![[Brazil_Reflections_Part_2.mp3]] ## A Note on Timing This post isn’t about the trip itself. It’s about the stretch of life that made the trip matter. The weeks I spent in Brazil came at a moment when the structure that had organized my life for years finally loosened. Before writing about what I experienced there, I need to explain the systems I built, the tradeoffs I made, and the kind of person I became in the years leading up to it. This is the context that shaped everything that followed. ## A Life Optimized for Work For most of the last eight years, if someone asked me who I was, my answer was simple: **I’m an engineer, and I move a lot for work.** On average, I moved about once a year. Work didn’t just determine how I spent my time—it dictated where I lived, what I owned, how I structured my days, and which parts of myself I allowed to develop. In many ways, that focus worked. I became very good at my job. I earned the respect of the people I worked with, received employee-of-the-year recognition, and developed systems that were reliable, proven, and resilient. I regularly worked eighty-plus-hour weeks, and there were stretches where work consumed nearly everything—sometimes twenty-six hours at a time. If there was ever a question of priority, work came first. More importantly, I learned how to be an adult. During that period, I stopped hating myself. I learned how to take care of my mental health, my physical health, and my responsibilities. I developed a strong sense of who I am, what I like, what I need, and how to be comfortable being myself. That part of my life became stable, grounded, and internally coherent. But it was also narrow. Outside of work, my life was quiet. I went home, then went to work, then came back home again. My hobbies were mostly passive—video games and television—until the final stretch of those eight years, when I began introducing habits like going to the gym, writing, and photography. I didn’t spend much time building relationships outside of my family. I didn’t date. I didn’t put myself in situations that required much emotional risk. The constant movement felt freeing in one sense. It also became a convenient excuse. I told myself that this level of devotion was necessary—that the only way to reach my financial goals was to give everything else up temporarily. Work became both the engine and the justification. I couldn’t have hobbies because I moved too much. I couldn’t have relationships because I didn’t know where I’d be next. I couldn’t buy certain things—like a drum set I thought about for years—because they were too bulky to move. In reality, I had choices. I had free time. It would have been difficult to build those parts of life, but not impossible. I said no anyway. When people asked where home was, my answer was usually some version of: _wherever the job is._ This short-term mindset kept me safe. It also kept me detached. I rarely put myself in positions where I could be harmed by other people. I didn’t risk much vulnerability—friendships or romantic relationships that would require openness, uncertainty, or emotional exposure. On the surface, everything felt temporary. On a deeper level, I think I struggled with the vulnerability required to build something lasting. I feel conflicted when I look back. I’m proud of what I accomplished. I worked hard. I met my goals. But I also question whether the level of fidelity I gave to work was necessary. There were times when I sacrificed sleep, health, and balance unnecessarily—times when I could have asked for help, talked to someone, or built a more sustainable way of living. Instead, I relied on willpower until it ran out. ## When the Structure Fell Away When I finally reached my financial independence goal in June 2025, my immediate reaction wasn’t celebration—it was fear. There had been comfort in the routine and simplicity of devoting myself almost entirely to work. It gave my life a clear structure and a stable identity. Removing that organizing force felt destabilizing. I worried about losing my sense of self, about staring into open time and not knowing how to use it. That fear wasn’t unfamiliar. I knew it was common. Still, it was unsettling to experience firsthand. At the same time, it felt like a beginning. I wasn’t the same person I had been eight years earlier. I was more comfortable being myself. I was more honest—with myself and with other people. The challenge ahead wasn’t competence or discipline. It was exposure. It was learning how to live a full life rather than an optimized one. One value that became clear during this transition was openness—not just understanding myself internally, but allowing myself to be seen. Writing began to matter more, especially the act of publishing it. Vulnerability stopped feeling like a weakness and started feeling like a skill I needed to practice. What surprised me was that changing my circumstances didn’t automatically make these things easier. Especially the things I wasn’t good at yet. Skill still requires repetition. Growth still requires discomfort. There was no shortcut—only practice. ## Travel as Perspective, Not Escape This shift in mindset reshaped how I thought about travel. I traveled constantly for work, but rarely with curiosity. Most of the time, my world consisted of a job site and an apartment. I wasn’t exploring. I wasn’t lingering. I wasn’t trying to understand the places I passed through. The most meaningful travel experiences of my life happened much earlier—during college. I spent ten weeks living with a local family in a small town in Honduras to improve my Spanish. The language improved, but the deeper value came from immersion. One moment that stayed with me involved how different cultures view women’s bodies. I grew up in Southern California, where bikinis at the beach are normal and largely unremarkable. Honduras, by contrast, is more conservative—women often go to the beach fully clothed. At the same time, breastfeeding there is completely unremarkable. Women feed their babies in public without covering themselves, without shame. In the U.S., those values are often reversed. That contradiction forced me to confront assumptions I didn’t realize I was carrying. Neither approach felt obviously right or wrong—but seeing both made it clear that many cultural “truths” are simply defaults. Travel gave me options. It expanded my sense of what life _could_ look like. I had a similar experience working on a farm in rural Idaho. Once again, proximity and duration mattered. Living alongside people, sharing their routines, and seeing their priorities reshaped how I viewed work, time, and success. Because of those experiences, traditional tourist travel never fully appealed to me. I worried that a short trip to a place like New York, Chicago, or Italy would feel hollow—expensive, curated, and disconnected from how people actually live. I wasn’t interested in collecting destinations. I wanted perspective. ## Where This Trip Began This trip didn’t begin with a plane ticket—it began with an invitation. About a year earlier, while working on a job site, I became friends with Laio. At some point along the way, he casually offered to host me in São Paulo. It felt like one of those offers people make generously without expecting it to be taken up. During this shift in my life—from building systems to living within them—I remembered that conversation and reached out. Accepting Laio’s offer wasn’t about travel in the traditional sense. It was about proximity, trust, and choosing to experience a place through a person rather than a plan. In the next post, I’ll write about where Laio and I met, how that offer came to be, and what it meant to finally say yes. This post is the ground beneath that decision. Continue to the next post: [[3. Expectations]]