I opened a ticket in the customer support system of the SaaS we built: a customer wanted to cancel his subscription - $30 a month, and asked for a prorated refund for the days left. I opened his account, counted the days, did the math. Approved a $17 refund, wrote that the money would show up within a few business days, closed the ticket.

Half an hour later, I was done with customer support for the morning.

At noon, I got a WhatsApp from the CEO of a startup building a new AI model, the kind that tries to push the edge of what’s possible. A few weeks earlier, he’d told me what they were working on and asked for help with the raise. I thought of a fund I’d worked with that felt like a good fit. Sent a message, made the intro, and moved on.

Now the CEO wrote: the fund is in. Close to a million dollars.

He was thrilled. He deserved it.

I read the message twice. Wrote congrats, told him he’d found great investors. And I meant it - they’re building something real, the kind of thing worth fighting for.

But it’s their round. The meetings, the pressure, the breakthroughs, the excitement, the five years ahead - theirs. I connected two people, closed a $30 ticket, and stayed here.

At three, I left to pick up my kids from school.

I reply “very.”

Two weeks later -

I wake up in a hotel room in Nagoya, Japan. Room is a big word. “Pod” fits better. But I have a bed, a toilet and a shower, and I don’t need more than that.

We get ready and head to Nagoya’s central station. The station holds more human beings than atoms. Rivers of people pushing in different directions.

We start pushing toward our platform. I see signs: “Extremely crowded due to F1 Grand Prix.”

I remember the “power circle” drills from the army - the team closes you inside a tight circle and you have to break out any way you can.

You need to apply force in a precise balance - enough to move in our direction, but not past what’s acceptable to the Japanese. I learn to calibrate as I go, from the Japanese around me.

We reach our platform - trains toward Suzuka, the town where the circuit is. No room on the express trains.

We line up for the slow local ones. After a few trains we manage to squeeze into one.

People packed to zero space, smeared against the doors from the load.

Then the train stops at the next station and two more get in.

We have about an hour and a half to Suzuka, where we get off and wait for shuttles to the circuit - rumor says the shuttle line takes about three hours.

A British guy in a Formula 1 cap gets ready to get off before Suzuka. We ask him why he’s getting off here. He explains there’s an alternate route - he switches to another train, gets off somewhere else, and from there it’s a 40-minute walk to the circuit.

Sold.

We get off with him and a few others and switch trains. Another half hour ride, then off the train and walking.

After about half an hour of walking we start seeing cars converted into campers - people who come to sleep in their cars for the race weekend.

We’re getting close to the circuit. I can’t see anything yet, but for the first time I hear the sound of Formula 1 engines live - it’s not the sound of cars. It sounds like fighter jets flying low.

My stomach flips. I have to see what’s making that sound.

We flow inside an endless river of people. We’re two out of about 100,000 arriving at the circuit today. Above us, helicopters filming the race. It’s the largest human gathering I’ve ever been in.

We reach our seats on a bench in the sun. We’re fairly close to the pit exit - I get a decent view of the cars as they accelerate.

In the distance I see the VIP area - right above the garages, dressed in suits, drinking champagne, meters from the drivers and the teams.

The race ends. It was an insane experience.

I hear a helicopter landing - I walk up to the helipad fence with a few other people. I watch a few suits board the helicopter and it takes off. And it repeats, again and again - the helicopters land, collect a few relaxed people, and take off.

My body tightens at the thought of the route we have now, back to the hotel - the walk, the trains, the crush.

I check my phone. How much is a Paddock (VIP) ticket - about $6,000. How much is a helicopter from Nagoya to here - about $5,000.

I tell Guy - this was amazing, but next time I come to Formula 1, it’s helicopter only, VIP only.

Guy laughs. I don’t.

Suddenly a Thai guy walks up and bangs on my window, furious.

I roll it down.

“Come see what you did!!” he says in angry English.

Did I run someone over?!

He leads me to his car and shows me a broken taillight.

Behind his car stands another vehicle with a small dent in the bumper.

His claim: I braked too fast, then he braked, then the car behind him hit him.

From friends’ stories I know that in Thailand, you close these things as fast as possible.

Doesn’t matter if I’m right or not - I’m a foreign guest here, and word is I don’t stand much chance in court against locals.

So like I learned from the stories, I tell the guy - sorry if I braked too fast, let me pay for the broken taillight.

“No way! I called the police, they’re on their way.”

I’m confused. I just offered to pay for the taillight - why does he need the police here?

Starting to worry I don’t understand this situation at all.

I have an idea. I’ll call the Tourist Police - I’ve heard they look out for foreigners here.

The Tourist Police tell me accidents are regular traffic police business, nothing to do with them.

I’m alone in this.

The police arrive.

The officers and the two Thai drivers who collided behind me huddle in a dense conversation in Thai.

I studied Thai for 8 months and I know 7 words, but it doesn’t help - the only word I recognize is farang. It means “foreigner.” Me. And they’re saying farang every other word.

I understand they’re describing reality to the officers however suits them, and I have zero say in it.

I try opening ChatGPT on my phone and standing next to the group - let it listen and translate for me. It picks up nothing.

More locals arrive at the scene in private cars.

I understand later these are the insurance agents of the locals who collided behind me.

Maybe I should get an insurance agent here too? Do I have an insurance agent for the rental car? How does this work?

Suddenly a tow truck arrives. Then two more. Three trucks total - two crew members each.

Why a tow truck?! One taillight broke. Everyone’s healthy and every car drives.

Nobody even touched my car - why do we need three tow trucks?!

I start to suspect a party is being organized at my expense.

All that happened here: a taillight broke, maybe 200 baht to replace, and a bumper got slightly creased, probably no drama to fix either.

Why is half the island gathering here at night?

My goal - fold this event as fast as possible. Don’t confront, don’t argue, don’t end up at a police station and definitely not in court.

I make a decision in my head - any number they throw at me up to 50,000 baht, I pay on the spot and continue with my life.

I decide the most effective thing to do is get closer to the angry guy who insisted on calling the police.

I start talking to him using the 7 words I know in Thai.

He’s apparently moved that I bothered to learn his language, and apologizes for raising his voice and being angry.

He explains that the police are checking the road cameras right now to see who’s at fault.

We start chatting. He tells me about his life and his businesses, I tell him how we ended up in Koh Samui and that my wife sings in bars here in Thai.

I ask him in mixed English-Thai - why did they bring 3 tow trucks if all the cars drive?

