RentMen:
If we sat on the beach and drank wine and ate great food just you and I, what would you tell me about yourself and your life?
Lucky_boyy:
Honestly? Probably not what's on the profile.
The profile is true — all of it — but it's the version of yourself you construct when you're trying to make a first impression. On a beach, with good wine and the sun doing that thing it does in the last hour before it sets, the constructed version tends to fall away.
So here's what I'd probably tell you.
I grew up in a small town in California that I couldn't wait to leave and now think about more than I expected to. I got out on ambition and a scholarship and didn't look back for twenty years. I'm looking back now. I'm not sure what to do with that yet.
I have a screenplay I've been working on for two years that I think might be the best thing I've ever written. I'm terrified to finish it because finishing it means finding out if I'm right.
I'm happier now than I've ever been. I say that without qualification and I mean it completely. Not in spite of the unconventional choices — because of them.
And I'd probably tell you that this — right here, this beach, this wine, this conversation that's going somewhere neither of us planned — is exactly the kind of thing I left the other life for.
Then I'd refill your glass and ask you something.
RentMen:
What are 5 things you can’t live without?
Lucky_boyy:
1. A notebook.
Not a phone. An actual notebook, with a pen that writes the way I think — which is to say, not in a straight line.
2. A city I haven't been to yet.
There always has to be one on the horizon. A trip I'm planning, a place I'm reading about, somewhere I haven't figured out yet. The anticipation is half the point. The moment I stop having somewhere new to go is the moment I'll know something has gone wrong.
3. Good coffee, made properly.
Not as a caffeine delivery system. As a ritual.
4. A story I'm working on.
There has to be something on the page I'm trying to solve. A scene that isn't working yet, a character I haven't figured out, a structural problem I'm turning over in the back of my mind while I'm doing everything else. Without that, I feel unmoored in a way I can't entirely explain.
5. Physical contact that means something.
Not performance. Not transaction — or not only transaction. The kind of touch that's actually present. A hand on an arm that says I see you. The specific weight of another person choosing to be close to you. I spent years in a life that was full of people and starved of that. I don't do that anymore.
RentMen:
Tell us a little about yourself, if you were to pick something what would you like others to absolutely know about you?
Lucky_boyy:
I chose this.
Not as a last resort. Not because something went wrong. Not because the other options ran out. I chose this deliberately, with full information, after a long and successful career doing something entirely different — and I would make the same choice again tomorrow.
I think that matters more than people realize.
There's an assumption that tends to follow men in this space — that the story behind it is one of desperation or damage or a life that didn't go as planned. My story is the opposite. My life went exactly as planned, and at some point I looked at the plan and decided it wasn't the right one.
What I do now is honest. It's mine. And it makes me genuinely happy in a way that the other life, for all its credentials and compensation, never quite managed.
So if there's one thing everyone should know: I'm not here despite my life. I'm here because of it. The whole thing — the law degree, the firm, the years of precision and discipline and showing up — led me here. And here, it turns out, is exactly where I want to be.
That's not a tragedy. That's the story.
RentMen:
What are your hobbies, what do you like to do in your spare time?
Lucky_boyy:
I'll give you the honest list, not the curated one.
I write screenplays. I started keeping a journal at nineteen and somewhere in my forties it evolved into something more structured — characters, scenes, stories I couldn't stop thinking about until I put them on the page. I don't know yet what will come of it. I know I can't stop doing it.
I run. Early mornings, before the city gets loud. Four or five miles, nothing heroic. It's less about fitness and more about the forty minutes of silence where I'm not accountable to anything or anyone.
I read constantly and indiscriminately. Biography, history, literary fiction, the occasional thriller when I need my brain to stop performing. I have a particular weakness for writers who are also funny — Wodehouse, Waugh, early Nora Ephron. I think humor is the most underrated form of intelligence.
And I travel. Which I've already told you about. But it belongs on this list because it's not a vacation for me — it's the thing I organize the rest of my life around.
Spare time, for me, is just time I've decided to spend on the things that make me feel most like myself. I've gotten very protective of it.
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