📩 In Today’s Email

• TL;DR: What if hustle culture isn’t making us better, just less imaginative?

• The Deep Dive: A personal essay on creative burnout, the slow return of play, and what America risks by worshipping output.

• The Read: Rest by Alex Pang, a science-backed case for why doing less makes you more creative.

• The Stream: Living, a quiet masterpiece about time, purpose, and the courage to slow down.

• The Speak: I turned this issue into a visual poem, with cows.

  Visit my Instagram to see a new post pairing my words with the photography of Paula Andrea Marín: a visual meditation in seven slides.

  It’s part of this issue. Just told through images.

  Click on the cows to open the post.

  Drop a like or share if it resonates. ❤️

  

🤿 The Deep Dive

I post a lot on X.

Depending on who you follow, it can be one of the best places online for crowdsourced news, sharp contrarian takes, and odd corners of intelligence.

But there’s a trend I’ve been seeing that feels quietly dangerous, something that runs directly against the very point of being human.

They call it “Grindcore” or, “Hustle Bro” Culture.

This wasn’t satire.

It was a serious quote from a founder describing the new religion of San Francisco’s startup scene. No parties. No romance. No drugs. No mess. Just metrics.

Wake at five. Eat clean. Marry early. Track everything. Lift, scale, repeat.

For anyone trying to create anything, this isn’t just intense.

It’s suffocating.

Creativity doesn’t thrive under pressure. It slips away. And if you’re not careful, it doesn’t come back.

When the Music Stops

A few years ago, I lost it.

The truth is, I didn’t lose my creativity by doing everything right.

I lost it by doing what I thought I was supposed to do. Continuing to produce movies. Working for other people. Chasing projects that weren’t mine.

But sometimes you have to do that.

It was great experience (and I followed that path to the end) but somewhere in the process, I stopped tending to my own garden. My work became output. My time was no longer mine. And the part of me that used to make things for no reason… went quiet.

Getting that part back has been the goal behind this entire journey.

And through this newsletter, through the systems I’ve built and the places I’ve lived, I can finally say: it’s back.

After all the years of searching. After thinking it might never return.

It did.

And that alone made the detour worth it. Made the years searching feel like yesterday.

If you’re wired to make things, not creating isn’t frustrating. It’s a kind of ache. Not poetic, noble suffering, but real, physical distress. A slow betrayal of self you feel in your chest.

The Long Return

So I did something drastic: I left.

I went nomadic, not to escape work, but to recover wonder.

I needed streets that didn’t remind me of anything. I needed boredom.

Because boredom is the birthplace of new ideas.

I wish I could say the creativity roared back. It didn’t. It took years. And even now, I protect it like something wild that startles easily.

What helped wasn’t optimization. It was play.

Lego on a rainy day. Sketching mockups just to see where they led. Reading weird books with no outcome in mind. Walking aimlessly through cities I didn’t know.

None of it looked like progress. But that’s where originality lives, in unmeasured time.

The Data is Real

This isn’t just personal.

In 2011, Kyung Hee Kim analyzed 300,000 scores from the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), a gold-standard assessment of imagination and problem-solving. Her conclusion was chilling:

American creativity has been declining since 1990, especially in children.

By 2008, over 85% of kids scored lower than previous generations.

IQ held steady. Test scores remained high. But something vital was shrinking.

And it wasn’t just kids.

A 2023 study in Nature found that scientific papers and patents are becoming less disruptive, more incremental, less original. The volume is up. The breakthroughs are down.

We’re producing more than ever. But we’re imagining less.

Rest is Not Laziness

You know the moment.

An idea that arrives in the shower. On a walk. Mid-sentence in a random conversation. That’s not coincidence. That’s your brain working backstage.

Lin-Manuel Miranda was grinding for years trying to write something great. Then he went on vacation to Mexico. That’s where Hamilton was born.

Rest isn’t the absence of work. It’s the compost of creation.

But America has forgotten that. We treat stillness like laziness. Slowness like failure.

Play like something for children.

And this is how we lose the thread.

The Hustle Mindset is Anti-Creative

The startup grind we glorify now isn’t modern. It’s industrial. It feels like a Soviet factory: gray, efficient, joyless. Endless output. No imagination.