He explains it’s standard procedure, in case the driver starts acting up - then the police cuff him and the truck takes the car.

A few minutes later the officer says something to him in Thai.

“The officer said you can go. Either way, brake slower next time.”

I didn’t even finish my goodbye ‘Kapunakp’ and I was already in my running car, navigating out of the parking lot between all the people who’d gathered.

I was in shock that I got out of this without paying.

A few months after this incident - I was making a turn, and a motorbike that overtook the car letting me turn scraped my bumper.

He scratched his bike a little. Nothing happened to him.

I walked over to ask if he was hurt - he said he was fine.

A few minutes later his uncle showed up - an insurance agent, experienced in the situation.

Long story short - the biker suddenly started claiming internal organ damage, and that his bike would be out of commission for at least a month, and that I need to compensate him for a month of lost income.

At first I rebelled against the transparent shakedown attempt - but the whole family was waiting in the car, I was sick and hoarse with no voice, and Lital tells me just pay, that’s how it works here.

After about an hour of negotiation with hand gestures and phone messages - I gave in.

I didn’t want to risk him now bringing a doctor friend to determine his internal organs were damaged.

I paid 25,000 baht and continued with my life.

This time it came back 150.

And that’s after three months with my self-discipline switch flipped to “full Soviet”. Clean eating, more cardio. None of the sweets I love, nothing fried, nothing interesting, nothing tasty, nothing happy.

I have a deep love for Napoleon cake (mille-feuille). A slab of artery-clogging margarine. The only reason I stop after half of one is that I have children to be responsible for.

I love to eat. A lot. The experiment took something out of my life.

And the bad cholesterol didn’t just fail to drop. It jumped.

I don’t have a regular doctor in Thailand, so I diagnosed myself - my problem is genetic.

The chat agreed with me. It suggested a genetic test to find the cause, and recommended a specific hospital in Singapore. Along the way I also found out that a new drug had come out - instead of a pill every day, two injections a year, around a 50% drop in LDL. About $6,000 a year.

I did a video call with the doctor. I bought a plane ticket.

In Singapore the doctor explained that there’s no point doing genetic testing in my situation. He was about my age, and said his cholesterol was around the same as mine. Instead of messing around with drugs that have under five years of use worldwide, I should take what everyone’s been taking for forty years - a small dose of statins.

He also explained that diet and exercise move cholesterol, for most people, by somewhere between 10 and 15 percent.

I finished with the doctor and booked a table for that evening at a Michelin restaurant. Thirteen courses.

First time I’d eaten at a Michelin restaurant. I was the only weirdo sitting alone.

Before each course the waiter brought me the main ingredients to look at and smell, and a small card explaining the dish.

The one that blew my mind was a clear soup of three kinds of mushroom, with some rare, fancy black pepper.

I’d been living in culinary black and white for months, and every bite of the interesting, tasty, happy food gave me back a little more color.

I flew back to Thailand. I started taking statins - the boring, ordinary drug. My latest results came back excellent.

Friends tell me statins are a pharma industry conspiracy. Could be.

I’m willing to give up a few years to eat in color.

We were paying around 4,000 baht in the villa we rented, and we never lost power.

There was a solar system on the roof that the owner had installed.

A friend told me you could get more out of it. By default, the battery keeps 50% of its charge in reserve in case the grid goes down. Lower the reserve to 30%, and you get more “free” electricity.

I went home and opened the electrical cabinet. Inside were a few sealed white boxes about a meter tall, plus a smaller box with a display. I took a picture and sent it to AI. It explained that they were batteries and an inverter.

The inverter had a QR code on it. I scanned it, which installed the app for managing the system. The app asked for a username and password, so I called the installer. His phone number was on another sticker inside the same cabinet.

He gave me access, and I started exploring.

I have no background in electrical engineering. At first I didn’t understand any of the numbers.

What is a kWh?

I learned that our system was rated at 5kW. Koh Samui gets about 4.5 effective sunlight hours per day, so the system produces roughly 22.5kWh daily. At about 5 baht per kWh, that’s almost 4,000 baht worth of electricity every month.

Our roof was turning sunlight into money.

I started reading about the industry and discovered that in the US and Europe, many customers don’t actually buy solar systems.

They lease them.

The model is called a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). A company installs a solar system on the customer’s roof at its own expense, and the customer agrees to buy the electricity it generates for around 20 years, typically at about a 30% discount to the utility.

Solar panel prices have fallen roughly 90% over the last 15 years. Battery prices have dropped just as dramatically, largely thanks to the electric vehicle industry.

I started building a model.

Real estate investors in Koh Samui are happy with annual returns of around 10%.

I stress-tested the spreadsheet from every angle.

It came out at roughly 30% a year.

The investment paid for itself in about three and a half years. After that, almost everything was profit.

I even spent $12 on a Udemy course about building a solar business.

I never finished it.

I was too eager to move beyond theory.

I went back to our installer and told him I was bringing the PPA model to Koh Samui.

He said it was a stupid idea.

Nobody on Koh Samui finances solar over the long term. People pay cash and own the system outright. That’s how he’d been doing business for 15 years, and nothing else would work on the island.

I told him financing was my problem.

I just needed him as the technical arm. I would pay him upfront, and he would install the systems exactly as he always had.

I posted a message in a WhatsApp group for families living in Koh Samui:

“I’ll install a solar system on your roof at my expense, and we’ll split the savings.”

Within a few days, the installer and I were standing on the roof of our first potential customer - a family with two kids - taking measurements for a proposal.

At the same time, I hired a local lawyer to draft a PPA agreement for Thailand.

The clause I cared about most was enforcement.

Then we found out the family was planning to leave Thailand in about a year.

One year.

My investment took three and a half years to pay back.

The homeowner would still be contractually obligated, but a Thai court judgment isn’t worth much against someone living on another continent. Nobody starts international litigation over a 500,000-baht contract.

So I abandoned the residential market.

A business customer, by definition, should be more stable than a family spending a year or two on a tropical adventure.

I spoke with the owner of a successful restaurant I play padel with.

His roof turned out to be too old for solar panels.

I emailed my kids’ international school and scheduled a meeting with the principal.

Twenty minutes in, I realized he had no intention of evaluating the proposal.

He was simply curious how someone who sounded serious could be offering him something for free.

Then a real customer showed up.

Another international school had just expanded into new buildings and was consuming more electricity than the local grid could reliably supply. They were dealing with frequent outages.

The installer inspected the roof.

Perfect for solar.

I asked him for the engineering specifications of the mounting system and hired a structural engineer to verify that the roof could safely support it.

