A decade of research.
300 conversations.
One moment in the Sea of Cortez.

Foreword to Unhustle

Every week, people show up at the Modern Elder Academy (MEA) campuses with weight they can’t put into words. They checked all the boxes. Career, title, money, family. The whole setup that’s supposed to add up to a good life. But somewhere between what they built and how they actually feel, there’s a gap. They traded their spark for the next achievement, little by little, barely noticing until it was gone.

I’ve watched thousands of people arrive carrying that unnamed weight. Executives, founders, CEOs, artists—people who crush it at work but feel lost in their lives. They come because they succeeded at the wrong game and are trying to figure out what the right one looks like.

Milena Miteva-Regos wrote the book that answers that question.

I met Milena on a chilly January morning in 2020, on the patio at MEA overlooking the Pacific. What struck me about her then, and what this book confirms, is that she comes to the question of “unhustling” from an unusual and specifically credible position. She didn’t just fall into the hustle trap; she helped build it. As a CMO and marketing strategist, she knows exactly how the machine works, because she ran part of it.

That combination of understanding the trap from the inside while having found a genuine way to claw herself out of it is what makes this book different from others I see in this genre. Milena is not a wellness guru with clear boundaries and a perfect morning routine. She is someone who fed the system, got consumed by it, suffered the consequences of the Hustle Hangover, as she calls the ill feelings that come with overworking, and went on a quest to find another way, not only for herself but for others. She followed what urban planners call the “Desire Path”—the trail that appears where enough people decide the official route isn’t taking them where they want to go.

What she discovered is what I’ve seen in people who thrive at MEA: the opposite of hustle isn’t giving up or checking out. It’s building real wealth, the kind that hustle drains out of you, such as health, time, connection, experiences, and work that means something. She calls it Life Wealth. Building it is simple, and it can change your Mondays.

What I find most important about this book—beyond the research, beyond the Life Wealth framework, beyond the remarkable stories of people who found their Desire Path and walked it—is that Milena is writing for the person who is still inside the machine. Not for those who have already escaped it. She’s writing for the executive reading this on a Sunday night with the familiar dread of returning to work already setting in. She’s writing for the people trying to figure out what comes after the stability of the 9-to-5 job is gone, and the career ladder security doesn’t exist anymore.

She’s also writing for the person I used to be. My first company was called Joie de Vivre—joy of life—and by my mid-forties, I had very little of either but didn’t know what to do about it. She’s writing for who I still am, on the days I forget.

In every chapter she asks a question. One of them is: Who are you without the doing? I’ve had reason in recent years to sit with that question more deliberately than I might have chosen. A Stage-3 cancer diagnosis has a clarifying effect. As a result, the answer to that question got louder, more precise, and less patient with delay.

Let me say something about why this book matters right now.

I spent more than seven years at Airbnb, watching up close as technology started to rewrite the rules of work. We were promised that tech would free us, give us our lives back. That hasn’t happened. If anything, we’re being pushed to do more faster and to prove ourselves even harder. The machines keep speeding up, and we’re the ones burning out. Now, with AI, we’re finally being forced to ask the question hustle culture has dodged for years: if machines can do the tasks better, what are we actually here for?

Milena answers that question with specificity and clarity. Humans are for making meaning. For exercising taste. For the creative connections that no algorithm could predict. For the relationships, empathy, joy, and particular quality of being human that cannot be generated with a prompt. Her argument isn’t that we should work less. It’s that we should stop measuring the wrong things, and that the AI era makes this more urgent, not less. When robots can execute nearly everything, your value isn’t in your productivity. It’s in your creativity, your judgment, your emotional depth, your presence, your capacity for meaning, your wisdom.

At MEA, we often talk about the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Intelligence accumulates knowledge and optimizes performance within existing frameworks. Wisdom questions the framework itself. It asks not How do I win this game but Is this the game I want to be playing? Most who come to us have too much of one and are hungry for the other.

You don’t have to wait for a crisis to wake up. You can choose, right now, in the small moments, to start living a life that’s actually yours even when everything around you is pushing the other way.

The Desire Path is already there. Milena will show you where to look.

— Chip Conley
Founder, Modern Elder Academy
Baja California Sur and Santa Fe, New Mexico

End of the foreword

Unhustle: A Rebel’s Guide to Escaping the Grind and Building Life Wealth. Drops March 2027.