I am sitting at the gate at Denver International right now, waiting on a boarding group for a flight out to Orange County, completely removed from my normal coordinates.
Over the last couple of days, I put down a seventeen-hour drive straight across the midsection of the country, hauling our competition entries out from Holland, Michigan, to the Great American Beer Festival staging warehouse in Denver. Much of that drive was spent rocketing down I-80 at eighty miles per hour with literally nothing to break up the horizon except endless fields of Nebraska corn.
In theory, seventeen unbroken hours alone in a car should be the ultimate decompression chamber. You can’t do much else except steer and listen to audio. You have a clear, tangible operational purpose. You are moving freight, crossing state lines, and checking off a massive logistical box for the business. It is productive, justifiable, honest work.
And yet, for seventeen straight hours, I was an absolute wreck of nervous energy.
I’m on my way to Southern California for a few days of downtime before heading into the Future Proof Wealth Festival—an event I affectionately refer to as my annual imposter syndrome convention. Because between running the business, navigating daily family life, and currently rebuilding our home from the studs up after a devastating fire, I haven’t written nearly as much lately as I’d like. My brilliant solution for my “time off”? Launch an aggressive, self-imposed blogapalooza where I force myself to write and publish every single day for a week.
Because God forbid I just sit down and stare at the Pacific Ocean. Let’s dive headfirst into the irony: I have completely lost the ability to chill out, and worse, I feel intensely guilty about even attempting it. And more guilt that I can’t accomplish it.
Consider the mental ticker tape scrolling across my brain while cruise control was locked at 80:
My third grader. He has had a rough start to the school year, and historically, I tend to be the one who keeps him grounded, focused, and accountable. How is that dynamic going to shake out over the next ten days while I’m three time zones away?
The brewery. In ten years of ownership, the longest stretch I’ve ever been completely away from the operation is seven days. This trip will clock in at ten. The cold box is full, the taproom is dialed, and my staff is bulletproof, but the operator’s twitch never actually shuts off.
My marriage. My wife has been on the road a lot for work. She just got back. I’ve been holding down the home front. Now I leave. The minute my flight lands back in Michigan, she walks out the door for another business trip. Passing like ships in the night is no way to run a long-term partnership.
The house. Construction is finally ramping up hard after the fire. The second my return flight touches down next week, I have to walk directly into an on-site rough-in with the electrician to make permanent, high-stakes layout calls that we will live with for the next twenty years.
Does any of this stuff actually matter? Yes, of course it does.
Can I control a single ounce of it from behind the wheel in western Nebraska, or from 35,000 feet over the Rockies? Not a chance.
And that right there is the entire defect. It’s the illusion of control. When you live with high-functioning anxiety, you don’t merely tolerate chaos—you actively build a cockpit inside of it. You convince yourself that your hyper-vigilance is the only thing keeping the wings attached to the fuselage. When the forced stillness of travel strips that perceived control away, your brain doesn’t sigh with relief; it panics because its primary operating function has suddenly gone offline. You feel like if you take your hands off the wheel for even a second, the entire enterprise veers into the ditch.
The second leg of this trip is inherently, unapologetically for me. This marks my fourth year heading out to Huntington Beach for Future Proof. The first time I went, I was grinding through an MBA, terrified that post-COVID headwinds were going to swallow the brewery whole. I was aggressively working every connection and acquaintance I had, frantically trying to build a runway to pivot into wealth management if the floor fell out from under us.
Fortunately, through an unreasonable amount of stubborn grinding, the brewery survived, and that career pivot isn’t happening.
So why am I still flying out there? For the exact reason I write this Substack: I desperately crave the intellectual scratch. There are only so many people in your everyday orbit who want to passionately geek out on market mechanics, behavioral finance, asset allocation, and economic regime shifts. For me, it’s pure Finance Fantasy Camp. But because it doesn’t directly feed the immediate, tangible machinery of my day-to-day responsibilities, a persistent voice in my head tells me I shouldn’t be here.
There are plenty of academic studies on the “U-curve of happiness,” showing that life satisfaction tends to bottom out for men right in their forties. It’s that exact squeeze where the weight of peak responsibilities—raising kids, career obligations, rebuilding physical infrastructure, supporting a family—collides head-on with the quiet realization that your time on this spinning rock is brutally finite.
I am smack in the middle of that trough. Doing nothing feels reckless. Even while grinding through endless miles of cornfields, I was firing prompts into an AI assistant, trying to optimize everything from family dynamics to operational workflows. That isn’t reflection; it’s just running on a treadmill in a different room.
I don’t have a clean, packaged takeaway here. I am notoriously bad at this. If you read this publication regularly, odds are pretty high that you are wired the exact same way, or at least cycling through a season of life that demands it.
I’m going to attempt to treat this week as a legitimate mental circuit-breaker, even if my definition of a “break” currently involves publishing market essays between festival stages.
Do as I say, not as I do. When was the last time you did something purely for yourself that couldn’t be justified on a spreadsheet, an invoice, or an arbitrary productivity tracker?
Try to carve out an hour for it this week. I’ll be over here trying to figure out how to take my own advice.