“At the time I accepted the job at Berkeley, I had already decided that I would keep it for at most two years before leaving it to go live in the woods. The fact is that I never at any time felt satisfied with the idea of spending my life as just a mathematician and nothing more. Ever since my early teens I had dreamed of escaping from civilization—as in going to live on an uninhabited island or in some other wild place.

The trouble was that I didn’t know how to go about it, and it was extremely difficult to work up the nerve to cut loose from my civilized moorings and take off to the woods. It’s very difficult because sometimes we don’t know how much the choices we make are governed by the expectations of people around us, and the fact that we go and do something other people would regard as mad—it’s very difficult to do. Furthermore, I didn’t know where to go really.

But at about the beginning of my last year at the University of Michigan I went through a kind of crisis. You could say that the psychological chains with which society binds us sort of broke for me. After that I was sure that I had the courage to break away from the system, to take off and just go into some wild place and try to live there. When I went to Berkeley, I never went there with the intention of continuing there indefinitely. I took the job at Berkeley only to earn some money to get started with, to buy a piece of land.”

- An Interview with Ted Kaczynski by Blackfoot Valley Dispatch
(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-an-interview-with-ted-kaczynski)