📩 In Today’s Email

• TL;DR - The hinge generation stands between analog soul and digital optimization. Learning how to rebuild without losing what makes us human.

• The Deep Dive - Reinvention after 40, and what the body teaches you when the novelty wears off.

• The Read - From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks. How to trade ambition for meaning without losing momentum.

• The Stream - Dry Creek Wrangler School. A cowboy philosopher with more wisdom than most startup founders.

🤿 The Deep Dive - Reinvention after 40

The gym overlooks the mountains. Medellín spreads out below, green and impossible.

Inside, a dozen people take selfies and film themselves for form, looking like a committee of personal trainers assembled them.

Perfect form. Perfect skin. The kind of discipline that makes you wonder how it’s possible.

Then there’s me.

I’ve been coming here almost every day for over a year now.

At first, I tried everything. I read the studies. I listened to the podcasts, bought the supplements that promise mitochondrial repair and cellular regeneration. I wanted the stack that would make 40 feel like 30, or better yet, 27, that would buy me another decade of sharpness before the “long decline” and inevitable onset of sarcopenia.

I wasn't an Instagram model like my fellow gymgoers (really), but I was feeling good. The only barometer on getting older I have is the humble hangover. That’s pretty good. Hangovers are avoidable.

Of all I was doing, some of it worked. Most of it didn’t. Most of it was theater. We think snake oil salesmen died out in the Wild West. You haven’t been on X recently.

Here’s what actually stuck: creatine, because the research is airtight. Berberine for blood sugar. Magnesium glycinate for sleep. Vitamin D with K2 because I live near the equator but somehow still test low. Must be all the writing and the LEGO. Turmeric in the eggs for inflammation (activated by black pepper, as I learned from that great fitness influencer, Marc Maron).

Cold water at the end of every shower because it does something science hasn’t understood yet nor myself but my nervous system seems to. I don’t know what brown fat is but we are just going off of feeling on that one.

That's the stack. Not because I'm chasing immortality. Because I want to stay in my body long enough to see what happens next.

I’ve been calling us: the hinge generation.

We're the last people who remember what it felt like to be bored. To sit in a waiting room with nothing but our thoughts. Maybe a woman’s magazine. To not know the answer to something and just live with not knowing.

We are also the first people who can use AI to optimize our workout, Google our symptoms are 2am, write and publish newsletters on the metro, order lab work without a doctor and break it down with AI also, and build a supplement protocol based on peer-reviewed studies we read on our iPhones.

We live in both worlds. Analog enough to remember. Digital enough to optimize.

And that makes us odd. Duckbill platypus odd.

Many people I know are going full biohacker. Continuous glucose monitors. Sleep trackers. Bryan Johnson worshippers. Customized meal plans based on DNA tests. They're trying to become a perfected version of themselves, quantified and optimized and (nearly) immortal.

The other half are deleting social media. Learning to make things with their hands. Buying film cameras. Reading physical books. They're trying to recover something they think we lost. They are the backlash.

I'm somewhere in the middle.

I take my supplements, but I don't track my macros. I end my showers cold, but I don’t icebath. I wear a smartwatch, but I don’t track sleep with it. I lift heavy, but I also sit on my balcony and do nothing for an hour. I listen to Huberman, but I also read Le Carré.

Maybe that's what reinvention after 40 actually is. Not picking a side. Not going all-in on optimization or all-in on resistance. Just learning to move between worlds without losing yourself.

Because here's what a year of showing up taught me: the body is simple. It wants to move. It wants to sleep. It wants real food and sunlight and cold water and heavy things to lift. Everything else is noise.

The hard part is not the protocol. The hard part is showing up when the protocol stops feeling new. When the supplements become routine. When the gym is just the gym and not a symbol of your transformation.

That's when you learn whether you're optimizing or just distracting yourself from the actual work.

The actual work is this: staying present. Not as a concept. Not as a meditation app you open twice a week. But as a physical practice of being in your body while your body is still good.

Because reinvention after 40 is not about becoming someone new. It's about becoming more of who you already are, before time makes that harder.

