The Firefly, Me, and Change

A few months ago, I had a diving company with a substantial operation: employees, boats, equipment, customers, obligations, regulators, and an impressive collection of bills that, unlike the customers, never failed to show up.

Today, my wife, Marcelly, and I live in a tent about 3,000 feet above sea level, on a mountain in Nova Friburgo, Brazil, surrounded by the Atlantic Forest.

It may sound as though something went terribly wrong. Maybe it did. The curious part is that something may also have gone right.

Before the tent, there was a company

The company lasted sixteen years. We offered recreational scuba diving: we started in Arraial do Cabo, on the coast of Rio de Janeiro state, grew, opened two operations in nearby Armação dos Búzios, and reached the point where I was in São Paulo preparing a fourth location, intended to bring customers from there to dive on the Rio de Janeiro coast. The new location was not a bet on growth, but an attempt to offset losses.

For years, we were among the companies training the most recreational divers in Brazil, and at times we ranked first. When the training market began to change, we put more energy into introductory dives for first-timers—what Brazilians call a “baptism dive”—and captured a very large share of the local market.

The company grew, and growth has a curious feature: everything gets bigger. Revenue, infrastructure, possibilities, and, showing remarkable team spirit, problems.

About five years ago, the company stopped growing and began to shrink. First came the pandemic, which left us in debt. Then ICMBio, the Brazilian federal conservation agency that regulates the activity in the region, prohibited the boats’ second daily departure. We used to run two trips, one in the morning and another in the afternoon, and the rule, which applied to every company in town, cut our peak-season and long-weekend revenue in half.

At the same time, local competition was pushing prices down. I couldn’t raise the price of a dive, which was already very low, and visitors to Arraial, accustomed to those rates, wouldn’t accept an increase. The company reorganized. Then it reorganized again, and again. Companies quickly learn a skill that is also deeply human: calling survival strategic planning.

In May of last year, while I was in São Paulo preparing the new location, boating tourism and diving in the region suffered another downturn. Our revenue fell again, to roughly half of what it had been. A small business can sometimes weather a drop like that by shrinking its own body. A larger operation also has more inertia: employees, properties, boats, maintenance, and costs don’t immediately get the news that revenue has decided to disappear.

I spent about nine months in São Paulo. Early in the second month, it became clear that I couldn’t continue the investment. From there, I ordered the Búzios locations closed and spent those months trying to rebalance the business, hoping the peak season would help. January ended, and the recovery never came. I returned to Arraial do Cabo for another restructuring: cut back further, change everything again, work hard.

Then, one day in April, around noon, a few employees parked the company’s dune buggy in front of the shop.

It was the vehicle that pulled the little trailer carrying the diving equipment. I remembered both as they had been before I left for São Paulo. The trailer was patched all over; the buggy’s fiberglass body was broken, its headlights were missing, and, as I discovered when I asked, it had no brakes.

There was no sad music, no rain running down the window on cue from the production crew. There was a vehicle with no brakes parked in front of the shop. And that image condensed five years: I was no longer managing growth, but successive attempts at survival. It was the last straw.

I simply decided to close. After sixteen years, I realized I didn’t want to spend the next sixteen reorganizing the company to compensate for the previous reorganization.

We closed the remaining locations, gave up the properties, and dismantled the operation. There was still a way for a small part of the business to continue on a much smaller, hands-on basis, as many companies in the industry had always operated: less infrastructure, fewer people, the owner personally serving customers, organizing things, diving, and literally standing behind the counter. But I was already somewhere else before I ever moved.

A somewhat unusual trade

As the company shrank, my involvement in the operation and my income became much smaller. There were still old obligations to settle and assets to sell. In the process, I traded an intangible business asset for a piece of land in Nova Friburgo. Not a sentence you often find in management textbooks.

Nova Friburgo is in the mountains of Rio de Janeiro state. The name isn’t a Brazilian attempt to sound European: the city grew out of a Swiss colony established in the early nineteenth century and was named after Fribourg, Switzerland. Other immigrant groups followed, and the city developed a history of its own among the mountains.