Between the engineer and the lawyer, I had already spent around 40,000 baht.

We signed the agreement.

They would get stable electricity with no outages at roughly 30% below utility prices.

I would get my first project.

Everything was ready.

We were waiting for one final document: formal approval to install a solar system on the school’s roof.

While we were waiting, the authorities carried out a surprise inspection.

It turned out the school was missing some of the licenses required to legally operate.

Even a school wasn’t guaranteed to still be around in three years.

I gave up on the solar leasing business and went back to building SaaS companies.

Using what I had learned, I installed a large solar system at our next house.

It now covers almost our entire electricity bill.

Not long ago we invited a bunch of friends over for Friday night dinner.

Halfway through the meal, the power went out.

It turned out I had forgotten to pay the electricity bill.

The utility had disconnected us two days earlier.

We’d been running on the batteries the whole time without noticing.

Fast forward 4 years.

Near the end of my internship, Tzafrir - the partner responsible for me, a real mensch - calls me in for a hard conversation. The gist:
“You are the biggest disappointment in the history of this firm.” They’d never had an intern with a wider gap between potential and actual performance.

It got to the point where they didn’t trust me to photocopy documents.

My head was buried deep in the business I’d built during law school. I couldn’t see any future where I worked as a lawyer.

My only motivation was inertia - I told myself, “you’ve made it this far, finish the track.”

I disappointed everyone at the firm, except my fellow interns, who were happy to have one less competitor for an associate position.

It was embarrassing.

After the internship I tried to pass the bar exam - studied for hours every day for three months - failed, and never tried again.

I promised myself that if I ever made it as an entrepreneur, I’d hire the firm where I interned to represent one of my startups, as compensation for my disgraceful internship.

I owe you guys!

I’m alone in a Cessna 172, on my second solo cross-country flight, approaching to land at Rosh Pina (northern Israel).

My hand is on the throttle. Through the engine noise, I can hear my instructor, Yossi, shouting:

“Whatever happens, don’t let the airspeed drop below 72 knots!!”

Except Yossi isn’t there.

I’m alone in the airplane.

400 feet. 74 knots.

I lower the flaps all the way. On my airplane - CDJ -that means 40 degrees instead of the usual 30, and you can feel the difference.

“Forty degrees is like hitting a wall! The airplane drops like an elevator!!”

I can hear Yossi yelling it in my head.

I push the throttle forward to offset the drag from the flaps.

In another moment I’ll pull the power and transition into the glide over the runway. That part is all feel. I’ve done it dozens of times.

Except this time, the airplane doesn’t feel right.

It’s the first time I’ve ever felt that.

Instead of gliding straight toward the centerline, the airplane starts pulling hard to the left.

I correct with rudder and aileron, but I know that if I touch down like this, there’s a good chance the airplane will flip.

Before I can even explain to myself what’s happening, I hear Yossi again.

“If there’s any doubt - go around!”

I shove the throttle all the way forward. Full power. Flaps back to 10 degrees. The airplane begins climbing, slowly.

“CDJ going around,” I report to the tower.

My stomach drops.

I wanted to call my mom and ask her to come pick me up from this flying lesson.

But I’m alone in the airplane.

I climb out and fly another circuit, explaining to myself it was a strong crosswind pushing me left.

You don’t get to order crosswinds for flight training, and I’d never practiced landing in one this strong.

I turn final for my second attempt.

A few feet above the runway - and it happens again.

The airplane swings hard left. My correction isn’t enough. We’re crossing the threshold at a bad angle, and I know that if I land now, I’ll wake up in a hospital if I’m lucky.

Full power again. Flaps to 10 degrees.

“CDJ going around. If I can’t make it this time, I’ll head back to Herzliya,” I tell the tower.

But I wasn’t really telling them. I was telling myself.

The fuel is running low.

I’ve decided the landing conditions at Rosh Pina are beyond my skill level. Instead of wasting more fuel trying to force it, I’d rather fly back to Herzliya, where I’d never seen winds like these and where I had dozens of successful landings behind me.

I line up for one last attempt.

This time I point the airplane further into the wind, letting the crosswind correct the drift instead of fighting it at the last second.

Honestly, I don’t remember much about that third landing.

What I do remember is the moment all three wheels were rolling on the runway.

My heart rate was probably 200.

And I felt more alive than I had in a very long time.

A few months later, I passed my checkride and earned my pilot’s license.

After we shut down, the examiner looked at me and said:

“Well... you don’t know how to fly an airplane.

But you fly safely enough to teach yourself.”

I flew to the US and went from bank branch to bank branch, begging someone to open an account for me so we could sell on Amazon too. Eventually a branch in Las Vegas said yes.

The business grew nicely and we were making $20,000–$30,000 a month. Two single students living on a $2,000 monthly budget - we had no idea what to do with that kind of money, so we just let it pile up in the bank.

Then a friend who was building a startup offered us the chance to be his first investors.

The company was called Weissbeerger, and the product: smart beer tables - everyone pours their own from a tap at the table and pays by the drop.

We did our due diligence. We went to talk to bar owners, and every single one of them told us to walk away. Nobody would ever put a thing like that in their bar.

We decided not to invest.

But we set up a meeting with the founders anyway - at least we’d share what we’d learned from the market.

We walked into the meeting to give advice. We walked out with a final decision to invest.

Back to the American bank, where the money from the business was sitting. The most efficient way to move it to Israel at the time was withdrawing cash from an ATM. There was a daily withdrawal limit, so it took a few weeks of daily withdrawals to collect the full investment amount.

When the money was ready, I put the bills in a shoebox and drove to Tel Aviv.

I handed the founders a shoebox full of cash, and became the company’s first investor.

Weissbeerger quickly moved on from smart tables and invented a new category - Beverage Analytics.

Years later, they were acquired by AB InBev, the largest beverage company in the world.

“Babe, I think I’m having contractions.”

The bag had been packed for weeks. We were ready to head down to the car and drive to the hospital.

While Lital got herself together, I called the friends who’d been on standby for a month to take one-year-old Yan.

“Whenever it happens, call us. Any hour. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

He didn’t answer.

I called his wife. She didn’t answer either.

Screaming from the bathroom.

Lital had become a pile of pain and screams.

I realized there was no way we were getting her down to the car.

What do we do?

This is a medical situation, I thought. Call an ambulance.

I explained that I thought my wife was giving birth in our bathtub.

“Check if you can see the baby’s head.”

