When I was a kid, I thought speaking in tongues was normal.
My mom believed in it, I grew up around it, and I didn’t know there was anything strange about it because when you’re a kid, whatever happens inside your house is just how the world works. It wasn’t until I started making friends and getting away from my mother that I realized everybody wasn’t doing this shit.
I grew up in a trailer park, and back then crazy to me was anything outside of a trailer park. People living what I would now consider regular lives seemed strange. As I got older and saw more of the world, I realized I had it completely backwards. My childhood was the crazy part.
I’ve traveled all over, spent time in Los Angeles, and spent two years in Iraq running combat missions. I’ve been around enough shit that I thought I had developed a pretty high tolerance for it.
The strangest thing about Iraq wasn’t that the violence became normal. It was that at some point I started enjoying the intensity of it. Combat was extreme, the violence was extreme, and after living inside that environment long enough, the extremity itself became something I liked. That’s a strange thing to admit now, but it didn’t seem strange then.
I spent 17 years in New York, which has its own particular kind of insanity, and for a long time I loved it.
I lived on Morgan Avenue in Williamsburg during the height of hipster culture. I always considered myself the anti-hipster, although in retrospect I was living in Williamsburg, going to huge warehouse parties during peak dubstep and popping Molly all night, so maybe I don’t have much of a defense.
Those parties would go all night, and one morning around seven, after being out all night, I was sitting on the stoop of my building when some guy came running down the block completely naked. I watched him go by and didn’t think much of it because it’s New York.
I still think about that guy sometimes. At some point I heard that during some robberies and home invasions, people get forced to strip before they’re let go, the idea being that a naked person isn’t going to chase anybody or run straight to the cops. They’re just going to stand outside trying to figure out what the fuck they’re supposed to do next. The first time I heard that, I thought about the guy on Morgan Avenue.
I have absolutely no idea if that’s what happened to him. Maybe he was high, maybe he’d lost his clothes, or maybe he was having the greatest morning of his life. All I know is that at seven in the morning I was sitting on my stoop coming down from Molly while a naked man sprinted through Williamsburg, and neither one of us was really in a position to judge the other.
Eventually, New York drove me to the absolute brink of insanity. Toward the end, I pulled a report from my Fitbit and it said that over the previous three years I’d averaged two to three hours of sleep a night. I would lie in bed for hours without sleeping, exhausted but unable to shut down. When you go that long without sleep, you almost get tunnel vision. You just see yourself waking up, getting ready, getting on the subway, going to work, coming home, and then lying in bed. I would go to work tired, come home tired and lie there again. I was too exhausted to work out, I got out of shape, and the routine became work, home, bed, don’t sleep, repeat.
I was living in the East Village when I finally decided I was done. I sold or got rid of almost everything in my apartment, packed whatever was left into suitcases, and left the country.
I flew to Rome and spent a month getting my yoga teacher certification in the mountains of Tuscany. When I came back, I flew to Miami and stayed with a friend in North Miami for a month while I applied for jobs and got to know the city.
Miami wasn’t completely new to me because for about a year before moving here, I had been coming down roughly once a month, usually for a weekend or four days at a time. I thought I knew the place. In my head, Miami was basically going to be an urban beach town, something like New York with palm trees.
Visiting Miami and living in Miami are two completely different things, and the difference is that when you live here, you find out Miami is fucking insane.
I live in Brickell, and one day I was standing on my balcony overlooking the city when I heard a Ferrari engine and tires screeching somewhere below me. I didn’t even look up, and that’s an important detail because Ferrari engines and tires screeching are normal sounds in Brickell.
Then I heard a bang, every light in my apartment went out, and I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t just my place because the surrounding blocks had gone dark too. A Ferrari had crashed into a utility pole hard enough to bend the pole over. The driver jumped out and ran, the police chased him, and they eventually caught him.
My electricity was out for about two hours, and then Miami continued.
Another day I was riding to the VA while it was raining, looked across the interstate, and saw a truck doing donuts in the rain.
That’s the whole story.
At one point I was opening Equinox and waking up at 3:30 in the morning for work, which is an interesting time to be awake in Brickell because you’re starting your day while a significant percentage of Miami is still finishing the previous one. People are coming out of clubs drunk or high, people are fighting, people are barely dressed, and sometimes they’re not dressed at all.
One morning I walked out of my apartment and there were two girls squatted down pissing on the sidewalk. As I walked past them, I said, “Make your father proud now,” and kept going to work.
I’ve seen homeless people naked, guys dressed like anime characters, people who look like they’re live-action role playing, OnlyFans girls, influencers and people fighting. One time I saw a guy just walking down the sidewalk in a full clown suit. I have no idea why. Eventually you stop asking questions.
The funny thing is that my stories aren’t even particularly competitive here. In June 2026, Miami Beach police said they found a burglary suspect completely naked inside a ransacked apartment. According to police, he ran away and was later spotted wearing nothing but red shorts after a security guard reported that he was trying to get into a school.