The Instagram models finish their sets and leave. The mountains stay. I rack my weights and walk out into the Medellín morning, still here, still human, still figuring it out.

We're the hinge generation. The last ones who knew boredom. The first ones who learned to build ourselves back on purpose.

And maybe that's enough.

📢 Newsletter News

1. The Edward Effect YouTube is Growing.

   Remember to visit the YouTube page - new material on this theme is coming soon. Shot and the team are editing and filming as we speak.

   We also just kicked off LEGO livestreams every Sunday evening, a meditative build-meets-storytelling experiment that’s already drawing a small crowd. Time may shift as we find the rhythm, but the first one’s in the books.

   This baby channel just hit 100 subscribers. Let’s grow it together!

   

   https://www.youtube.com/@theedwardeffect

🌎 Visa Watch

🇪🇸 Spain — The Digital Nomad Visa is now accepting remote worker renewals for 3-year extensions. Tax benefits remain capped at €600,000 income.

🇲🇽 Mexico — Temporary Residency rules are tightening. Expect higher income thresholds (now roughly $3,600/month) for long-stay digital applicants.

🇮🇩 Indonesia — The Bali “Second Home” visa continues to draw global interest, allowing 5- and 10-year stays with simplified property ownership routes.

🇨🇷 Costa Rica — DN visa approvals are moving faster post-digitalization, averaging 30–45 days for remote applicants.

🤓 The Read - From Strength to Strength  — Arthur C. Brooks

I picked up Arthur Brooks because I wanted to know if I was too late. If the speed I had at 30 was the only speed I'd ever have. If reinvention after 40 was just expensive maintenance.

Brooks calls it the two curves. The first curve is what you think of when you think of peak performance: athletes at 27, founders at 35, writers on their breakthrough novel. Speed, novelty, the ability to learn new systems faster than anyone else in the room. That curve always peaks. Then it drops.

Most people try to stay on it. They work harder, sleep less, take more supplements, hire more coaches. They mistake the curve for their identity.

Brooks says there's a second curve. It starts later, builds slower, but it doesn't drop. It's made of different material: pattern recognition, teaching, the ability to see what matters and what doesn't. You can't hack your way onto it. You have to earn it by letting the first curve go.

I'm not sure I believe him yet.

The gym might be me trying to stay on curve one. Or it might be curve two maintenance, keeping the body functional so the brain has somewhere to live. The newsletter might be curve two. Or it might be me pretending I have wisdom when I'm just older and more tired.

Here's what I know: I'm faster at some things than I was at 30. Slower at others. I can see patterns I couldn't see before. I also forget names mid-sentence and need reading glasses.

Brooks says the goal isn't to outperform your younger self. It's to outgrow them.

I'm still trying to figure out if that's true or just something people tell themselves when they can't keep up anymore.

That’s why we’re here.

🦜 Rio’s Corner

🍿 The Stream - Dry Creek Wrangler School (YouTube)

I found Dry Creek Wrangler School at 2am when I couldn't sleep. A former cowboy sitting by a campfire talking about fear and faith and work. No cuts, no music, no thumbnails designed by committee. Just a man who sounds like he's lived more than he's read.

Millions of people watch him. And the last thing this ole cowpoke is, is optimized.

While the rest of YouTube is trying to hack your attention span with jump cuts and urgency, he talks slower than you think anyone should be allowed to talk on the internet. He pauses. He looks at the fire. He lets silence do work that words can't.

That's the other half of the hinge. We're fluent in both languages. Huberman and cowboy wisdom. Peer-reviewed studies and campfire philosophy. We can toggle between them because we remember when slow was the only speed available.

The fastest-growing audience on YouTube is people over 40.

We remember boredom. That's the superpower nobody's pricing in yet.

The optimization culture is real. The biohacking, the protocols, the supplements that actually work. I'm in it. But I'm also watching a cowboy talk about ego by firelight, and both things feel necessary.

Maybe that's what reinvention after 40 actually means. Learning to live in the gap between monk and cyborg without losing your mind.

🛤️ 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.