My land sits at about 900 meters—roughly 3,000 feet—above sea level, with the summit reaching nearly 1,200 meters, or 3,900 feet. We’re on a plateau, with the Atlantic Forest dropping away in front of us down a slope into a ravine. Since I didn’t yet have the money to build a house, we made a practical decision: we bought a tent.

And that is how a company with branches, employees, and boats ended up, by a route no strategic plan would dare present at a meeting, with its former owner living in a tent on a mountain. At least there are no meetings.

Human resources now includes chickens

The idea isn’t just to live somewhere different. It’s to try a different structure for life.

We’ve already planted about two dozen fruit trees. I studied the soil, chose the spots, watched the sun, shade, and water, and scattered across the land what, if things go reasonably well, will stop being saplings and start being dessert. We’re preparing a vegetable garden with sweet potatoes, potatoes, carrots, and other food. We’re considering a small chicken coop; six hens already produce a respectable number of eggs. And there’s a clear career path: if a hen performs well, she stays on the team. If the time comes for restructuring, unlike at a multinational corporation, “heads will roll” may be meant literally. Probably served with rice and farofa, toasted cassava flour.

We’re also considering a small fish pond. The mountain climate makes trout an interesting possibility. There’s spring water nearby, we have solar panels, and we’ve also connected to the power grid. The goal is to combine solutions, not compete in the world self-sufficiency championships. I don’t intend to make my own screws or cast my own pots. I want to reduce the number of things I have to buy to keep living and, above all, the amount of my life I have to sell to keep buying things. The difference sounds small in a sentence; in practice, it can take up an entire lifetime.

The fruit will ripen at different times. We’ll eat what we eat; my wife may turn the surplus into preserves and perhaps sell some on a small scale. But there is one rule: five years from now, there will be no meeting to announce the launch of the International Mountain Preserves Division. I’ve been a businessman long enough. I don’t want to turn another pleasant activity into an operation that has to grow to pay for the infrastructure created to let it grow.

Before the mountain, a hillside

This wasn’t my first attempt to change the scenery to see whether something inside me might shift along with it. Earlier, when I returned to Arraial do Cabo, after having lived in an oceanfront penthouse with a pool and a three-story house with a pool and household staff, I moved to Morro da Cabocla, a hillside community in Arraial. I could have rented another conventional place, perhaps not at the same level, but I could have. Choosing the hillside wasn’t a financial spreadsheet winning an argument. I wanted change, and I found it.

The ocean view was still there, proving that, fortunately, the ocean has yet to introduce income-based access tiers. Almost everything else worked differently. People knew one another better, help circulated with less ceremony, and life unfolded closer to the front door. There was less room for the silent competition in which entire neighborhoods seem to compete in a championship whose rules no one has received, but in which everyone must demonstrate that they’re doing very well.

And there were children in the street, flying kites, running, inventing games, and being summoned home by an extremely powerful, extremely inexpensive communication system:

“Get inside!”

A mother appeared at the window and settled in two seconds what might now require a group chat, a notification, and a parental-control app.

Children still play in the street in many places, and it would be absurd to turn a personal experience into a universal theory about neighborhoods, social classes, or generations. But the contrast caught my attention. In many of the middle- and upper-income urban settings I had known, that scene had become much less common. The street had lost some of its role as an extension of the home, and childhood was moving into controlled spaces, screens, gated communities, schedules, and organized activities.

I wasn’t thinking about fireflies yet. But I was already observing the same thing: contexts change, and when they do, they take more than objects and habits with them. They take entire ways of relating to one another.

The rhythm of a mountain

The most obvious difference isn’t in assets. It’s in rhythm. In a small rural community with only a few neighbors, relationships move at a different speed. Someone stops by and brings something; another time, we take something to someone else. Sometimes a conversation happens in the middle of the day without having to schedule it in Google Calendar as an “informal neighborhood alignment meeting.” Everyone works, but work doesn’t occupy the same symbolic place.

For a long time, my life revolved around structures that had to keep functioning. Employees depended on the company, customers had expectations, boats needed maintenance, government agencies had rules, and suppliers had payment deadlines. The bank, always attentive to our spiritual growth, had due dates. Here, sometimes I stop because a guan just went by.