“Say I see a head - what do you want me to do with it?”

They told me to stay calm. It was a natural process. An ambulance was on the way.

I hung up and tried our friends again.

Still no answer.

The paramedics arrived.

“You’re delivering here at home, right?”

“Absolutely not. We’re taking her to the hospital - a sterile delivery room, all the proper equipment.”

Fifteen minutes later, Tommy was born.

On a stretcher.

In the kitchen.

The idea: take the new AI models that could generate realistic images and video, and build a tool for online influencers. Instead of flying to exotic locations and shooting with a camera, they could make the same content from home, for a fraction of the cost.

It started with needing someone to believe me.

I have a technical co-founder with twenty years’ experience, but the business had to start with me. I had to show enough proof in the idea for him to write the first line of code.

So I went to influencers. Describing the tool in words didn’t work - so I started sending them AI images of themselves in places they’d never been: skydiving, diving with sharks, floating in space. That opened the conversation.

Within two weeks we had a few paying customers - creators paying me to make the AI images by hand. That was the proof my partner needed. He built the product.

We moved those first users onto the real app. We hit $1,000 a month.

And there we stalled.

The AI looked impressive, but influencers kept coming back with the same note: “It’s not 100% me.” Small deviations - the limits of the tech. An outsider wouldn’t notice. But someone looking at their own face does. For an influencer, that’s everything. We were stuck there for months.

Borrowing an audience to grow.

To learn the market, I joined Telegram groups about AI content monetization. One day I saw a creator who taught thousands of people how to earn income with virtual AI influencers. He was recommending a competitor app of ours as an affiliate, for a small commission per referral.

I came back with a different offer: forget the referral fee - come in as an equal partner, a co-owner of the SaaS.

We didn’t know each other, so we started with a two-month trial. We’d see if he could really bring paying customers; he’d see if we could build something people pay for.

Two weeks in, he dropped our app’s link to his community.

Within days, he’d brought in nearly 200 paying customers. I remember watching the payment notifications stack up on my phone, one after another, and understanding that something had just changed.

His audience was the missing piece. We registered a company, the three of us as equal partners.

We also figured out why it suddenly worked: his niche was AI influencers - fully invented personas, built from scratch. Nobody was looking at their own face, so the small inaccuracies didn’t matter. The thing we’d been stuck on for months simply stopped being a problem.

We’d traded a third of the company for an audience that already trusted him. It took us to $30,000 a month.

The climb to $90K.

His community wasn’t just revenue - it was data. We learned which features people actually used, which messages pulled the right buyers. That first audience was the seed; everything after grew from what it taught us.

So we pushed. A referral program - paying our own users to bring in people who trusted them. Paid videos with YouTube creators in the AI space. Same play every time: renting trust from people who’d spent years earning it.

It was fast and a little unhinged. We went from a few thousand image generations a week to millions, server bills climbing, shipping features weekly just to keep up. Less than a year in, we crossed $90,000 a month.

A rocket built almost entirely on borrowed trust.

The part I didn’t see coming.

Then we hit a different kind of dependency: the payment processors.

The first one shut us down one day, no warning. Every subscription, all the revenue, gone overnight. The reason was boilerplate - “doesn’t meet our policy.” What I learned later: realistic AI-generated content scares the whole payment world. The card networks above the processors are afraid of the brand risk of enabling tools that could make harmful content.

A processor moving billions a year has no reason to spend a person’s time vetting a business our size. Cutting us was simply the safe move.

I found a younger, hungrier processor. Did a video call with their CEO, went deep on the business - it felt personal this time, two founders building something together.

Within two months, they cut us too.

Then came an established processor, twenty years in the business. We spent weeks with their compliance team building a system that would pass any check. It worked. The business grew on what finally felt like solid ground.

We only survived all that switching because our users trusted the company enough to re-subscribe every time we changed payment rails.

The collapse.

Half a year later, I got ‘the call’ directly from our third processor’s CEO. Because of our relationship, he called personally to tell me before the automation took over. He was frustrated - he wasn’t cutting us because he wanted to. He was being forced to by the card networks above him. They put it in writing:

We’ve invested significant resources to keep this category compliant. Despite this, fines continue to be issued aggressively by the card networks, often without clear explanation. This has become unsustainable. We’ve made the decision to discontinue support for products involving AI-generated images, videos, and songs, and to suspend such accounts effective immediately.

He said he was willing to fight it, to appeal. I took a day, then called back and told him not to waste his energy.

We could have gone hunting for a fourth processor, and a fifth. But after three of them hit the exact same wall, I stopped blaming the processors. They weren’t the ones making the call. The card networks had decided that businesses like ours - small, in a category they saw as high-risk - weren’t worth the trouble. The big, established players in the space had the size and the relationships to weather it. We didn’t.

$90,000 a month, and within a day, the ground was gone.

What it taught me.

Here’s the thing, though: the growth engine never broke. The way we got to $90K worked exactly as I’d hoped. What broke was the payment plumbing underneath it -
a completely separate problem from how we grew.

And that’s the part I’m keeping.

My last SAAS company, CrazyLister, took three years to pass $90K a month. I built it the slow way - earning my own audience over years. This one took less than a year, because I didn’t build the audience. I borrowed it. I found people who’d already spent years earning a crowd’s trust, and I plugged into what they’d built.

That’s the real lesson, and it’s not a cautionary one: you can skip the slowest, hardest part of building a business by renting trust someone else already earned. Years of audience-building, compressed into months. It’s the biggest shortcut I’ve found, and I’m taking it into the next one.

So now we start by partnering with people who already have a trusted audience - and build from there.

We’re waiting on Lital’s visa (my wife) from the Thai embassy, so we can go home - to Thailand. I got mine a week earlier, in an email that landed at 14:27. Friends we were traveling with got theirs a few days later, at 14:29. We figured out there’s probably an automated system that sends the approvals in a window of a few minutes before three. So every day, just before three, I sit and refresh.

Two and a half weeks have passed. The friends already went back to Thailand. We’re still here - stuck for another weekend because the embassy is closed, waiting for it to reopen Monday. The kids have missed two and a half weeks of school, glued to their tablets. The Vietnamese never did anything to me, but I can’t stand the sight of Vietnam anymore. I just want to go home.

14:30. I keep refreshing, but the hope is draining out. At 14:35 I accept reality - we’re stuck here another day. I let out a breath and book another night at the hotel.

I called the embassy. I went there in person. All I get is “nothing to do, just keep waiting.” A blank wall.

