Everything Looks Different From Here

What if the cage door isn't locked? For years, Meghan Herwehe and her husband had a recurring calendar reminder asking a deceptively simple question: When can we hiatus? The answer was always: not yet. There were jobs to climb, a house to manage, a child to raise, money to earn, and an endless list of adult responsibilities. Then the pandemic arrived, Meghan's demanding corporate career became ten-to-twelve-hour days of video calls, and the life she'd worked so hard to build began to feel increasingly like a cage. So Meghan and her family took the ultimate YOLO leap: they quit their jobs, rented out their Denver home, packed up their four-year-old daughter, and moved to Lyon, France, for a year. They barely spoke French. They couldn't legally work. And they had no idea what would happen next. What follows is both a hilarious family adventure and a sharp-eyed examination of the assumptions Americans make about work, parenting, food, money, success, leisure, and happiness. As Meghan encounters French schools and sprawling lunches, European vacation culture and bureaucracy, cultural misunderstandings and family travel disasters, she begins to see that many of the "rules" governing her old life aren't rules at all. Blending memoir, cultural observation, research, and self-deprecating humor, Everything Looks Different from Here asks a question increasingly urgent for burned-out workers and families: What happens when we stop organizing our lives around work—and what might we discover when we finally give ourselves permission to imagine something different?