In 2023, I learned I was going to be a dad.

I was 34, married, making good money, and running something I'd built from scratch — BrowardBeer.com, the only real journalistic coverage of the South Florida craft beer scene. I was proud of it. It was mine.

But learning you're going to be a father has a way of making you take inventory. I went to the doctor and didn't love what I heard. Blood pressure was high. Bad cholesterol was up. Liver function tests were flirting with fatty liver territory. I was building a brand around craft beer while my body was quietly sending up flares.

And somewhere in all of that, my wife and I landed on a name.

Radley. People ask if it's after "Boo" Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird or a character from Bluey. Neither. We just thought it was a cool name — boy or girl, that kid was always going to be rad. The second we said it out loud, I bought the domain. RadDadLyfe.com. I didn't have a plan yet. I just knew it meant something.

I'm a high school dropout who eventually got his act together enough to earn a bachelor's degree in multimedia journalism. I built a real publication in a niche market. I had a contact on the national desk at Axios — a dream job, a sure thing, or so I thought. I was referred. I was ready.

They passed.

My daughter was two years old when that rejection came in. And something about it — the timing, the audacity of it, the years of work that led to that moment — made something click. I looked at the domain I'd been sitting on and thought: enough.

I can't run from any of this. Not the health stuff. Not the career stuff. Not the AI reshaping every industry I've ever worked in. 45% of millennials say they're worried about being replaced by AI within the next year. I'm one of them. Nearly three-quarters of millennials report struggling to save for retirement while juggling the cost of actually living. Nobody handed us a playbook for any of this.

So I'm writing my own. Publicly. Imperfectly. In real time.

I'm using AI to build this site — not because I'm a developer, but because I refuse to let the thing I'm afraid of be the reason I don't start. I'm documenting my health, my finances, my mental state, and what it looks like to carve out a life on your own terms when the doors don't open the way you planned.

Like the Idles album Joy as an Act of Resistance — you can laugh through the hard parts. But you need a plan. RadDadLyfe is mine.

If you read this far, old man — here's to staying rad.