At the end of 2022, I had just been promoted at a tech company I genuinely liked. About a month later, I got laid off.
It was my second layoff in three years, and this one hit harder than I expected. Maybe because the promotion had made me feel like I was finally gaining some momentum. Maybe because by that point in my career, I thought I had earned a little more certainty. Whatever the reason, I took it personally.
A few weeks later, I went to Thailand for New Year’s. I remember ringing in 2023 unemployed, hungover, and feeling like a complete loser. There was no beautiful revelation on a beach or sudden gratitude for the universe redirecting me. I mostly felt embarrassed and lost. I had spent years building a career, collecting increasingly better titles, trying to become more valuable, and suddenly the structure I had used to measure progress was gone.
That was probably the part I underestimated. Losing the job was one thing. Losing the identity and rhythm around it was another.
When I got back to Austin, I did what seemed responsible. I started interviewing. I updated the résumé, took calls with companies, and began rebuilding the same life I had just been removed from. At the time, getting back on track felt synonymous with moving forward.
Then one Saturday morning, something shifted.
I started thinking about this strange tradeoff that seems to happen as we get older. When you are young, you usually have plenty of time and not much money. Later, if things go well, you finally have a little money, but the time starts disappearing beneath careers, homes, families, responsibilities, and all the perfectly reasonable reasons not to disappear for a year.
For the first time, I realized I was sitting inside an unusual window where I had enough of both.
I wasn’t rich. I certainly didn’t feel financially fearless. But I had savings, relatively few obligations, and nobody expecting me anywhere on Monday morning. The layoff had felt like something had been taken from me, but there was another side to it I hadn’t considered. I suddenly had ownership of my time in a way I probably hadn’t since I was a teenager.
Traveling around the world had been a dream of mine for years. I had traveled plenty already, but this was different. I didn’t want two weeks in Europe or a polished lap around the same places everyone already knew. I wanted to go properly. Start somewhere unfamiliar. Travel overland when possible. Spend time in countries I knew almost nothing about. Put myself in situations where my usual reference points weren’t particularly useful. I also wanted to finish the year in the mountains, trekking through Nepal and eventually attempting Aconcagua in Argentina.
There were plenty of reasons not to do it. The résumé gap. The money. The career momentum I was supposedly throwing away. The possibility that I would come home a year later and discover that nobody particularly cared about my grand adventure.
But underneath all of that was a much simpler question: if I didn’t do it now, when exactly did I think I would?
I stopped interviewing. I sold most of what I owned, cashed out my 401(k), and booked a one-way ticket to West Africa.
That sounds far more courageous written down than it felt at the time. I wasn’t dramatically rejecting corporate America or announcing that I had figured out some superior way to live. I actually assumed there was a decent chance I would return to the corporate world after the trip. I had enjoyed parts of my career and had been good at it. I just knew that if I immediately accepted another job, there was a good chance this particular dream would quietly become something I kept promising myself I would do later.
Oddly enough, that fear of returning to corporate life is also the reason this website exists.
I had already traveled to 38 countries by then, and before leaving I decided to build a travel website. My logic was surprisingly practical. I imagined myself coming home after almost a year away, sitting across from an interviewer while they stared at a giant hole in my résumé and asked what I had been doing. Instead of trying to explain the year in a few awkward sentences, I figured I could point them somewhere that actually told the story.
That first version of Mindful Mindsets was essentially a very elaborate answer to a future résumé question.
The only problem was that I had absolutely no idea how to build a website.
So I started learning. I taught myself enough development, design, structure, writing, SEO, and everything else to keep moving. What was supposed to be a side project quickly consumed entire days. I remember barely sleeping for stretches because I wanted to get the site live before I left, while also trying to fill it with years of travel stories so there was something useful there from day one.
At the same time, I was training hard for the mountains later in the trip. My days became this slightly ridiculous loop of sitting behind a laptop for hours, training, coming home, opening the laptop again, and repeating the process.
One afternoon, a close friend and I went to a local wellness spot to break up the day. We did a few rounds between the sauna and cold plunge, and I came out feeling completely reset. My energy was back. My head felt clear. I remember thinking how perfect it would be to come back the next morning, plunge, grab a coffee, open my laptop, and work there for a few hours.
So I asked if I could bring my laptop back.
The answer was basically, “No Wi-Fi allowed, man.”
It should have been a completely forgettable interaction. Instead, something about it stuck.
Why did I need to leave a place that made me feel better in order to go somewhere else to work? Why did I need one membership to train, another place to recover, another place to work, another place to grab coffee, and then somehow find time to see friends after all of it? Why had some of the most important parts of a good life ended up living in completely different places?
There was no Gevity at that point. No name, no business plan, no lease, and certainly no vision of an 18,000-square-foot club. It was just a question I couldn’t quite stop thinking about.
Then I left.
Over the next eleven months, I traveled through 27 countries, beginning in West Africa and eventually working my way toward Argentina. There were long train rides, crowded buses, borders crossed on foot, deserts, tiny villages, hostels, strangers’ homes, ridiculous logistical mistakes, questionable meals, and eventually a lot of time in the mountains.
I had gone partly because I felt like I needed to rebuild myself, but I think what happened was less dramatic and probably more useful. The familiar things were removed for long enough that I started noticing how much importance I had assigned to them.
Nobody in a village halfway across the world cared what company I had worked for. My title was useless at a bus station where I didn’t speak the language. A promotion didn’t help me find my way through a border crossing, make a stranger laugh, or get myself over a mountain pass. The things that had made me feel behind or unsuccessful at home became almost completely irrelevant once I stepped outside the environment that had taught me to measure myself by them.
That was incredibly freeing.
