A genuinely beautiful American life, and why I still leave it

People assume that someone who keeps disappearing to Eastern Europe must be running from something. The opposite is true. I have a life in Atlanta, a house, a family, and the Chattahoochee a short drive away, that I am, frankly, quite fond of.

A Different Perspective

The house that gets compared to a Miami drug lord's mansion

That isn’t my line. It’s what a friend said the first time he visited, and I’ve never found a more accurate description, so I’ve stopped arguing. It’s a large, slightly absurd, very comfortable house in Alpharetta, and I’ll show you around it on the channel, because pretending it doesn’t exist would be its own kind of performance.

I built it after thirty-five years of real work, American Express, Equifax, IHG, and others. Enterprise technology, at actual scale, for actual clients. I’m not going to recite a résumé at you. It’s enough to say the life is real, and so is the work that paid for it. The reason I’ll show you any of it is simple. When a man tells you to slow down, you’re entitled to know whether he ever sped up in the first place.

Start here — The Philosophy

The family that finds Romania endearing

My wife is an attorney who owns her own firm, more accomplished than I am, and she knows it. My daughter is a surgeon. Between them, they have more discipline than I’ve managed in a lifetime.


Neither of them fully understands the Romania habit. Both find it endearing. There is a recurring scene in this household where I announce I’m going back to a city on the Danube for a couple of weeks, and they look at me the way you’d look at a relative with a harmless, slightly eccentric hobby. They are not wrong to.


That dynamic, a family of high achievers watching one of their own drift happily eastward every year, is, I’ve come to think, one of the more honest things about me.

What I found there

Why I still leave

Because a beautiful life and a deliberate one are not the same thing, and it took me most of my career to notice the difference. The house is wonderful. The work was meaningful. But the pace I learned standing next to the Danube is the thing I actually wanted, and I had to leave a very good life, repeatedly, to find it.


That’s what this whole site is about. Below are the essays where I get into it properly.

No rush forever

THE RIVER IS IN NO HURRY.
NEITHER ARE WE.