Blended Tribes

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Blended Tribes

A calm corner for intentional living, midlife reinvention, and using AI without losing yourself.

08/21/2026

I’ve wanted to write this one for a long time, but it took me a while to figure out how. I hope you like it.

What a long meal with someone you love actually asks of you

08/05/2026

Three teenage girls on the Panama Metro taught me something about vanity, self-respect, and the danger of trying too hard to look like a local.
I thought my Panama hat would help me blend in.
It didn't.
My latest post is about what the Stoics can teach us about personal style, why I still wear the hat, and a simple test that can keep unnecessary clothes out of your closet.

What three teenage girls and Epictetus taught me about vanity

07/29/2026

Most of us use AI to move faster.

I recently used it to do the opposite.

When I discovered serious problems with the handling of my immigration case, every angry instinct in me wanted to react immediately. Instead, I gave myself 40 days to slow down, separate emotion from fact, and figure out what to do next.

In my latest post, I share the five-part prompt I used to challenge my assumptions, identify what was reversible, uncover my blind spots, and make a calmer decision.

Sometimes the smartest use of AI isn’t getting an answer faster.

Sometimes it’s helping you wait long enough to ask a better question.

The Stoic case for letting a difficult choice sit and the five-part prompt that helps me think clearly

07/22/2026

"A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one." Most of us have heard some version of that line. I always assumed it was one old saying. It's actually three, stitched together over four hundred years, and the meaning flipped every time somebody added to it.

That history sent me somewhere I didn't expect: straight into the question of what mastery actually is, and whether anyone ever really gets there.

I used to think mastery was a finish line. Cross it, and you're done. But nobody who's actually good at something describes it that way. The better people get, the more clearly they see how much they still don't know.

So I've started thinking about my life less like one skill to perfect and more like a garden: a few things that need daily water (character, health, the people I love), a few that need weekly attention (the writing, the business), and a few that are allowed to just grow slowly, or stay hobbies, without ever needing to pay rent.

I wrote the full 400-year history and the philosophy behind it here:

A 400-year detour through an old proverb, and what it taught me about a mastery that never finishes

07/20/2026

My grandmother could look at a plain table for thirty seconds and know exactly what it needed. Two things, chosen well, never more than that: a bowl moved six inches to the left and a bouquet with three stems cut shorter than the florist intended. She was French Canadian, not wealthy, and never once mentioned money while she taught me this.

Watching her taught me what taste actually is: attention, paid consistently, over years, to small things nobody's grading you on.

Here's the rule I still use, the one I got from a woman who's been gone forty years. Before I buy anything, I ask what it would look like if I owned three and had to pick the best one. Usually that question kills the purchase entirely.

The Stoic case for taste as a form of attention, and the one rule I still use before buying anything

07/15/2026

An old colleague from my design and construction days emailed me last month asking if I'd consult on a project remotely. Easy money, he said.

Ten years ago I'd have said yes by the second paragraph, then spent the next hour building an elaborate excuse to justify why I had to back out.

This time I typed five words. "That doesn’t work for me," and then I sent the email. I thought to myself, was I being too impulsive? Maybe even a little rude? I sat there for a full minute, waiting for the follow-up question that would force me to explain myself.

It never came. He wrote back, "No problem, good luck out there." Turns out most people just want an answer. The excuses were for me, not for them.

The Stoic case for a clean no, and the one line I finally learned to use

07/12/2026

An email hit my inbox last week promising an "AI search backdoor." The pitch: get your writing cited by ChatGPT and the other big models, using tactics with names like definition boxes and strategic press placements.

I read the whole thing. Then I felt something close to disgust, the kind you get watching someone explain how to fake a handshake.

Here's what bothered me more than the pitch. For about thirty seconds, I considered it. I have years of showing up honestly, and here was a stranger offering to help me skip the slow part.

A question stopped me: Do I want to be found by an algorithm, or understood by an actual reader? I deleted the email and went back to work.

Why I’d rather be understood than found, and the Stoic case for writing like a human anyway

07/08/2026

Somewhere between the immigration lawyer, the business permits, and the grocery list magnetized to the fridge, my wife and I turned into co-managers of a small operation. Neither of us noticed when it happened.

We still love each other. We just started talking like a two-person ops team. Did you call the accountant? Is the residency renewal in yet? Six months into rebuilding a life in Panama, I realized we hadn't had a conversation that wasn't a status update in longer than I wanted to admit.

So we started something small. Ten minutes most evenings, one rule: no fixing anything. Just one question. How are you really today?

It felt like wasted time at first. Thirty-five years in consulting trained me to treat every conversation like a problem with a deliverable. Turned out those ten minutes were the only part of the day that belonged to us instead of the operation.

Yukkuri, and the Stoic permission to ask instead of fix

07/05/2026

Three tabs deep into a vibe-coding tutorial, I asked myself a question that ruined the whole afternoon. I'd been at it two hours, halfway convinced I was about to build the perfect to-do app. Not use one. Build one, with AI doing the heavy lifting on code I don't actually know how to write.

Then it hit me: why the hell do I need to be working all the time? Or my brand is a farce.

I write about slower mornings and not needing to control everything. I'd just spent two hours building a system whose entire job was making sure I was never more than one tap from my task list.

A to-do list you can reach from anywhere is a tool. One that can reach you from anywhere is a job. I closed the tutorial and went back to my legal pad.

A vibe-coding rabbit hole and the question that pulled me out of it

07/01/2026

Tim Ferriss sent an email last week saying his print book sales are down 57% this year. He blamed free chatbots replacing what he calls "lookup table" content, the how-to instructions people used to pay a book or course for.

To fully digest it, I read it twice, then I asked myself the question: if a chatbot can already hand anyone the instructions, what's left that's actually mine?

AI is genuinely excellent at recipes, code, definitions, first drafts. What it can't produce is 35 years of watching projects fall apart, a marriage you're still learning from, money you lost and earned back differently the second time. It can simulate the sentence structure of a life. It can't have had one.

That's the only moat left, and it's worth more than it used to be.

A line from a Tim Ferriss email that wouldn’t leave me alone

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Portland, OR

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http://blendedtribes.com/, https://anthonyzagelow.substack.com/

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