It’s a large bird common in parts of the Atlantic Forest; some have a reddish patch on the throat. When they take off nearby, their wings make so much noise that your first impression is that the Air Force has decided to operate a helicopter among the trees. Flocks of parakeets pass through, too. A wild rabbit has shown up. There are marmosets, birds I can’t yet identify, and sounds we hear before discovering who makes them.

And there’s the sky. The sky over a big city and the sky over a mountain are technically the same sky, which shows how much the phrase “technically the same thing” can conceal. At night, we see far more stars. Sometimes a meteor goes by, or a bright object that may be a satellite or space debris reflecting light or reentering the atmosphere. By late afternoon, simply looking up has become a habit.

What star is that?

I had just finished working on an article about artificial intelligence and existential risk, a light topic: the possibility that we might all die. After writing about humanity’s potential extinction, I sat down beside my wife. We were looking at the sky when she asked:

“What star is that?”

I looked. I saw the point of light. And then the star went out.

There was that little mental short circuit that happens when reality refuses to obey the category we’ve just put it in. Stars generally don’t go out because Marcelly asks about them. I looked more closely. The star came back. And went out again.

It wasn’t a star. It was a firefly.

We started laughing. Then another appeared, and another. And I was genuinely impressed to see a firefly. When I was a child, that would hardly have been newsworthy; I remember places with so many that memory rearranges them into little clouds of lights blinking in the dark. That was when I realized something I hadn’t noticed until then: I hadn’t seen fireflies in decades.

Are fireflies disappearing?

The scientific answer is more interesting than the headline. It isn’t accurate to say “fireflies are going extinct” as though they were a single species collectively heading for the exit. There are more than two thousand known species in the firefly family worldwide, and enormous gaps in the data remain for many of them.

But there are real reasons for concern. Declines have been reported in different regions, some populations have disappeared locally, and certain species have already been assessed as threatened. Researchers and conservation organizations identify habitat loss and degradation, light pollution, pesticides, changes in water quality, and climate change among the main risks. Light pollution carries a cruel irony: an animal that spent millions of years refining its ability to produce light to communicate may now struggle because we light up the entire night. We invented the streetlight and disrupted firefly romance, a distinctly human contribution to biodiversity.

At the same time, science still lacks enough long-term data to say that all firefly populations are declining in the same way.

The firefly was only the beginning

That was when I realized that the firefly wasn’t exactly the subject. It was a trigger. The little light in front of the tent opened up a comparison between two periods of my life, but we make that kind of comparison all the time.

The species we encounter change, as do cities, technologies, and ways of working, talking, raising children, learning, and wasting time, an activity in which humanity, despite all its innovations, maintains a consistent performance. One generation remembers children filling the streets; another, television bringing the family together at a certain hour; another will remember online games and friendships that never depended on two people being in the same place.

Someone who lived through one of those configurations may look at the next and conclude that something essential has been lost. And something probably has. What we sometimes forget is that something has also been created. A child who now builds part of a social life through a screen doesn’t miss a world in which you had to wait for the landline to be free; that world was never part of the child’s experience. A grandfather says, “Things were different in my day,” and he’s right. His grandchild thinks, “Thank goodness,” with equal conviction.

Neither is observing change from a neutral position. Each carries a biography, and it turns certain contexts into reference points. A transformation can expand possibilities and eliminate habits, bring groups together and dissolve others, create professions and destroy some. Gains and losses coexist without asking permission to fit into a simple narrative.

Perhaps aging includes this sense of displacement: the setting that helped shape our reference points gradually disappears. A child arrives in the world without having to unlearn the previous one. We adults often have to.

To miss something, you first have to have had it

I wasn’t devastated. I didn’t spend the night hugging a tree and saying the world had lost its meaning. It was a small uneasiness, like stumbling across a song from childhood and realizing that an entire part of your life had been stored there without your knowing it.

