📩 In Today’s Email

• TL; DR - Becoming isn’t something you do once. In a world where we might reach 120, you’re built for multiple transformations.
  

• The Deep Dive: Julia Child, cringe cycles, and why your next transformation probably isn’t your last.

• The Gear: A tiny architectural miracle: the Twelve South Curve Nano. A magnetic micro-stand that doubles as a pocket tripod and folds into a felt case the size of a credit card.

• The Read: Little Fires Everywhere. Adolescence, identity, and the chaos of becoming… again.

• The Stream: Stranger Things, Season 5. Monsters that feel suspiciously like your own problems in CGI.

🤿 The Deep Dive

Julia Child didn’t publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking until she was 49. She didn’t host her first TV show until she was 51. Before that, she had no roadmap, no formal training, and no expectation that she’d become a global icon. She simply stepped into a new stage and let it transform her.

That idea has been twirling in my head this week: stages, not ages.

A friend used to say it as a joke, but with life expectancy climbing and the real possibility of humans living to 110 or 120, the phrase is starting to feel more and more literal. For most of human history, “middle age” was 30. You had childhood, apprenticeship, mastery, then death. Today, 30 is still the prologue. Forty is chapter one.

Seventy is intermission.

Here’s what makes this urgent: we’re still operating on an obsolete script. We treat careers as linear trajectories. As lifetime labels.

We assume identity solidifies somewhere around 25. We save “reinvention” for motivational posters and midlife crisis cliches. Meanwhile, we’re staring down five or six decades of adult life with no cultural map for what comes next.

We maybe we need a reframe: We don’t come of age once. We come of stage, over and over.

The First Draft of Becoming

This is where the adolescent theme from both Stranger Things and Little Fires Everywhere becomes a mirror. Society thus far has treated reinvention as something reserved for teenagers, that volatile period when you’re discovering who you are, what you want, who you’re attracted to, what you believe.

But what if adolescence isn’t a phase? Well, hopefully you outgrow the acne part, but what if it is simply the first time you confront the chaos of identity? The first draft of becoming.

If we’re living longer, these identity ruptures don’t stop at 18. They repeat at 30. At 45. At 60. At 75… Each one asks the same question in a different voice: Who are you becoming now?

The difference is that when you’re 16 and confused, everyone expects it. You get permission to be awkward. It’s even cute (of course, not to those living it). Permission to try things, to fail spectacularly. But when you are 45 and want to start over?

The culture offers you two narratives: midlife crisis or cautionary tale.

What if you had a third option? What if we expected, and even celebrated, multiple becomings?

My Own Private Metamorphosis

Here’s where I’ll pull the curtain back.

I spent most of my career behind the camera. Writing scripts, producing films, and developing stories.

Staying off screen.

I never thought I’d enjoy being in front of the camera. I didn’t think I would be any good at it. I definitely didn’t think it would feel necessary. More that it would feel like unnecessary pressure.

Then I tried it.

And that pressure actually turned into an electric type of life, a living electrified.

This year, I began making short-form content and some longer-form YouTube videos. I discovered how cringe it is to watch yourself on an editing timeline. How at first, and still, everything is cringe, the angles, the breaths, the pauses, the putting yourself out there.

I had to relearn the filmmaking process from the ground up. Most movie producers don’t magically know how to edit. At least I didn’t.

And now, in less than a year, I’ve built a cross-platform following of close to 20,000 people, and growing daily.

But reinvention always starts with cringe. It's the tax you pay to enter the next stage.

And if you want to get on board early (and it is early, my dear reader, be kind if you turn into a watcher, please), if you want to see me at the bottom of the curve, here is the link to the channel.

One series I am building is called From the Desk, which eventually will be a weekly companion to this newsletter. The topics won't always align perfectly because of the production timeline, but they’ll orbit the same ideas: reinvention, creativity, nomadic self.

What I've learned in this awkward transition is that the discomfort isn't a bug. It's proof you're at the threshold. The 16-year-old trying on identities at a high school party and the people in their 40s launching a YouTube channel are doing the same work.

