I live in Miami. Two pools in the building, a gym, a sauna, good restaurants, nice cars everywhere. People dress to impress. Life is genuinely good here, and I'm not pretending otherwise.
Over the last two years, I've also spent about four months in a small surf town in Panama called Playa Venao.
One beach. Two coffee places, if we're being generous. One laundry. A handful of small businesses. The main road isn't really a road, it's dirt. Nobody's dressed up because it's too hot to be dressed up. Most of the year the ground is so warm you walk barefoot, and you stop noticing after a day or two.
The main things people do there are surf, play footvolley on the sand, watch the sunset, and run their small business if they live there. That's it. That's the day.
What I keep noticing is how much less my body and my head have to carry in a place like that. Fewer decisions. Fewer opinions to form about what I'm wearing or where I'm eating or what I should want next. Sun on your skin. Feet on the earth. Water. Sleep. Food that isn't complicated. After a few days, something softens that I didn't know was tight.
It feels like this is what our bodies are actually asking for.
But I want to be honest about something, because the easy version of this story is "simple life good, city life bad," and that isn't what I've found.
My wife with two and two new friends
I've been to Venao with my wife. With close friends. With family. And once, alone. The same beach, the same sunsets, the same soft rhythm. And being there without the people I love is not the same experience. It can't be. The place doesn't do the work by itself. People do a lot of the work.
And even with the right people and the right place, something is still missing if you don't have a reason to get up. A thing that's yours. Something your future self will thank you for doing today. For one person that's surfing better than they did last month. For another it's building a business, or raising a child well, or finally writing the thing they've been carrying around. The shape of it doesn't matter. What matters is that it's genuinely yours, not borrowed from someone else's life.
So the combination I keep landing on is people, nature, simplicity, and purpose. Take one away and something gets hollow.
Here's the part I want to sit with for a minute.
Your life is yours. I know that sounds obvious, almost embarrassing to say out loud. But most of us spend a surprising amount of time living a version of our life that was handed to us. The schedule we inherited. The standards we absorbed from people whose approval we stopped needing a long time ago. The shoulds that quietly became louder than our own voice.
Nobody else is going to live this for you. No one else carries what you carry, knows what you know, remembers what your body remembers. Which means no one else gets to decide what a well-lived day looks like for you. Not your mother, not your husband, not the version of you from twenty years ago who wanted very different things.
Your path is yours. That can feel lonely for a second and then, if you let it, it starts to feel like freedom.
And it's never too late. I mean that plainly. The shift usually doesn't start in your head, it starts lower, somewhere in your chest or your stomach. A quiet knowing that something wants to change. Your body tends to know before your mind catches up. The work is mostly to stop talking over it.
You don't need a plane ticket to Panama. You need one honest hour with yourself. A walk without your phone. Bare feet on grass if you have grass. A window open. A question you've been avoiding.
Ask what your future self would thank you for today, and then do the smallest version of that thing.
That's the whole practice.