Why did that insect have this effect? Because I had something to compare it with. I knew a world with more fireflies, at least in the places and moments that were part of my childhood. Then I went decades without seeing them, and when one reappeared, blinking in front of me, the distance between the two worlds became visible. My surprise that night is not a population survey: “Jumas saw three fireflies in Nova Friburgo” is unlikely to pass peer review as a global trend. But the encounter activated a memory, and the memory made an absence visible.

A child born into a future without a particular species won’t miss it in that way. They may study its biology, see images, mourn the loss intellectually, perhaps find it outrageous that earlier generations let it disappear. But they won’t feel the same absence. Longing requires memory, and memory requires some prior presence. Nobody wakes up on a Tuesday overwhelmed by an unbearable longing for a Triceratops. We can like dinosaurs, study dinosaurs, watch Spielberg, and develop a thoroughly convincing relationship with the idea of them, but none of us remembers a Triceratops crossing Grandma’s backyard. There was no loss within our own biography.

That is why we so often confuse two different things: reality’s transformation and our emotional experience of it. Change happens outside us; its meaning also happens within us. That night’s firefly went on with its life, unaware of the philosophical importance I had just assigned to it. The extra meaning was mine.

This doesn’t make extinction irrelevant

Here we need to avoid a tempting logical leap. Saying extinctions have always happened is not the same as saying it doesn’t matter if we cause them.

Earth has changed continuously over billions of years. Climates changed, continents moved, oceans opened and closed, species dominated entire environments and then disappeared. The vast majority of species that have ever existed are no longer here. That is natural history. But we are now also a force capable of altering habitats at extraordinary speed. When we destroy environments, spread toxic substances, light up entire nights, or modify systems other species depend on, we don’t become neutral observers just because extinction predates us. A volcano can also destroy a forest. That is no argument for setting one on fire.

Change is neither good nor bad by definition. That doesn’t make its consequences inconsequential: an extinct species represents an irreversible loss of biological diversity, and a destroyed forest can compromise entire systems. Answering all of that with “everything changes” would be a sophisticated way of not thinking. We should try to preserve what we value and prevent what we consider destructive; we just need to remember that preserving is not freezing. Even what we preserve keeps changing. Perhaps part of our difficulty lies in wanting what we love to keep resembling the version we learned to love.

We arrived very late to the party

There is a useful way to grasp the scale of this story. Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old, and our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for around 300,000 years. If we compressed the planet’s entire history into twenty-four hours, Homo sapiens would appear in the last six seconds before midnight.

If we prefer soccer, it gets more humbling. In a ninety-minute match representing Earth’s entire history, our species would take the field about a third of a second before the end, practically after the announcer had already started saying, “It’s over.” And yet we arrived only moments ago and immediately began arguing about how the planet should stay. Admirable confidence.

For almost all of Earth’s history, there were no human beings to miss anything. Entire worlds existed without us: forests without observers, extinctions without documentaries, oceans without resorts, extraordinary animals that were born, dominated environments, and disappeared without receiving a single Instagram tribute. Reality went on.

Perhaps the problem is our expectation of permanence

We know things change; we simply prefer it when the things that change are the ones we haven’t become attached to yet. We establish reference points—city, profession, home, people, landscapes—and they become part of the story we tell about ourselves. When one disappears, more than the scenery changes: part of that story has to be rebuilt.

That is why certain changes provoke such strong reactions. Sometimes we aren’t defending just an object, a custom, or a landscape, but the stability of a representation we have learned to call our life.

I didn’t stay in one place very long, either

It would be convenient to finish by saying that the world changes while I, a calm and consistent observer, watch from a privileged position. My biography spoils that possibility. I’ve been changing all along, too.

I once took martial arts seriously: I earned a brown belt in full-contact kickboxing, competed in tournaments, and was working toward a black belt. After spending some time getting hit—a highly educational activity that began producing less-than-elegant changes to my nose—I changed direction and took up painting. I studied fine art, painted in oils, took part in exhibitions, and sold paintings. At some point, I apparently decided that paint wasn’t abstract enough and went into computers: I became a programmer and systems analyst. Then I studied accounting. I also worked in photography, including fashion photography. Then I became a diving entrepreneur and spent sixteen years among management, customers, boats, equipment, and stretches when I went back underwater. Now I’ve started writing.