My whole life I’ve made choices to give myself as much freedom as possible. And now, for two and a half weeks, my whole family’s life is on PAUSE. We’re living out of suitcases in a hotel, completely dependent on some random clerk I’ve never met, who’ll sign Lital’s paper whenever it suits him. There’s no arguing with him, no one to call, nothing to do but wait.

How did we get here? Why did we even have to leave our home in Thailand to get permission to come back to it?

Turns out it all started with a Serbian guy with a gun.

When the World Was Open

A little over a hundred years ago, in most of the world, you didn’t need a passport to cross a border. Passports existed - but they were an option, not a requirement. One could buy a ticket in Europe and board a ship to America, or sail from Germany to China, and step off on the other side without a single official asking who he was or why he’d come. No visa issued in advance, no fingerprint, no embassy interview. The closest thing to a passport actually served the opposite purpose to today’s: not a document the state demands to prove you’re allowed in, but a kind of letter of protection a nobleman or merchant would request from his ruler - a note asking the authorities along the way to treat him well and help him out if he ran into trouble. For the ordinary person, it didn’t apply. You just showed up.

And in my own neighborhood specifically - in the late 19th century, Siam (today’s Thailand) threw its gates wide open. King Rama V wanted working hands to build ports, railways, canals. So he just opened the door and invited everyone in.

Between 1825 and 1910, the Chinese population in Siam grew from 230,000 to nearly 800,000. Thailand almost never closed the door. People just arrived, unpacked their bags, and lived - no passport, no visa, no flying to a neighboring country to sit in a hotel and refresh email like an addict.

Then came 1914. Someone shot an Austrian duke, and half the planet decided that was an excellent reason to kill each other for four years.

And in the chaos, in a short span of time, government after government reached the same conclusion: if we’re in a world war, we’d better know exactly who’s crossing our borders. Maybe this guy’s a spy. Maybe he’s dodging the draft. Let’s make everyone carry a document with a name and a photo.

That’s how the modern passport was born. Not as an orderly plan to run the world, but as a temporary emergency measure in the middle of a war. Britain and France started, and within a few years the whole world had shut itself behind fences.

Thailand joined in 1917 - not out of a desire to control its own residents, but out of necessity. When the whole world suddenly demands passports, your own citizens and merchants get stuck in foreign ports without papers. So Thailand had to build a fence of its own, just so its people could get the key that would move them through everyone else’s fences.

Friend or Enemy?

Passports and visas were supposed to be a temporary fix. After the war, in the 1920s, more than a few leaders and international officials hoped they’d go back to being an emergency measure only, and that we’d return to the freedom of movement of before 1914. It didn’t happen - partly because governments don’t tend to give up tools of tracking and control. A fence is a lot easier to build than to take down. A hundred years later, I’m paying the cost of that fence still standing, in a hotel room in Hanoi.

And this history explains exactly why I, of all people, got stuck.

The passport was born from a wartime mentality, to answer one question: is this person ours or not ours? Friend or enemy? It’s completely binary thinking. And it worked fine as long as people really were one of two things: either citizens who live inside, or tourists who come for a short visit and go back to their “home country.”

Except my family and I are neither.

I’m not a Thai citizen - and I’m not a tourist either. I was born in Ukraine, raised in Israel, and I’m raising my kids on an island in Thailand. I live there, the kids go to school there, we adopted a dog, we fucking learned Thai - but I don’t have a Thai passport. I have an Israeli passport, and Israel is the place every system assumes I “return” to. Except I’m not returning there right now. I live in Thailand. That gap - between the country my paper points to and the place I actually live - is exactly the hole I fall into.

And the problem isn’t that there’s no slot for me. There are visas today for nomads, for temporary residents, for foreign workers - you can find a form. The problem is that all of those slots are built on the same assumption: that you’re here temporarily, and that your real home is somewhere else. Every one of those visas basically says, “we’re hosting you for a while - and then you’ll go back to where you belong.”

Except I don’t belong somewhere else. Thailand is home. This is where I live, where the kids are growing up, where the life is being built. I’m not trying to sneak in, not looking for a loophole - I just want the paper to recognize what already exists: that I live here. A long-term visa, a stable status, without counting days until the next renewal.

But here’s the absurd part: to move into that status - the status of someone who lives here - I first had to leave here. You can’t switch visa types from inside. You have to leave the country, apply from a Thai embassy abroad, and wait there for permission to come back in.

To get the status of “someone who lives in Thailand,” I had to stop, for a moment, living in Thailand.

Once I get this visa, I’ll be stable. I won’t have to leave again. But the transition itself - the moment I officially turn from visitor to resident - the system insists I do from the outside. Because in its eyes, “entering” is something that only happens from the outside, even when you’re already inside. Even when you’re already home. So I packed up the family, left my home, flew to a foreign country, paid for hotels, and refreshed an inbox until my finger hurt.

Early Adopters of a New Way of Living

I’m describing the problems of the privileged here. There are people who cross borders to flee terrible things. My parents fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union in 1990, with no property, no means, with a box of vodka bottles they traded for bananas in Hungary on the way to Israel.

Our choices today come from wanting to build a life that fits us better, not because we’re fleeing something terrible.

So think about who early adopters really are. They’re not smarter or braver than anyone else. They’re just people whose need for something is so strong that they’re willing to suffer for it. They buy the first version of the product - the one that crashes halfway, that’s missing half its features, that has no support - because what it gives them is worth more to them than all the bugs. They pay in frustration now, in exchange for something everyone else will get polished and convenient only years later.

That’s me, with this way of living. My need to live where I choose - without anyone deciding for me where I “belong” - is apparently strong enough that I’m willing to absorb the system’s bugs. And the bugs are big: flying to a foreign country to ask permission to come home, two and a half weeks in a hotel, forms in Thai designed for a tourist from the 1950s. This is the first, janky version of living without one country managing you. It doesn’t have tech support yet.

One day maybe they’ll build a system that fits people like me. Meanwhile, I’m sitting in a hotel room in Hanoi, refreshing email.

And I’d still choose this again.

Inside, I’m panicking. But I fake a reassuring smile for my son — it’s fine, nothing to worry about - while I stroke his head. They push the white anesthetic into his vein. He shivers, says “Dad, it’s so cold,” and goes under.

They wheel him into the operating room, and I go back to the waiting room with the rest of the family.

My mind races. We’re playing with fire. What if something goes wrong? We’re on an island, in a foreign country, and our son is sedated, intubated, and being operated on by a doctor we know almost nothing about - who barely speaks our language.