We’ve replaced the dream of making something beautiful with the obsession of making something scalable.

But creativity doesn’t work on a production line. It doesn’t reward obedience. It needs friction, surprise, rebellion.

Work longer. Track harder. Sleep less. Scale faster.

But creativity doesn’t care about your spreadsheet. It doesn’t respond to brute force.

And if you’re someone who needs to make things (and many of us are) then not doing that will rot your soul.

All the performance smoothies and early marriage and sleep data won’t fix it.

Because what you need isn’t optimization.

You need a spark.

You need space.

Friction.

Permission to waste time.

That’s where the real work begins.

😏 The Meme

🌎 Visa Watch

🇪🇸 Spain has just introduced a more relaxed visa pathway—U.S. W‑2 employees are now eligible for the Digital Nomad Visa, opening up new possibilities for remote professionals with traditional employment contracts.

🇪🇸 Spain continues to stand out: it recently unveiled flexible nomad visas allowing stays of up to one year, with the option to extend for three years in total—ideal for creatives seeking long-term roots in Europe.

🇲🇩 Moldova is officially launching its Digital Nomad Visa by the end of September 2025. The program allows remote workers to live in the country for up to two years, with the potential for renewal.

🇳🇵 Nepal is making waves with plans to offer a five-year, multiple-entry visa for nomads—available to those earning at least $1,500/month or holding $20,000 in savings, plus health coverage and more. It’s a bold move for budget-conscious innovators.

🤓 The Read - Rest by Alex Soojun-Kim Pang

In Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Pang makes a bold claim. Rest is not the opposite of work. It is a form of work. And if you care about creativity, you ignore this at your own risk.

Pang draws from the lives of deep thinkers: writers, mathematicians, scientists, artists. People whose jobs depend on insight.

He shows how many of history’s most original minds, from Darwin to Maya Angelou, worked in short, focused bursts. Often just four hours a day. The rest of their time was spent walking, gardening, reading, or doing something that looked like nothing at all.

In one of the book’s most memorable chapters, “Four Hours,” Pang shows how that limited window (small, consistent, and protected) produced more lasting creative work than twelve-hour days ever could. Not because these people were lazy, but because they understood that intensity needs recovery.

Modern science backs this up. Studies show that long hours do not lead to more productivity. In fact, they often backfire. One study found that professionals working 10 to 20 hours a week were more productive and creative than those working 25 or more. Iceland’s shortened workweek pilot showed similar results. More time off. Same or better results. And significantly improved well-being.

Pang’s point is simple. You can push the body. You can optimize the schedule. But creativity is not a machine. The brain continues working on problems in the background, while you walk, cook, rest, or sleep. That’s when the real breakthroughs often happen. Not during the grind, but during the gaps.

For coders, writers, founders, and thinkers of all kinds, this book is a permission slip. Not to do less, but to work with more depth. Rest is not indulgence. It is how you actually finish things worth making.

Who this is for: High-agency creators and nomads who are tired of burning out and ready to work with their mind. not against it. Rest will remind you how ideas are really born.

🦜 Rio’s Corner

🍿 The Stream - Living (2022) - Amazon Prime

Some films whisper.

This one exhales.

Living is the story of a paper-pusher who finds out he’s dying, and instead of spiraling, he simply begins to live. Not by chasing thrills. Not by moving to Bali. But by doing one small thing that matters.

Set in London and adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day), it’s a remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, a film about meaning, mortality, and the quiet dignity of finishing something with your full attention.

Set i

Bill Nighy earned an Oscar nomination for this role, and the script was up for Best Adapted Screenplay. But don’t watch it for the prestige. Watch it because it feels like someone made a movie out of that feeling when you realize… you’ve been working like hell, but you’re not sure what for.

This is not a productivity film. It’s not a dopamine hit. It’s a slow cup of tea with death sitting across the table.

It’s rest disguised as cinema.

Streaming on Amazon Prime.

Who this is for:

The over-optimized creative. The calendar-maximalist. Anyone who’s been productive for so long they forgot how to be alive. Living is your cue to pause. And then do the one thing that actually matters.

🛤️ 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.

Ask Birdbrain GPT (Powered by Yours Truly, Rio)

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