally nourishes us. It’s why you love being a strategist, a creative director, or a brand builder.

We want and need a meaningful model of the world so badly that our brains chemically reward us for it. At our core, we are epistemic systems built to figure out who we are and what reality is like, and that’s why good info feels better than chocolate cake.

Listen to this clip from my interview with neuroscientist Dr. Mark Miller talking about how provocative, early-signal information that lets us constantly update our mental models is extremely valuable to a thriving life.

We are genuinely hungry for it.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private community Exposure Therapy is where my team and I share our best original research, have provocative conversations, special dinners, and lots of fun.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau that works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas daily, before they turn into reports or articles. Come connect or follow me on TikTok and Instagram.

• My public speaking, where I bring my energy and enthusiasm to life with people who are deeply curious about culture, strategy, and the future.