We’d asked for information beforehand. They told us he’d done six tonsillectomies in the past year. Two of them on children.

I had no idea what to do with that number. Is six a lot, or a little? Does that make him experienced, or not? Back in Israel, “six surgeries last year” would have meant something to me. I know that system from experience. I have doctor friends. I know how to check a specific surgeon, how to read between the lines, who to call. The number would have had context.

Here, on an island in Thailand, the same number is just a number. I have no way to judge it. And that’s the part nobody warns you about - it’s not that there’s no system here. It’s that I lost the ability to read the one I’m standing in.

So the questions kept coming. Would more responsible parents have flown back to Israel for this? Did we take this whole new-life-in-Thailand adventure too far?

Leaving the standard package of life sounds romantic. Cool, even. Free.

And then they put your kid under for surgery, and shit gets real.

He came out fine. Groggy, asking for the promised ice cream, completely unbothered - the way kids are.

And the truth is, I wasn’t shaking. I was relieved, and a little surprised at how relieved. I’m an optimist by nature - I’m the guy who assumes it’ll work out, which is probably how we ended up on a Thai island in the first place. But this one stretched even me. It was the first time my optimism and my appetite for adventure ran right up against their limit, and I felt it.

Back in the 16th century, the currency of choice in West Africa was glass beads. The locals didn’t have the technology to manufacture glass, making these beads a scarce resource that required serious effort to acquire. They arrived via complex overland trade routes, and people traded high-value goods like gold, ivory, and spices- things that took real backbreaking labor to produce - just to get them.

And then, the Europeans showed up.

As soon as European traders hit the African coast, they realized exactly how much those glass beads meant to the locals. So, they did what any enterprising colonizer would do: they flooded the continent with cheap, mass-produced beads made in Venice. Using this practically free “money,” the Europeans bought up goods, gold, and eventually, human beings as slaves.

The result? A whole continent’s wealth, time, and energy were sucked into a product with zero intrinsic economic value. These “Slave Beads” went down in history as the ultimate textbook example of a system where one side manufactures currency with minimum effort, while the other side works themselves to the bone for it - a heist executed without firing a single shot.

Money is Just a Story We All Agree to Believe In

We recently sold our house. The return I got for it is just a bunch of larger digits in my digital bank account. This whole transaction worked for one reason only: I believe that some total strangers in the future will be willing to give me real-world, valuable goods and services just so I can tweak those same digital numbers in their accounts - numbers that have absolutely no real-world value on their own.

If I were to travel 10,000 years back in time with my impressive new bank balance, or even a suitcase stuffed with millions of dollars in cash, I probably wouldn’t be able to buy anything of substance. Unless, of course, someone back then thought my green illustrated papers had nice decorative value.

That’s because 10,000 years ago, at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, the story of money hadn’t been invented yet. People exchanged actual value and physical goods - chickens for sacks of wheat, and so on.

This exact storyline repeats itself throughout history.

Take the Yap Islands in the Pacific Ocean, where giant “Rai stones” functioned as currency. Their value came from the sheer difficulty of carving them out of limestone on the distant island of Palau, and then rowing them 400 kilometers back home across the treacherous open ocean in canoes. The more labor and risk a stone required, the more it was worth. That’s Proof of Work right there - the very difficulty of producing the currency is what protects it from being counterfeited. (By the way, that’s what gives Bitcoin its value too.)

This worked beautifully until the 19th century, when an Irish captain named David O’Keefe showed up with a modern ship. He started hauling massive stones from Palau cheaply and in bulk, effectively “hacking” the currency and making himself the richest man on the island.

In short: When one side can produce the currency for free, commerce turns into polite robbery.

So, What’s Our Situation Today?

Honestly? Not much has changed.

If the Europeans back then actually had to manufacture glass in Venice, and David O’Keefe had to physically haul heavy stones on a ship - today, governments and corporations can manufacture money with zero effort, from an air-conditioned office, with a simple tap on a keyboard.

A global pandemic hits? Need more cash? Click, click - and boom, another $10 trillion is injected into the market.

Meanwhile, the rest of humanity has to trade their life energy, skills, and that most precious, finite resource of all - time - just to earn that same money.

Wait, so the government is basically acting like those Europeans flooding Africa with worthless glass?

Yeah, pretty much - except not out of malice. Governments print money to keep economies from collapsing, to fund crises, to avoid mass unemployment. The intent is usually to help. But the effect on whoever’s holding the cash is the same: their savings quietly lose value, whether the motive was greed or rescue.

Take your average grocery cart as an example. If it cost $100 in 1990, by 2020, that exact same cart cost nearly $200. In other words, your dollar lost half its purchasing power - slowly, quietly, over thirty years. That was the “normal” rate of decay.

And then COVID-19 happened, and the game changed. To keep the economy afloat, trillions of new dollars were birthed in a tiny window of time. The money supply (every single dollar existing in bank accounts and cash) spiked by about 40% in just two years. When you almost double the amount of money floating around but don’t double the amount of stuff there is to buy, each dollar naturally buys less.

And that’s exactly what went down. The kind of wealth erosion that used to take a decade happened in just two to three years. Inflation hit a 40-year high, and purchasing power evaporated by more than 20% in a flash. That grocery cart got expensive again - only this time, it happened at warp speed.

The Africans in the 16th century weren’t stupid - they just had no way of knowing the Europeans could manufacture their currency for free. We, on the other hand, do know.

So, what am I doing with my glass beads?

My logic is dead simple: in every historical script, the people who got wiped out were the ones holding the stuff that was easy to replicate - glass beads, stones, digital numbers. The winners were the ones holding the stuff you can’t fake: gold, land, real assets. So, I try to stay on the side of the fence that can’t be manufactured out of thin air.

So here's what I actually hold:

• Broad Market Index Funds (ETFs): When new money gets pumped into the economy, it doesn’t just vanish; it flows somewhere. A huge chunk of it flows straight into the biggest, most profitable companies in the world through the stuff we all buy and use every single day. Instead of holding onto cash that’s actively melting away, I prefer owning a piece of the companies that the cash is flowing into - assets that generate real value, rather than paper explicitly designed to lose it.

  Tax Optimization: As a tax resident of Thailand, I’m not subject to the Israeli 25% capital gains tax - which is a pretty sweet leverage point.