I don’t consider myself a philosopher, I’m not a specialist in a particular scientific discipline, and I’m still discovering what it means to make writing my central activity. If someone had asked me at any of those moments which was the real Jumas, I would have pointed to the version occupying the body that day. Now the question seems strange. They all were, and none remained. Identity may be less a photograph than a sequence. The trouble is, we really like photographs.

The failure that changed its meaning

This also changes how I look at the company’s closing. If I freeze the story in April, I can describe it as a failure: a company that stood out, grew, opened locations, weathered crises, and lost enough of its economic footing for me to decide to dismantle it. The end. Credits. Theater lights up.

But reality has the inconvenient habit of continuing past the point where we decide to end the narrative. A business asset became land. The land became the possibility of a house. The lack of a house became a tent. The tent became daily contact with a mountain, which became fruit trees, a vegetable garden, plans for a chicken coop, an idea for a fish pond, neighbors, guans, parakeets, and a sky I had stopped looking at. And the sky became a firefly, which became this article.

So where does failure end and something else begin? I’m not trying to turn financial trouble into a motivational speech. There are bills, losses, and obligations still being settled. Living in a tent has pleasant moments and others when nature makes clear that it never signed a contract with the comfort department. Rain still gets you wet, cold is still cold, and mud doesn’t become philosophy just because we’re feeling contemplative. A simple life is not a magically simple life; it shifts the complexities. But it also shifts priorities, and that was what I was looking for when I decided not to rebuild the company yet again.

What does the thing we call success cost?

For a long time, growth seemed an obvious direction: more customers, more revenue, more locations, more employees, more capacity. Business language treats “more” with almost religious reverence. Someone who brings in ten wants twenty, and someone who brings in twenty starts the meeting about getting to forty. Nobody walks into the room and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve reached a perfectly pleasant size. Let’s stay here and leave early to watch birds.” They would probably be referred to HR.

But there is a question that growth figures can’t answer on their own: how much of your life must you give up to sustain the structure that produces what we call success? There is no universal answer. For one person, building an enormous company may be an extraordinarily meaningful experience. For another, looking after six hens and writing may produce a life more consistent with what they want. There is no automatic virtue in living in a tent, just as there is none in owning several branches. What matters is the relationship between what we build and what we sacrifice to maintain it. Time is an asset, too. So are health, attention, and freedom, and they all have one unpleasant economic feature: they are finite.

Perhaps starting over is simply noticing this

When I traded that business asset for the land, I wanted to solve concrete problems: reorganize my life, reduce costs, settle obligations, and establish a base for starting over. There was no philosophical plan called the “Mountain Existential Project.” Just as well; it probably would have involved PowerPoint.

The material change, however, also changed what I pay attention to. For years, my attention was captured by revenue, operations, scale, staffing, regulators, taxes, and due dates. Now part of it goes to the soil, the sun, the birds, and figuring out why one sapling grows more slowly than another. A change in life is, in part, a change in what we pay attention to.

I don’t know whether that’s evolution. Perhaps it’s just gardening. But it’s the configuration I want to try right now.

The only thing that doesn’t change

There is a phrase people have repeated for thousands of years: everything changes. It risks sounding banal precisely because it is hard to find a more persistent observation. My company changed, my profession changed, my body changed—my nose can testify to part of that process—and my relationship with work changed, too. The land changes with every rain, the trees I planted are changing as I write, and the Atlantic Forest in front of me is neither the forest of a hundred years ago nor the one it will be a hundred years from now.

There is a more precise formulation: transformation is a permanent property of what exists in time. Saying that change is the only thing that doesn’t change is a paradox too beautiful not to question. Our difficulty isn’t in knowing this, but in feeling it when transformation reaches something that was part of us: a company, a home, a city, a person, a landscape, or a small light blinking in the dark.

That night, my wife asked what star that was. I looked, and the star went out. Then we discovered it was a firefly, and we started laughing. Sometimes something goes out, and our first impression is that we have lost what we were looking at. Then our eyes adjust, and we realize it wasn’t quite what we thought.

Reality had simply changed its form.

Or perhaps we had finally taken a closer look.