We just pretend one is development and the other is desperation.

Designing a Life for Multiple Selves

If we’re truly entering a world where humans regularly live past 100, then the old script breaks. You don’t get only one identity or one career or one coming of age.

You get many.

So what does a life designed for multiple selves actually look like?

It means building flexibility into your foundations. The nomad life, the wild, global, self-authored path, is built for that kind of evolution. It assumes you’ll change. It rewards it. Geographic mobility becomes identity mobility. When you’re not tethered to one place, one industry, one version of yourself, you have permission to rewrite.

It means rejecting the myth of mastery. If you've spent 20 years becoming excellent at something, our culture says: stay there. Capitalize. Optimize. But what if mastery in one domain is just the launchpad for being a beginner again? Julia Child didn't leverage her government work into a safer next act. She walked away from what she knew and toward what terrified her.

It means building communities around transformation, not nostalgia. We need people who knew us in our last stage and people who only know this version. The friends who remember you as the investment banker need to coexist with the friends who only know you as the ceramicist. Both groups keep you honest. Both groups prove that identity is plural.

It means getting comfortable with the gap. There's always a period where you're neither here nor there. You’re too far from who you were, not yet settled into who you're becoming. That space is where the real work happens. Most people abort the transformation because they can't tolerate the gap. But the gap is the whole point.

The New is Always Awkward

Each stage begins the same way: with profound discomfort. With the terrifying realization that the skills, identity, and confidence you build in your last act don’t transfer. With the feeling that everyone else knows something you don’t.

That feeling? That’s not failure. That’s the entry fee.

If adolescence taught us anything, it’s that you can survive the chrysalis. You can endure the humiliation of not-yet-knowing. You can build something real from raw uncertainty.

And if we are lucky enough to live long lives. If we get 50. 60. 70 years of adulthood, then we don’t just survive one transformation.

We get to do it again. And again. And again.

Stages, not ages.

The question isn’t whether you’ll reinvent yourself. It’s whether you’ll give yourself permission to be awkward when you do.

📢 Newsletter News

1. Subscriber Counter: 3,572

2. Some ATN stats for 2025:

🌎 Visa Watch

🇺🇸 United States — From Dec 15, all H-1B and H-4 applicants must set social-media profiles to public for expanded vetting.

🇪🇸 Spain — Digital Nomad Visa income requirement raised to ~€2,763/month as of Dec 5.

🇧🇭 Bahrain — Golden Visa investment threshold reduced from BHD 200,000 to BHD 130,000 to attract more foreign residents.

🇳🇿 New Zealand — Visitor-visa rules relaxed to allow remote work while in NZ, creating a more nomad-friendly entry path.

🇻🇳 Vietnam — Added 41 new e-visa checkpoints, expanding access to 83 total airports, land borders, and seaports.

🤓 The Read - Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere reads like Celeste Ng walked into suburban America, pulled every emotional fire alarm she could find, and calmly watched it burn. The book opens with a house lit up, literally, and then rewinds to show us the sparks that got it there.

What struck me is how many different kinds of baby-making, baby-keeping, and baby-losing threads this story juggles. Ng gives you the full buffet: teen pregnancies, adoption battles, surrogacy questions, mother-daughter resentments, the whole “whose baby is this really” courtroom-in-your-head drama.

It’s almost comedic how many plotlines orbit around motherhood. It’s like she said, “Let’s explore every possible permutation of creating or raising a tiny human. All of them. At once.” For my taste, a little too much.

But the real engine of the novel isn’t babies. It’s identity. Reinvention. The uncomfortable moments when you realize your life isn’t actually the one you meant to build. Every character in this book, teenagers, adults, parents, loners, is standing at the edge of a decision they don’t want to make yet.

Critics tend to frame it as a book about race, class, and motherhood. Which it is. But what makes it fun (yes, fun) is how explosive the quiet moments feel. The smallest decisions hit like grenades. A photo. A lie. A secret studio. A child calling someone else “mom.” It’s domestic life staged like a thriller.