• Bitcoin: If stocks are a stake in the engines of production, Bitcoin is the direct antidote to the glass bead problem. It’s the only asset out there with a genuinely fixed supply - 21 million, final, hardcoded. No government, bank, or tech breakthrough can print more of it. Unlike gold (which we keep mining) and thde dollar (which we keep printing), Bitcoin cannot be diluted. For the first time in human history, the “beads” are finite.

I have no idea what the future holds, and I’m certainly no financial advisor - but I don’t want to be the one holding the glass beads.

Me getting dengue is like Elon Musk crashing a self-driving Tesla.

For four years I was the Founder and CEO of Diptera.ai, where we built technology to fight dengue, malaria, and other mosquito-borne diseases. Then I left - and less than six months later, a mosquito put me in bed for two weeks.

It started small. I felt weak, figured I was dehydrated. The next morning it was worse, and a blood test came back with the answer: dengue. High fever, body aches, and in the bad cases, real complications. Even death.

The irony stings, because at Diptera the whole point was stopping exactly this. We developed technology to fight mosquitoes with mosquitoes - an approach called the Sterile Insect Technique. We’d mass-produce sterile male mosquitoes (males don’t bite), release them into the wild, and they’d mate with the females, whose eggs then never hatch. The local population collapses. No pesticides, no poisons - the mosquitoes end the mosquitoes.

It was the most fascinating company I’ve ever worked on. Brilliant people, backing from the Gates Foundation, and a mission I genuinely believed in: mosquitoes are the deadliest animal on earth, killing hundreds of thousands of people a year - most from malaria, most of them children in Africa. The technology we built is deployed there now, fighting exactly that. It’s hard to imagine work that matters more.

And still - after four years, I couldn’t turn it into a business. The science worked; the business didn’t. I left, a new CEO took over, and then the disease I’d spent four years trying to stop came for me personally.

Day after day my blood levels dropped. I got close to being hospitalized. There’s no treatment and no cure - you wait, and hope your body wins. I also learned that a second case is usually worse than the first, which is a strange thing to sit with: the next bite could be the one that lands me in a hospital.

What got to me wasn’t the fever, though. For months I’d already been frustrated that I hadn’t built anything that worked lately. Being sick made it concrete - lying in bed, useless, unable to even help with the house or the kids while everyone else carried the weight.

Somewhere in the recovery, that frustration turned into something sharper. Not a grand idea about purpose - I wasn’t there. Just a plain need to feel useful again. To pull my weight. So once I could stand, I got back to building something new. I didn’t know if it would work, or if it was even the right thing. I just couldn’t stand still.

A note from now (June 2026):

Reading this back, what stays with me isn’t the dengue - it’s that last part. At the time I thought I just needed to get back to work. To feel useful, to stop being a burden. That’s all I could see.

It took a while to understand what was underneath it. The thing I threw myself into worked for a bit and then ended. So did a couple of things after it. And somewhere along the way I realized it was never really about staying busy, or even about building a business. It was about wanting the work to mean something - not just to make money or free up my time. I didn’t have the words for that yet when I wrote this.

In 2015 I co-founded CrazyLister, software that helps eBay sellers build professional-looking listings. We made every mistake in the book - including raising venture capital, which in hindsight was the biggest one. We grew it to $2M a year in revenue, swimming hard against a declining market the whole way.

Here’s the thing about $2M ARR: for the founders, it’s life-changing. For a VC, it barely registers. We’d accidentally built a micro-SaaS - a small, niche software business that doesn’t fit the venture model because the market’s just too small to ever return a fund. We spent years trying to force a small-but-great business to behave like a rocket ship. It was never going to.

But that “modest” business did something the rocket ships often don’t: it gave me my freedom. CrazyLister is what funded my pilot’s license. It’s what let me spend four years building a crazy deep-tech company - Diptera.ai. It’s what made it possible to move my family to Thailand on nine hours’ notice. The money was modest; the freedom it bought was not.

That’s why, years later, I’m still a believer in micro-SaaS as a tool for freedom - for the people who can build it.

A micro-SaaS can be run from anywhere, by a tiny team, with low overhead. It throws off income without eating your life. In a world where more and more people want control over their own time, a small software business that quietly pays the bills is one of the most direct paths there is to getting it.

The catch is in that phrase - for the people who can build it. This isn’t passive income or a side-hustle fantasy. Building software that strangers will pay for, month after month, is hard, and most attempts don’t make it. I’m not selling the dream. I’m saying that if you have the skills to build one, a micro-SaaS is one of the highest-leverage things you can do with them - not because it’ll make you rich, but because it can buy back the one thing you can’t earn more of: your time.

And if you’re wondering how much you’d actually need to be free, here’s the sobering math - and why you can’t save your way there.

In short: the average monthly expenses for a Western family with two or three children run between 200,000–300,000 THB a month - roughly $6,000–9,000.

The hardest part of living here isn’t the cost, though. It’s earning the money in the first place. Broadly, I see three ways people make a living on the island:

Digital nomads - working on a laptop for a company that pays a Western salary, or running their online business from here.

Local earners - making a living on the island itself, usually through tourism or real estate.

The retired - pensioners, people who’ve sold a business, inheritors. Essentially, those who don’t need to work anymore.

Here’s where the money actually goes, for a typical Western family:

Housing: 70,000 THB (~$2,150) / month
International school: 20,000 THB (~$615) per child / month
Food (groceries + eating out): 50,000 THB (~$1,540) / month
Car: 20,000 THB (~$615) / month
Health insurance (whole family): 10,000 THB (~$310) / month
Activities (kids and parents): 10,000 THB (~$310) / month

On top of that come the smaller things - electricity, water, fuel, household shopping, the occasional massage, a babysitter, day trips. And the schools here have a lot of holidays, which quietly turns into real money: camps, trips, and activities to fill the weeks the kids are off.

What surprised me most wasn’t any single number. It was the contrast. An average Thai family here lives on around 30,000 THB a month - about $900. You’ll see five of them on one old scooter, and they seem genuinely happy with their life. I don’t want to romanticize it - 30,000 THB is tight, and “happy on less” is easier to admire from the outside. But it has stuck with me as a question I keep turning over: how much of what we spend actually buys us anything that matters?

When an AI makes an image, it doesn’t start with a blank canvas and draw. It starts with the opposite: a screen of pure noise, random meaningless pixels. Then you give it a prompt - “a cat playing piano” - and it works backwards, removing the noise in stages. Each pass wipes away a little more chaos, and the parts that match the prompt slowly sharpen into focus. It knows what to remove because it was trained on millions of real images turned to static and back. It’s not building the picture. It’s uncovering it - pulling the signal out of the noise, one step at a time.

