You can't apply the rule "look at the future versions of the people who make this choice" to criticize office drones and then not do the same to "Alaskan hitchhikers". It's perfectly plausible that most of those people's life outcomes are worse than the office drone, bad as that is. Worse, you probably only get to meet the "best" of the Alaskan hitchhikers, not a representative sample, many of which are probably in an invisible underclass.