Tag: Featured
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Two Loyalties, One Lie We’ve been taught, from the time we’re children, to conflate two very different kinds of loyalty. The first is loyalty to the people who matter most in our lives — our families, our children, the communities we choose. The second is loyalty to a geographic location, to borders drawn on maps,…
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The System That Taught Me Won’t Teach My Kids I grew up in the public school system in a small Canadian town. It wasn’t great, but there were good lessons being taught. I excelled in math and engineering disciplines — the kind of skills that got rewarded in the 90s and early 2000s. I could…
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I used to think I could explain it — why giving birth abroad was something we needed to do, why it was worth the risk, the distance, the uncertainty. I thought if I just laid out the facts clearly enough, she’d see what I saw. But facts alone don’t move us toward life-changing decisions. Most…
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My son doesn’t know he’s lucky. He just knows that in Brazil, soccer meant running barefoot through neighborhood parks every evening, the whole community cheering from the sidelines. He knows Festa Junina means dancing in a straw hat while bonfires flicker and the air smells like sweet cake and smoke. And this weekend, like so…
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I still remember the moment each of us was handed our permanent residency cards in Panama. My spouse first, then me, then each of our children. Four cards. Four keys to a door that can never be locked. Standing in that office, it hit me: our kids will always have somewhere to go. No matter…
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You’re standing at the airline counter. Both passports are in your hand. The agent is waiting. Your brain freezes. Which one? WHICH ONE? If you hold two passports, you’ve definitely had this moment. Even experienced dual citizens get turned around the first few times. But here’s the thing: it’s actually simple once you get the…
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I’ve sat across from families who’ve built extraordinary wealth — eight-figure, nine-figure or more portfolios, multiple businesses, real estate across different markets. By every conventional measure, they’ve won. But when we start talking about the future — where their kids will live and grow up, what happens if tax policy or the social climate shifts,…
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A friend of mine has a daughter in high school who wasn’t connecting with her math teacher. Instead of accepting this limitation, she hired an english speaking Brazilian PhD engineer over Zoom—someone who genuinely loves math and charges what amounts to a modest fee in U.S. dollars. After a few months of personalized instruction, that…
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I did the math: 8 hours at work, 2 commuting, 8 sleeping. That left 4 hours a day with my family — one-sixth of my life. So I left my high-paying Seattle job and took back 40 years of my life. Now I work an hour a day from anywhere — and actually live.
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The first time I traveled alone with my children through a U.S. airport, my daughter was strapped in a stroller and my son could barely toddle. I remember standing in that security line, watching it snake endlessly ahead of us, and thinking: This is going to be hell. I was right. In the United States,…
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We still use language from the Cold War to describe a world that no longer exists. First World. Third World. The terminology implies a hierarchy that made sense in 1975 but has little to do with how millions of people actually live today. The Moment I Knew When we first moved into our apartment abroad,…