We landed in November with our visas stamped and ready to go, officially set up to start building our new life and business in France.

I thought we were ready for this. We'd been visiting France several times a year for the past eight years. We knew France. We loved France. What we didn't realize was how different rural France is from Paris, and how different rural life in general would be for a city boy who'd spent the last 20 years in Los Angeles. Day to day, it was a complete 180.

The first sign came when we arrived at the house and the power wasn't on. (This was not the same power outage in one of our recent YouTube videos here.) Our realtor had given us the account info for one of the electrical lines to the property, but it only covered the guest house. The main house? Dark. We spent our first night in the Dordogne without electricity, and it didn't come back on until the next day. Welcome to France.

Our first instinct was to power through it. That's what you do in LA. Something breaks, you fix it. Something's slow, you find a workaround. Dylan and I spent the first few months in full operational mode, trying to run our new French life like we were still on a deadline. Every task that would take an hour in LA took a full week here. You'd show up somewhere thinking you had what you needed, only to learn there was one more form, one more person who had to sign off, one more step nobody mentioned on the website. And our reaction, every time, was to push harder.

But that's the thing. We didn't move to France to keep running on the same hamster wheel. We left Los Angeles because the wheel was all there was. After 20 years of that, we wanted something different.

The best money we spent to help this whole process was hiring a lawyer. We brought him on when we first decided we wanted to make the move, referred by our amazing friend Jean-Baptiste. He handled the entire immigration process. I've heard the horror stories from other expats who tried to navigate the prefecture system on their own, and I'm glad we skipped that particular French rite of passage, for now.

Dylan and I handle the adjustment differently, but not in the way you'd expect. He speaks fluent French, which helps with daily life. But when it comes to the actual admin of running our household, negotiating with contractors, pushing back when something isn't right, that falls on me. I'm the one organizing admin paperwork, planning content, and keeping up with work and clients back in the States. Thankful for them as we move into this new life.

Family came to visit early on, which was wonderful but also complicated. You want to show everyone this new life, but you haven't figured it out yourself yet. You're playing tour guide in a country where you still don't fully understand the recycling system.

Then winter hit, and the dark really got to Dylan. The sun sets here before 5:00 PM in December, and the nights in rural France are long and quiet in a way that LA never prepared us for. I'm grateful for my Wellbutrin. That's not a joke. Mental health doesn't take a vacation just because you moved somewhere beautiful.

But somewhere around month four, something shifted. I stopped trying to operate at an American pace and started just... being here. Planning less. Trusting that things would work out if we showed up and were persistent. I started copying the French people around us, being a little more expressive, a little more animated at life's inconveniences. Trying my best to keep up with conversation while learning French via immersion.

And here's the thing about rural France that caught us off guard: the community is real. Our neighbors help us. The woman at the boulangerie corrects my French with a smile, not a sigh. People know our dog's name before they know ours. It's a different rhythm than what we were used to, a feeling that people actually look out for each other. That life isn't just a series of transactions.

I'm building a consulting company here focused on media, entertainment, and travel, with a mix of helping businesses and brands in France adopt AI. And I'm relaunching my Los Angeles newsletter, something I worked on for years alongside a great team back in the States. Two cities, two projects, one very different pace of life. But the city noise and hustle has been replaced by something quieter. Not peace, exactly. More like space. Space to not be in a rush. Space to let a Tuesday be just a Tuesday.

Six months in, we're not the same people who got on that plane. And I think that's the whole point. We came here to change how we live. It's working. And we want to bring you along for it.

You hear a lot about the long lunches and the cheese and the lifestyle. What you don't hear about is the thing underneath all of it: money is just not that important here.

I don't mean people don't work or don't care about earning a living. They do. But it's not the organizing principle of everything the way it is in the States. In America, the first question you ask someone at a dinner party is "What do you do?" In France, that's considered rude. Nobody leads with their job because your job isn't supposed to be the most interesting thing about you.

You feel this everywhere, starting at the grocery store. A trip to the supermarket here is a fundamentally different experience than a Whole Foods run in West Hollywood. Nobody is in a hurry. The person in front of you has exact change and is going to count it out, coin by coin, and you are going to wait. Some of the bigger stores have self-checkout now, but even those move at a pace that would make an American lose their mind. The store isn't optimized to get as many people through as fast as possible. It's just a place where people buy food, and nobody's trying to set a speed record doing it.

It extends to every kind of business. Losing a sale here isn't the crisis it would be in the States. A shopkeeper will tell you they don't have what you need and shrug. Not rudely. Just honestly. In LA, that's a failure. Here, it's just Tuesday.

We've been renting a different car each month while we figure out what to buy. Returning one means vacuuming it, running it through a car wash, keeping all the receipts. If there's dirt, they send you back. We once missed a train because of this. The rental agent didn't care. Not in a hostile way. It just genuinely did not occur to him that our schedule was more important than doing the return properly. And after six months of smooth pickups, two different locations suddenly wanted an international driver's license. Same locations we'd used before. No explanation. That's French bureaucracy in its purest form: the rules exist until they don't, and new ones appear without warning.

Here's what took me months to understand: the lines aren't long because there are too many people. They're long because everyone is taking their time. With everything. The transaction. The conversation. The goodbye. Commerce is not the center of life here. It's a thing that happens between the parts of life that actually matter.

Americans build their lives around making money. The French build their lives around living. That sounds like a bumper sticker, but once you experience it daily, it rewires something in your brain. The grocery line is long? So what. The car rental took an extra hour? I wasn't late for anything. I'm just here.