And while the story is technically about adolescents coming of age, I kept thinking:

Most of us don’t stop doing that. We come of age again at 29. And 40. And 57. Ng’s characters prove it. Everyone’s molting. Everyone’s shedding a skin they thought they’d keep forever.

If adolescence is the first fire, this book shows you the rest. The slow burns. The unexpected sparks. The late-life infernos that change everything when you least expect it.

🦜 Rio’s Corner

🍿 The Stream - Stranger Things, Season 5

The new season of Stranger Things drops you right back into the most chaotic childhood nostalgia machine ever built, and somehow still pulls off the magic trick of making adolescence feel like you were on threeway dial with Joseph Conrad.

Some people have expressed dismay that the characters are older now, that it took so many years to make Season 5. That doesn't really bother me. In fact, I think they did a chop-chop job of dealing with that aspect. The lazy kids laying around on the couch has just shifted to lazy teens laying around on the couch. Easy. The aging-up works for the show's themes, not against them.

What irked me more is that in the three years since Season 4, some of the nostalgia dust has worn off. I found myself preferring the version of this show where kids ran around malls and discovered love, not what it’s morphed into of machine guns and monsters’ screech like the metallic train wreck.

And the romance? Interrupted at every turn, probably to milk those moments so we don't become Stranger Things: The Soap Opera. But honestly? I would've taken more soap opera and fewer jump scares.

Still, here's the genius of this show: It takes the most awkward, confusing stage of human life (the moment you're half-kid, half-adult, fully unhinged) and turns it into an epic saga where your emotions actually are monsters. Your friendships are battles. Your fears have names. Your awkwardness has tentacles. Teenage angst, but with higher stakes than algebra.

And that's why it fits perfectly with this week's theme.

Stranger Things is the classic "coming of age" story, but with the volume cranked to eleven. (Pun not intended, but I'll take it.) It reminds you that every transition feels supernatural when you're inside it. Every big shift in your life feels like stepping into the Upside Down: confusing, disorienting, full of creatures you'd rather avoid.

Watching Season 5, I kept thinking: Adults aren't any different. We just hide it better.

We still face monsters, they just wear blazers.
We still get lost, just in airports instead of abandoned labs.
We still reinvent ourselves, just with fewer mixtapes.

The cast is older now, and that's the best part. You can feel the show leaning into this idea that growing up isn't a single event. It's recurring. Cyclical. A series of portals you walk through again and again. One adolescence after another.

If Little Fires Everywhere explores the slow burn of reinvention, Stranger Things is the thunderclap. The lightning strike. The "your life is about to change, kid" soundtrack, even if I'd trade a few thunderclaps for more mall scenes and awkward first kisses.

A perfect pairing for a week about coming of stage, with monsters, friendships, and that bittersweet feeling that the world is bigger than you thought yesterday.

⌚ The Gear - Twelve South Curve Nano

The Curve Nano immediately feels like it should’ve existed years ago.  It’s simple: a tiny magnetic stand that holds your phone upright… or sideways… or floating at that perfect “FaceTime while you chop onions” angle.

Mine quickly claimed sought-after desktop real estate, now it's like a miniature architectural sculpture, and just heavy enough to feel intentional. Unlike one of those plastic accessories bound for the junk drawer after a week.

The magnet is confidently strong, and the horizontal mode is the real upgrade.

Flip your phone sideways, and suddenly it’s:

• a micro second-screen for editing

• a clean little teleprompter

• a proper horizontal framing tool for B-roll

• and (surprisingly) a legit mini-tripod for content

And the best part? It folds flat into a little felt sleeve the size of a credit card. Pocketable. Airport-friendly. Nomad-worthy. Sturdy. Recommended.

🛤️ Outtro

Reinvention begins not with where you land, but with what you make.

Every place is a blank page. What you write there? That’s your legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

This community grows through real connection. One story, one share at a time.

If you enjoyed this, share it.

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See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.