I think building a new life works the same way.

We started with total noise. We landed in a new country with no plan, knowing no one and nothing. New places, new people, new ideas - all of it random, all of it static.

The prompt: “When I’m old, I want to look back with as little regret as possible.”

And then the noise removal. The noise is the decisions I’ll regret later. Some I can already name because I’ve lived the regret. I skipped the big trip after the army - and I’ll never get to see the world as a young person with nothing to lose. That one’s fixed; it’s developed. I can’t re-shoot it.

The one I’m working on now: I don’t want to miss the short window where I get to be my kids’ hero. And honestly, most of the time I’m bad at it. It’s easier for me to sit at the computer or talk to friends than to get on the floor and play. But I’ve made one rule for myself - whenever they ask, I put them on my shoulders. Because every day they get a little heavier, and my back gets a little weaker, and one day they’ll stop asking. I don’t want to regret not carrying them while I still could, and while they still wanted me to.

Getting closer to the image. I’m trying to remove the noise using my own regrets and other people’s. I regretted not traveling young, so at 40 I moved my family across the world. Older people, near the end, tend to regret the same thing - not enough time with the people they loved. So I borrow their hindsight, because my own default is to work without stopping, driven by the pressure to provide.

Someone who’d been reading what I write put it better than I could: he said he wanted to raise his kids by being with them, not just by providing for them.

That’s the whole prompt, really. The rest is just removing the noise, one pass at a time, and hoping the picture that emerges is one I won’t regret.

Think about it from evolution’s point of view. When you’re asleep, you’re defenseless - blind, slow, oblivious, easy prey. For a third of your life, you’re a sitting duck. Any mutation that let an animal skip it, or cut it down, should have been a massive survival advantage. And yet sleep is everywhere. Every creature with a nervous system does it, and the ones that try to skip it die.

The only way that adds up: the benefits of sleep must be so enormous that they outweigh spending a third of your life helpless. Evolution ran the cost-benefit, over hundreds of millions of years, and sleep won every time. There isn’t a system in the body or brain that doesn’t depend on it.

Which makes what I’ve been doing kind of absurd.

For about two years, I’ve had the same problem. I fall asleep fine, then wake at 3 or 4 in the morning and can’t get back down - lying there for hours, turning over every problem in my life, watching the next day get ruined before it starts. If you’ve been there, you know how lonely 3 AM is.

So I did what I do - I went and learned the subject. There’s a whole field called “sleep hygiene”: same bedtime, dark room, cool room, no caffeine, no screens before bed. I did all of it. It helped a little, then the problem crept back. I was up before five most mornings, running on less than six hours.

Then, on a day I’d completely unplugged - no work, no phone - I slept eight hours straight for the first time in ages.

I almost missed why. It wasn’t the dark room or the caffeine; I’d been doing those for months. The only thing different was that I hadn’t worked right up until I closed my eyes. Normally I’m on the laptop or phone until the second I get into bed - then I lie down and wonder why my brain won’t switch off.

The next night I tried it on purpose: work and phone away two hours before bed. Slept well again.

And that’s the part that got me. Evolution decided sleep was worth being eaten for. And I’d been treating it as the first thing to sacrifice - borrowing against the one mechanism so vital that no animal on earth has been allowed to skip it, just to squeeze in a couple more hours of email. Work had quietly expanded to fill every waking minute, and then leaked past that, into the night, keeping my mind running while my body tried to shut down.

I’m still working on it; I haven’t solved it. But I’ve stopped treating sleep as a luxury I can borrow against. Evolution spent hundreds of millions of years deciding it wasn’t optional. The least I can do is stop scheduling work right up to the edge of it.

I told him I’d never understood why office chairs rock at all. I’m sitting at a desk to work - if I wanted to rock, I’d buy a rocking chair.

He said he likes to lean back and rock while he thinks - while he plans out his work before he does it.

That stopped me, because I realized I don’t really have a planning phase. I never have.

I don’t plan my work. I start doing it, and figure out what it’s supposed to be while I’m in it.

Take these posts. I don’t outline them. I don’t jot down the message I want to land or map the structure first. I sit down and start writing in whatever direction feels interesting in the moment. Then I read back what came out, a few times, and that’s when the actual point starts to surface - what this is really about, how to make it land. The thinking happens after the doing, not before.

I build companies the same way. I don’t start with a plan; I start with curiosity about some field. Then I rush to sell something to someone in it as fast as I can. And only once real paying customers show up do I start figuring out who they actually are, what they’re really paying for, and where the thing wants to go.

Turns out I’m in reasonable company with this. It’s roughly how SpaceX builds rockets - not by planning the perfect rocket on paper and launching once, but by building one, flying it, watching it blow up, learning, and doing it again. Iteration over planning. (Granted, the stakes on my version are slightly lower than an exploding rocket - but the wiring is the same.)

For years I half-assumed acting-before-planning was a flaw - that real, serious people plan first, and I was just winging it. I’ve come to think it’s not a flaw. It’s just a different wiring. Some people think their way to action. I act my way to clarity. Neither is better; they’re just two different engines.

My friend needs the rock to think before he moves. I need to move before I can think.

Do you think first, then act? Or act first, then think?

He’s right. This is one of the best places on earth to be very young or very old. Children grow up secure, barefoot, and free, without a care in the world. And retirees who come to spend their last years get an endless reel of breathtaking views to watch as the credits roll. The bookends of life are beautifully served here.

It’s the middle that’s the problem.

Because if you’re in mid-life - still building a career, still earning a living, still trying to become something - the island works against the very thing that’s pulled at me my whole life. There’s almost no FOMO here. People drive at 50 km/h, and life moves at the same pace: not much happens, and what does happens slowly. There’s little of the comparison and achievement pressure I grew up swimming in. No matter how much money you have, everyone ends up at the same café and the same supermarket. There are fewer signals, fewer reminders that you should be doing more, climbing more, proving more.

Which sounds like paradise - and mostly is. But I’ve spent my life running on exactly those signals. The drive, the FOMO, the constant low hum of “you should be building something bigger.” Take that away, and you find out how much of your motivation was actually yours, versus how much was just the current you were swimming in.

In the West it’s a rat race. Here it’s more of a sloth crawl. The rat race is exhausting. But the sloth crawl has its own quiet danger: it’s very easy to stop moving entirely, and feel completely fine about it.

I don’t think the answer is fast or slow anymore. It’s choosing your pace on purpose, instead of just absorbing whatever the place around you sets.