📩 In Today’s Email

• TL; DR: How to orient yourself when momentum isn’t enough.

• The Deep Dive: “Ikigai” as a north star, not a diagram. Apprenticeship, translation, and the quiet work you keep circling.

• The Video: The Last Time You Were Bored - YouTube @edwardeffect.

• The Read: Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles.

• The Stream: Shōgun (Hulu)

A Texas Nomad is about designing a life with room to be creative while the world gets louder and faster.

🤿 The Deep Dive

For most of my life, I didn’t feel lost.

This might sound strange given how often we talk about being “directionless,” but it’s true. I had momentum. I had structure. I had work that made sense on paper. I liked my life.

I was productive, curious, and engaged. If you’d asked me then whether I was following my passion, I probably would have said yes, or at least close enough to count.

And yet, something was missing.

It wasn’t dissatisfaction. It wasn’t the dramatic, hair-on-fire burnout you see in Steve Carell movies about corporate retreats. It was something quiet. A low-level awareness that while I was moving forward, I wasn’t moving toward something.

I was navigating the terrain well, but I had forgotten to look at the sky.

The Japanese concept of Ikigai is often flattened into a neat Venn diagram for LinkedIn posts: what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. It’s a helpful map, but maps are static. I’ve come to think of Ikigai less as a destination and more as a north star.

You don’t always see it. Sometimes it’s washed out by a high-noon sun of a busy career. Sometimes it’s hidden by the weather of a bad month. Sometimes you’re deep enough in the forest of daily survival that you forget to look up at all.

But that doesn’t mean it’s gone. It just means you aren’t currently oriented to it.

The Global Apprenticeship

Looking back, I see now that everything before this chapter, the years of producing, the languages, the long stretches of living abroad, was an apprenticeship. Not a detour. Not a “finding myself” cliché, like another one of those Steve Carell movies.

An apprenticeship in being human.

I loved my life before, but I wasn’t creating. I was consuming or managing. Now, the frame has shifted. I realized my passion isn’t just one thing; it’s a synthesis.

I’m obsessed with brain plasticity. The literal, physical rewrite of the mind. I see it as a goal and a reward all in itself. Similar in great measure to finding the love of your life or taking care of a puppy. And I have found there is no better way to force that rewiring of the brain than through living new things. When you treat places as if it were your first time there, whether it is or is not, or when you even go so far as to change zip codes, your brain is forced to stay supple.

My Ikigai, as I’m circling it now, is the act of translation: taking the chaos of a nomad's life and distilling it into videos, sentences, stories that help someone else see their own life more clearly.

Ikigai isn’t a status update. It’s slow and often even silent.

Sometimes you’re in motion, and the star disappears. Life gets busy. The sun is up. That doesn’t mean you’re lost. It just means you’re traveling by terrain instead of the sky.

But then there are moments, usually quiet ones, when the day ends and you step back. You lie metaphorically in a field and look up. And suddenly, the sky is full again.

You see where you drifted. You see where you stayed true. You see where you want to reorient.

That’s what this year feels like to me. Not a reinvention from scratch, but a recalibration. I’m moving toward a life where my travel fuels my brain, my brain fuels my creativity, and my creativity fuels life.

If you are reading this and you feel completely lost, that’s okay. If you feel mostly fine but vaguely unsatisfied, that’s okay, too. Ikigai doesn’t announce itself with fireworks. More often, it whispers through repetition. It doesn’t shout its arrival. This is why people often look for it in things like tea leaves.

Pay attention to what you keep circling. Pay attention to what feels like play disguised as work. Pay attention to what feels meaningful before it feels profitable.

The star doesn’t move. We do. And when the clouds pass, it’s usually right where it’s always been.

What’s the one thing you do that feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else? That’s usually where the North Star is hiding.

😏 The Meme

🤳 The Video

Your brain is beachfront property, and everyone is trying to buy it for cheap. When was the last time you were truly bored? Not, “scrolling-TikTok-while-watching-Netflix” bored, but nothing-in-your-hand-staring-at-the-wall bored.

In this episode of From the Desk, I explore why boredom is actually the most expensive luxury commodity you own.

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🌎 VisaWatch

🇪🇸 Spain retains its pole position in the 2025 global rankings as the best country for digital nomads, with cities like Málaga, Palma, and Barcelona highlighted for quality of life and remote-work infrastructure. 

🇧🇬 Bulgaria has formally launched its digital nomad visa, leveraging its recent entry into the Eurozone and Schengen Area to attract remote workers with easier travel and residency options. 

🇮🇹 Italy’s digital nomad visa, active since April 2024, continues to roll out with one-year stays available and requirements around income and insurance remaining in effect. 

🇪🇺 European countries including Slovenia, Portugal, Greece, and Croatia, are featured in recent coverage as part of an expanding set of remote-work visas available across the continent in 2026. 

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

🤓 The Read - Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

I wanted to like this book more than I did.

Ikigai is often framed as a precise Japanese concept. In practice, the book feels much broader and softer than that promise. Rather than staying tightly focused, it expands outward into Blue Zones, diet, exercise, longevity, yoga, and even Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy. Many of these ideas are worthwhile, but not all are Japanese, and not all feel necessary to the core thesis.

At times, the book reads less like a deep investigation and more like a friendly survey of Eastern philosophy, with a few Western frameworks folded in for balance. The result is accessible and calming, but also diffuse.

That breadth may be exactly what some readers want. If you are early in your search and looking for a gentle introduction to purpose, health, and meaning, this book delivers. It is easy to read, reassuring, and low friction.

If you are looking for precision, though, it can feel padded. Ikigai is described more than examined. You come away with a sense of the mood of the idea without much guidance on how to apply it rigorously.

This is a book that looks great on the shelf and feels pleasant to spend time with. Its value depends on whether you want a wide map or a sharper compass.

Who this is for: readers new to purpose-oriented thinking who want an approachable overview rather than a tight framework.

🦜 Rio’s Corner

🍿 The Stream - Shōgun (Hulu)

I expected Shōgun to be slow and ceremonial. Instead, it moves silently and as fast as a samurai blade. Based on a true story.

The action is clean, colorful, and decisive. When violence happens, it’s controlled, not indulgent, closer to classic adventure films like Zorro than modern spectacle. Every motion feels intentional.

What makes Shōgun belong in this issue isn’t the setting. It’s the philosophy underneath it.

Identity here isn’t something you search for. It’s something you accept. Characters know what is required of them and whether they’re capable of meeting it is the drama we watch played out. Honor is a discipline practiced daily. Rather end your own bloodline than dishonor it.

Visually, the series is rich without ornament. Beauty serves structure.

Smooth as Japanese whiskey. High recommend.

🛤️ 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.