In August of 1998, when I was 14 years old, my parents pulled my three siblings and me out of school, packed up our house and our bags, and left the country. 

Instead of starting 8th grade in the wealthy suburb of Laguna Niguel, I would be attending a public school in a working-class neighborhood of Campos do Jordão, a mountain town in Southeast Brazil a couple of hours outside São Paulo. My parents had decided to move us to Brazil so we could spend a year fully immersed in Brazilian culture and the Portuguese language. 

I still remember the opposition they had to overcome to make the move: from our teachers and school administrators warning them that we’d surely fall behind academically, from people at our church who said a “third-world country” would be too dangerous for children, and even from our extended family worried we’d lose touch.

Yet looking back, I think this was one of the most pivotal decisions my parents ever made. With the benefit of 26 years of hindsight, I find it hard to express just how dramatically that one year shaped my future. 

It was during that year that I learned to speak Portuguese (I had only been able to understand it up to that point), which in turn opened the door to learning other languages like Spanish and Russian. I connected with my Brazilian roots and learned to see the world through a Brazilian lens, giving me an alternate perspective to the American one.

Brazil was my first overseas immersion, teaching me priceless skills like resilience, adaptability, and the self-confidence that I could find my way in any situation. I went on to further develop those skills during foreign sojourns in Colombia, Ukraine, and Mexico. 

It was in that year that I first found my love of writing. The very first thing I can remember writing of my own free will, not because a teacher demanded it, were emails I sent back home to our family and friends recounting our adventures during road trips around Brazil. It was the first time something happened to me that I felt was worth writing about.

It feels like a decade of memories and lessons were packed into those 12 months. As this essay by Paras Chopra argues, the reason time seems to pass faster as we age is that the novelty of our days declines. We start living the same day again and again, and our brains don’t bother storing memories that are indistinguishable from each other. Chopra’s solution to this dilemma is one I’ve always followed: to “…dive head-first into unknown territory. That is, to travel physically or mentally.”

I’ve spent a lot of time recently reflecting on what kind of childhood I want my kids to have, especially now that they’re leaving the baby stage. I’m determined to recreate the same kind of experience I had as a kid for them. There is no greater gift I can imagine giving them than a new language, a connection to their heritage, and the knowledge that they can adapt to anything.

Which is why we’ve decided to move next summer (note: this has now been moved up to this summer 2024!) to a small mountain town called Valle de Bravo, about two hours outside Mexico City.

Why Mexico?

My wife Lauren and I first considered taking the family to Brazil, but it soon became clear that Mexico made more sense for us, at least for a first round.

Mexico is a lot closer to the U.S., where both our immediate families live, with easy flights from most major cities. It’s very important to us that our kids maintain a connection with their aunts, uncles, and cousins back home, and we expect to visit home often.

Lauren is Mexican-American, so not only is there an existing heritage for her to reconnect with, but once we return to the U.S. there is also an extended clan that will allow our children to maintain the new identities they acquire.

Lastly, Spanish is probably more broadly useful as a language than Portuguese, and once they learn one of them, the other becomes far more accessible (especially if they learn it during their formative early years). I still plan on living in Brazil at some point in the future. 

Why Valle de Bravo?

Mexico City was perfect for our childless, early-30s selves, but we’re now in a different season of our lives, in which getting a fancy meal for cheap isn’t the thrill it once was. Now our highest pleasures are experienced vicariously through our children, and the capital doesn’t seem designed for them.

We visited Mexico as a family recently, and I happened to get an invite from a Mexican entrepreneur to visit his town, and on a whim, I said yes. After a few hours’ drive that ascended into the mountains, we entered a cozy lakeside town that reminded me of Lake Tahoe. It was clearly a wealthy, touristic enclave, but my host told me that a lot of families had moved there during the pandemic and never left.

As I questioned my host and expats I connected with online about what it was like living there, they began to paint a picture of a wonderful lifestyle centered on families, outdoor activities and sports, and pursuits we enjoy like environmental work, spirituality, and culture.

It’s close enough to Mexico City to travel there easily, but far enough to instill a sense of palpable peace and quiet. It’s elevated, which gives it a more temperate climate and cleaner mountain air. It’s quite a small town where everyone seems to know each other, yet it also has an unusually high concentration of entrepreneurs and creatives (both Mexican and foreigners) as well as great food options and amenities. 

One of our primary concerns was finding a good school for our son Caio, and we were delighted to find several highly progressive early childhood schools that focus on socio-emotional development, like the one we have back home. We visited one of the schools and spoke with the director, and it seems like a perfect fit not only for our son but for the social network of parents who share a lot of our interests and lifestyle.