That’s not one of my stories. That’s the news.
Brickell itself is its own ecosystem of fitness girls, OnlyFans girls, tech bros, finance bros, entrepreneurs, salespeople, influencers, and two categories I’ve come to recognize very well: real Miami rich and fake Miami rich.
Fake Miami rich is a very specific type of person. He’s the guy who rents a Ferrari for the weekend and takes pictures with it like it’s his. He lives in an apartment he can’t afford, can barely afford, or his parents can afford, and he usually sells some kind of online business coaching or sales coaching on Instagram while making sure everybody knows he’s an alpha male. His Instagram is restaurants, watches, cars, bottles, apartments and money, and sometimes if you look closely enough at the money, it looks like the fake shit they use in movies.
The entire thing is a performance, which is funny because some of the people here with real money are the exact opposite.
The richest guy I know in Brickell owns a hedge fund. He refuses to buy anything unless it’s on sale, orders his gym clothes from Amazon Basics, and when he goes out to eat he’ll order an appetizer instead of an entrée because it’s cheaper. He doesn’t need anybody to think he’s rich because he is, while somebody with a fraction of his money is renting a Ferrari for the weekend so he can spend Saturday taking pictures leaning against it.
I grew up poor, so having reached a point in my life where I would consider myself upper middle class feels pretty fucking good. But I don’t care about looking successful. I save my money, invest for retirement, and yes, I will absolutely buy whatever is on BOGO at Publix. Maybe that’s why fake Miami rich fascinates me so much. I know what it’s like to have no money, and now that I have some, the last thing I want to do is spend all of it convincing strangers that I have more.
Then, in a city obsessed with showing you how much money everybody has, you can walk a few blocks and see somebody sleeping on the street.
New York homeless people tend to be crazy and sometimes kind of funny, and New York also has resources. LA homeless people, in my experience, tend to be more psychotic, mean and aggressive. Nothing I’ve seen looks more miserable than being homeless in Miami.
The heat here is fucking brutal, and when you add the humidity, tropical rain and then another round of heat, I can’t imagine what it must be like to live outside and have nowhere to escape any of it. You can walk past unbelievable displays of wealth and then see somebody in absolute misery on the same street. Miami has always felt like two classes to me: rich and poor, with another group in the middle desperately pretending to belong to the first one.
And sometimes none of it is funny. Recently, a woman was stabbed to death inside a luxury high-rise in Brickell, and police charged her son with killing her. She was killed on the forty-seventh floor of a luxury building in the middle of the neighborhood where I live. There’s nothing funny about that.
Cocaine is cocaine, and this is Miami, so nobody is going to be shocked by that. What I didn’t know before moving to South Florida was that cocaine actually washes up on the fucking beach.
It happens often enough that another package washing ashore barely qualifies as unbelievable news down here. In July 2026, a kilo washed up in the Florida Keys, and three days later another kilo with the same marking washed up about ten miles away. Sometimes law enforcement gets it, sometimes somebody walking the beach finds it, and sometimes, I’m sure, somebody looks left, looks right, sees nobody around and decides that God has finally answered his prayers.
Tusi gets sold as pink cocaine, and what’s actually in the bag is anybody’s guess.
Even the cocaine has branding here.
Here’s the part I haven’t mentioned: every one of the Miami stories I’ve told so far happened while I was sober.
When I was walking to work at 3:30 in the morning past people coming out of clubs drunk or high, I was sober. When I walked past the two girls pissing on the sidewalk, I was sober. The Ferrari crashed into the utility pole while I was sober. I moved to one of the biggest party cities in America and stopped getting fucked up.
New Year’s Eve was the first time I really tested whether that was going to work. I went to a party at Gecko in Brickell, and it was my first time really going out since becoming completely sober from drugs and alcohol. I had spent enough years connecting going out with getting fucked up that there was a legitimate question in my mind about what going out was even going to be without it.
At midnight, I got a kiss from a beautiful Venezuelan girl I’d been talking to for months at Equinox. I didn’t need to drink and I didn’t need drugs. I could be around the energy without having to become part of the insanity.
That’s the part that still surprises me. While living in the craziest place I’ve ever lived, my own life has become considerably less crazy.
I fucking love it here.
Since moving here, I’ve lost 53 pounds and built a fitness routine around weights, cardio, yoga, Pilates and walking. The two to three hours of sleep I was getting in New York became a solid eight. I barely saw the sun toward the end of my time in New York and was supplementing vitamin D and B12, while now I’m outside in the sunlight every day.
I walk, get near the water, spend time on grass and generally feel more connected to nature than I ever did in New York. I will also happily go the rest of my life without another bitter New York winter. My first winter in Miami was one of the most beautiful winters I’d ever experienced simply because there was no gray slush, no freezing wind tunneling between buildings, and no waiting months for the city to become pleasant again.
