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Nine hours. That was all the notice we had before we left Israel for Koh Samui, Thailand. The war had started. We packed for two weeks, loaded our two kids onto a plane, and hoped we'd be back soon.

We weren't. And we've been improvising life ever since.

In my previous life, I more or less knew what the next 10 years would look like—where we would live, how we'd make a living, how we'd raise the kids, who our friends would be, and who we'd turn to for help or advice.

Then all of those anchors disappeared at once. On paper, it looked like freedom. In practice, it felt a lot like instability. Despite the circumstances, I'd been given a rare opportunity: the chance to build a new life from scratch.

The question was what to build. My answer changed with age. As a young entrepreneur at 25, I measured success mostly in terms of money and assets. Now I was the father of two little rebels who looked up to me in admiration and craved my attention.

I had a short window of opportunity to be the hero in their lives. Soon they would grow up, and for the rest of my life, I'd be the one looking at them in admiration and wanting their attention.

Like in Cat's in the Cradle:

"When you coming home, son?"
"I don't know when"
"But we'll get together then, dad"
"You know we'll have a good time then"

That was one of my biggest fears. I didn't want to miss the brief time I had to be my kids' hero. When people ask older folks about their regrets in life, a common theme emerges—wishing they had spent more time with family, loved ones, or doing things that brought joy and meaning, rather than focusing excessively on career or work.

For me, success became the ability to control my time, to choose to spend it with my kids and the people I loved.

So I started writing publicly about the experiment as I built this new life—how I was creating an income to support my family while optimizing for control over my time instead of focusing on money. For a while, I had it.

Freedom. Control over my time. A SaaS that supported the family without eating my life. By the measure I'd set for myself, I'd succeeded. The strange part was that I still didn't feel stable.

Nobody tells you what it feels like to build a life where nobody has known you for more than a year. There are no lifelong friends to call when something goes wrong. No family nearby. No one who really knows you. No relationship that's already survived enough years to earn complete trust.

You're a foreigner in an unfamiliar system. You don't vote. You don't really belong. Every piece of bureaucracy reminds you that you're temporary. A visa requires a bank account. A bank account requires a visa.

Our kids treated the whole thing differently. They were young enough to think we'd invented a new game. New house. New school. New language. They adapted faster than we did. Then the business ended. Losing the business forced me to look again at what I'd been calling stability.

The shift happened almost without us noticing.

At some point we stopped treating Thailand as the place we were waiting to leave and started treating it as home. We stopped living like guests. We started investing in friendships instead of logistics. We built routines instead of contingency plans.

We found people we trusted, and people who trusted us back.