It looks like we can find an amazing house for around $4,000 USD per month, which will have enough space for a home office and a room for a live-in nanny. That is around how much our home in Long Beach would rent for, so we’ll either seek out a home exchange with a local family or just rent it out normally (if you happen to have a home in Valle and want to do a home exchange with us in LA, please let me know!).

Otherwise, I was surprised to find that most of the amenities and services we rely on back home are available in Valle as well. Internet connectivity is fast, Costco delivers from a nearby city, and Amazon Prime orders arrive in two days. There is no shortage of shopping, nature, sports, and social life to keep us all busy.

There is an international airport in the nearest large city, Toluca, that is about an hour away versus the three hours needed to get to Mexico City’s airport. There are flights to and from LA every day or two for a few hundred dollars, with layovers in Guadalajara or Monterrey. 

I honestly can’t imagine a place that meets more of our requirements. It actually strikes me as very similar to the town we moved to in Brazil as children. We plan on making the move in the summer of 2025 (note: this has now changed to summer 2024), in time for the start of the fall school semester, and staying for at least a year.


The fear and the bliss of leaving

This idea has been brewing for a long time in Lauren and me. As the concrete details have begun to fall into place, I’ve noticed that this isn’t just about the fun and adventure of a foreign land: it’s also about leaving the U.S. for its own sake.

I’m definitely not the first to observe this, and it saddens me a bit to do so, but I think there’s something deeply broken about the U.S. as a society now. Most people seem so disconnected from themselves and each other. Life is so work-centric and everything else is an afterthought in comparison. Everything is for sale, feels like a scam, or involves a tech company harvesting our attention for profit. It feels like the U.S. as a culture has entered a kind of stagnant decline that I don’t want to be a part of.

I don’t want my kids growing up only as Americans and seeing the world solely through that lens. I don’t want them steeped in the hyperindividualism, consumerism, tech addiction, media sensationalism, political polarization, and social isolation that are so unavoidable here. I increasingly feel that limiting my kids’ perspective to the American one would be dangerous to their mental health.

I recently read about the work of Professor Mariana Brussoni, about how important it is for kids to engage in risky physical play. It crystallized for me something I’ve always sensed: that in the U.S. we are gripped by fear of everything from traffic accidents to terrorist attacks to crime to dangerous playground equipment, despite it objectively being among the safest places on Earth. This culture of ubiquitous liability waivers, caution tape, and exaggerated caution I think is one of the deepest, most subtle causes of suffering in our society. When you act as if everything in the world is dangerous, all you see is danger and all you feel is fear.

At many points in my life, the Latino cultural qualities – collective welfare over individual success, default sociability versus isolation, cultural heritage versus material wealth, cooperation versus competition – have served as an antidote for me against nihilism and depression. They’ve given me an alternative “way of being” that I could switch to when my American outlook felt bleak. Giving my children access to that way of being is even more important to me than a new language.

To put this in personal terms, I’m just much happier when I’m abroad. I don’t feel nearly as much pressure to work long hours and pursue relentless achievement. When I’m abroad, time slows down, and the days feel longer. I create more memories, deeper relationships, and I like who I am more. 

The U.S. doesn’t work for me long term because it reinforces the worst parts of my psychology, or at least the parts that I’m ready to deemphasize now. The U.S. is the best place in the world to start a business, but now that I’ve done that, I want to go to where I will most be able to enjoy the “finer things in life.”

How the business will have to change

At first, I thought we would need to make some dramatic changes to how the business operates to accommodate this move, but the more I’ve thought about it, the less I think that’s the case.

Mexico City is only 1-2 hours ahead of LA time, depending on the time of year, so scheduling meetings and phone calls won’t be an issue. It’s easy to fly anywhere in the U.S. via plentiful international flights from several airports around the Mexican capital.

We’ve already retired the live cohorts of our course, which were the big heavy lifts that would have required a lot of synchronized meetings. And the team only meets in person once or twice a year anyway.

Our most critical and frequent in-person events are YouTube video shoots, which happen about every other month for a couple of days. But most of our equipment is portable, and I think we can either build our own studio in Valle or use someone else’s. There are many online creators based there and I’m sure there are ways to produce high-quality video recordings. We’ve already had to figure out a remote production setup with our editors calling in from Germany.

On the other hand, I was already planning on doubling down on book writing as my main focus, and this move is strongly in line with that. I’ll be able to create a slower-moving, more rural lifestyle with full-time childcare that allows me to focus on my writing most of the time. 

I always remember how our childhood travels abroad would inspire my father’s artwork, with Chinese or Brazilian or Israeli themes showing up clearly in his paintings. I hope much the same happens with my work, fueling my creativity with new ideas and new perspectives.

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