Brickell itself has completely different personalities depending on when you see it. At 3:30 in the morning, I’m walking past people finishing a night they probably won’t completely remember. By seven, eight or nine, people are walking their dogs, runners are out, people are getting coffee or brunch, heading to the gym, or going to work.
At night, the skyline lights up and reflects off the water, and I think the views are better than New York.
There. I said it.
I love the thunderstorms, the rain, the sunsets and golden hour, and I even love the ridiculous little reminders that I’m living somewhere tropical, like the fact that when Florida gets cold enough, iguanas start falling out of fucking trees.
For the first six months I lived here, I spent a lot of time doing things alone. One day I worked out at Equinox, got a coffee and a sandwich at Publix in Brickell, and walked home along the Underline. Later I went to Coral Gables and walked around near Miracle Mile, past the restaurants lined up with people sitting outside.
There wasn’t anything spectacular about the day, which is probably why I remember that period of my life the way I do. I could go to a restaurant alone, walk around a neighborhood alone, find something to do alone, and I was at peace with it. I didn’t need the day to turn into anything else.
Miami has some incredible food if you leave the places that are trying too hard to convince you they have incredible food. I’ve had Cuban, Venezuelan, Peruvian, Brazilian and Spanish food here, along with great seafood, and the mom-and-pop places are usually where I want to be.
Brickell, on the other hand, has one of the worst restaurant scenes for actual food, in my opinion. The restaurants themselves look fucking amazing. The ambiance, production and decor can be second to none, and then the food comes out and it’s average.
It’s almost another version of fake Miami rich. It looks expensive, photographs beautifully, and the substance doesn’t always match the presentation.
Get outside of that bubble and Miami changes. I can go to Little Havana and feel like I’ve been transported to another country. To me, it’s the last authentic neighborhood in Miami because Spanish is still everywhere, there are restaurants where it’s simply the language being spoken, people who were born there have grown old there, and places like Ball & Chain still carry the history of the neighborhood with them.
Little Havana feels lived in rather than manufactured, and that’s increasingly rare in Miami.
I also never really know who I’m going to meet here. I interact with people from different countries, careers, industries and walks of life, and that unpredictability is part of what keeps the city interesting.
My career changed here. I had been working in operations management at Equinox and decided to throw myself back into sales, something I’d done in the past but had moved away from. It was a big career move, and in my first month as a membership advisor, I became the number one salesman in the entire company.
New York taught me how to grind and hustle, and that’s one thing I’ll always give it. You learn how to fucking work there. I brought that with me.
I didn’t have to throw away everything New York gave me. I just had to stop letting New York destroy me.
Miami gives me choices that I stopped feeling like I had there. If I want nightlife, it’s here, and apparently I can even go out without getting fucked up. I can train, go to the beach, play poker, get outside, explore another neighborhood, eat somewhere I’ve never been, or spend the day by myself and be completely fine with it. There are completely different versions of the same city depending on what I feel like doing that day.
I didn’t expect to like Florida itself, but it’s grown on me. There’s no state income tax, there’s a Publix on basically every corner where I can chase BOGOs like a retired grandmother, and the sky can go from postcard to biblical and back again before dinner.
For a long time I believed New York and Los Angeles were where you had to be if you wanted to be close to culture, style, opportunity and whatever was happening next. I don’t believe that anymore because social media blew that geographical monopoly apart. Style, trends and opportunities can come from anywhere now, and you don’t need a Manhattan address or an LA zip code to matter.
For me, Miami has replaced them as the place to be, not because it’s perfect, because it’s not even fucking close, but because it gives me room to decide what kind of life I want.
When I was a kid, I thought speaking in tongues was normal because I didn’t know anything else, and I thought the trailer park was normal because it was the only world I knew. Then I left and discovered how strange some of my normal actually was.
Two years running combat missions in Iraq recalibrated me, New York did it again, travel did it again, and now Miami has done it.
Except this time something is different.
In Iraq, I learned to like the extremity. In New York, I chased it until it stopped letting me sleep. In Miami, it’s all around me, and I don’t need it.
As a kid, I didn’t get to choose my normal. In New York, I eventually found myself trapped inside a normal that wasn’t working for me anymore. In Miami, I’ve built my own normal around eight hours of sleep, sobriety, training, yoga, sunlight, work, saving money, thunderstorms, water, and a Publix BOGO.
Outside my window, a Ferrari is probably doing 90 miles an hour down Brickell Avenue, and somebody down there is making a decision that’ll end up in tomorrow’s news. I don’t even look up anymore. I don’t need to be in it.
I’m going to sleep through it, all eight hours. If it’s anything good, I’ll read about it in the morning.
I used to think normal was something you figured out once. It turns out I’ve had to find it over and over, in a trailer park, in Iraq, in New York, and now here. This is the first one I’d want to keep.
Miami is louder than New York ever was, and I’ve never slept better.
