He is at work on a book about artificial life. City-dwellers tire of the panhandlers and the crowds. Country-dwellers tire of the rednecks and the isolation.
Commuters have to commute.
I remember reading a '50s paperback science-fiction book called The Hedonists. The hero was a boy who found the hedonists's pods. The hedonists were humanoids who lived their whole lives in jellied capsules, intravenously fed, with their brains wired into pleasure-buzzers and communication networks. I remember the disgusting image of a burst-open pod with a twitching larval hedonist lying in a melting pool of slime. In a '90s cyberpunk novel, hedonists would not end up this way.