Travel also reminded me how basic a lot of our needs actually are. Move your body. Eat something decent. Sleep. Have a reason to get up in the morning. Stay curious. Spend time outside. Be around people. Have something difficult enough ahead of you that it requires your attention.
Those ideas would matter much more later.
Then, about two months into the trip, I met Espoir over a chess game in Spain.
I didn’t walk away from that game with some movie-scene certainty that I had just met my future wife. She was simply a person I found incredibly interesting, and we happened to meet because both of us had made completely separate decisions that somehow put us in the same place at the same time.
We kept talking. Then we kept finding ways to see each other.
That relationship is still the part of the trip that puts the entire idea of planning your life into perspective for me. I had spent months deciding where I wanted to go, what countries I wanted to see, and which mountains I wanted to climb. The most important thing that happened during the entire year was something I had absolutely no ability to plan.
I made the decision to travel because I wanted adventure, space, and perspective. I had no idea the biggest consequence of that decision would be meeting the person I would build the rest of my life with.
By the time those eleven months were coming to an end, I had stopped thinking about the trip as a detour from my real life.
It had become my life.
That didn’t mean I returned wanting to abandon ambition, stop working, or spend the rest of my years drifting around with a backpack. If anything, I came home wanting to build more. I just had a very different sense of what all that building was supposed to be for.
I had spent almost a year feeling intensely alive. I had been moving constantly, meeting people, learning, getting uncomfortable, pushing myself physically, spending enormous amounts of time outside, and having conversations with people whose lives looked nothing like mine. I didn’t want to come home and put all of that into a small box labeled “the year I traveled,” then return to a life where those things only happened during two weeks of vacation.
Espoir eventually moved from Austria to Austin, despite never having visited the city before. A few months later, we got married at the courthouse.
Our life together started pretty simply. We were living in a roughly 400-square-foot apartment without a dining table, so a lot of our meals happened on the floor. Eventually, so did an unreasonable amount of the early work on the company that would become Gevity.
That little thought from the cold plunge had continued following me around the world, and once we were both back in Austin, we started pulling on it.
At first, the idea was messy. We researched wellness, coworking, hospitality, longevity, private clubs, community, remote work, real estate, loneliness, and the way cities were changing after COVID. We kept asking questions and following them until our business plan was somewhere around 150 pages.
The deeper we went, the more we came back to the same observation: modern life had become incredibly fragmented.
We had become very good at creating specialized solutions for individual parts of ourselves. Work in one place. Train in another. Recover somewhere else. Meet friends across town. If you work remotely, perhaps your kitchen table also becomes your office, conference room, cafeteria, and social environment.
Then we wonder why people have trouble finding balance.
What if the problem wasn’t that everyone needed better time management? What if we had simply built environments that made a whole life unnecessarily difficult to live?
We weren’t interested in building another gym with nicer locker rooms or a coworking space that happened to have a sauna. We wanted to create the place we kept wishing existed ourselves, somewhere that treated work, health, recovery, curiosity, and connection as parts of the same person rather than separate products.
Somewhere you could get meaningful work done and still take care of yourself. Somewhere you could push yourself hard without wellness becoming another arena for ego. Somewhere friendships could happen through ordinary proximity rather than another networking event. Somewhere ambition and being present in your life didn’t have to feel like competing ideas.
Eventually, that became Gevity.
Today, I can walk through an 18,000-square-foot club in Austin and see someone training while another person builds a company twenty feet away. Someone might finish a meeting and head into the sauna. Two people who were strangers six months earlier are having coffee. Someone is reading alone in a corner. Someone came in for a workout and has somehow been there for five hours.
Every once in a while, I stop and think about the sequence of events that had to happen for any of it to exist.
I had to get laid off. I had to take it badly enough to question what I was doing. I had to decide not to accept another job. I had to build a travel website because I was worried about explaining a résumé gap. Building that website had to lead me into a wellness space on a random afternoon. Someone had to tell me I couldn’t use Wi-Fi there. I had to get on a plane to West Africa. I had to end up sitting across a chessboard from Espoir in Spain. She had to eventually move to a city she had never visited. We had to sit on the floor of a tiny apartment long enough for a strange idea to become a real company.
None of it looked like a plan while it was happening.
That is probably what I think about most now.
When I got laid off, I saw the event entirely as a setback because I could only measure it against the trajectory I had already imagined. I had been moving in one direction, and something had pushed me backward.
What I couldn’t see was that my life was about to start moving sideways.
And sometimes sideways is where everything is.
The layoff didn’t turn out to be a blessing because losing your job is inherently good or because every setback secretly contains some perfectly designed lesson. Sometimes bad things are simply bad things. What changed my life was what the setback created: an opening.
For once, there was a break in the momentum. Enough space to ask whether I actually wanted to keep moving in the same direction simply because I had already spent years moving that way.
I think we underestimate how powerful momentum can be. A career starts moving, so you keep following it. Your lifestyle gets more expensive, so the salary becomes harder to walk away from. The responsibilities accumulate. The window gets a little narrower every year. Eventually, continuing can feel less like a decision than the natural state of things.
Being forced off that path hurt.
It also gave me the first real opportunity I’d had in years to look at it from the outside.
I used to think good decisions were the ones where you had enough information to know they would work. I’m less convinced of that now. Some decisions matter precisely because there is no proof. You just recognize that the window in front of you may not stay open forever.
Booking that one-way ticket did not guarantee anything that came afterward. It could have been an expensive year of travel followed by another corporate job. I didn’t know I would meet Espoir. I didn’t know the random cold-plunge thought would eventually become Gevity. I didn’t know that the travel blog I built to explain a gap in my résumé would still be here years later telling this story.
I just knew I had spent enough of my life assuming the safest option was automatically the right one.
The layoff changed that.
It felt like the end of the trajectory I had been building.
It turned out to be the beginning of an entirely different one.
