Eight years ago, I wrote a short story for a non-profit organisation called Half the Story. I likened the online world to the Mirror of Erised.
If you know your Harry Potter, you'll remember it. Erised is desired spelled backwards. Look into the mirror and you don't see your future. You see your deepest desire staring back at you. Different things for different people, but always the same trick: it's showing you what you want, not what's real.
That's the internet. It's only half a story. We rarely see what it actually takes to build the highlight reel.
"In order to have a life online, you need to be living a life offline"
I like that quote enough to build a whole post around it, so here it is again.
I built a life packed with experience over the past eighteen or nineteen years, and I didn't document most of it. Not because I was precious about privacy, but because I was too busy living it. I wasn't pulling my phone out on hikes or in villages or at the beach. I wasn't blogging. I wasn't thinking about content.
Would it have made good content? Probably. But there's a version of this where you're either living the moment or performing it, and I chose living it, most of the time without even realising I was choosing.
Village life
For a long stretch of those years I lived in a small Bulgarian village, and one thing struck me about the people there: life never stopped. Not in a frantic way, just in a full way. Gardens needed tending. Wood needed chainsawing, chopping and stacking before winter, and then the whole cycle started again the next year. Vegetables got preserved and jarred for the colder months. Meals were cooked from scratch because that was simply how you ate.
"If you didn't pick it or kill it you didn't eat it." Simply put, this meant that the village way of eating was to grow your own product and always know what's in your food and where it came from. No nasty additives or false junk food.
And around all of that, ordinary life carried on too: coffee with friends, campfires, swimming in the lake, barbecues, people dropping by. None of it was for anyone else to see. It was just what filled the days.
I think that's where something in me settled. I started gravitating toward friendships built around people who were doing things, real things, rather than talking about doing them.
Life on the coast
Later I lived somewhere completely different: a bright, modern coastal city in Bulgaria, more contemporary than a lot of the towns I'd known growing up. Small coastal village charm layered with a proper cool-city-by-the-sea energy.
Different pace, same thread running through it. Walks on the beach. Wandering through flower fields. Long walks with my dog. Coffee with friends, evenings at the theatre or the cinema, homemade dinners, the odd fishing trip. Still real things, just in a different setting.
Looking back
I didn't clock any of this at the time. I was just living my life. It's only in hindsight that I can see the shape of it: because I wasn't manufacturing my life for a feed, I actually built one worth talking about. My life made the content, rather than the other way round.
That's still how I try to run things now, in the brand as much as anywhere else. Real materials, sometimes upcycled, nothing manufactured for the sake of a story. It's less about performing a life and more about living one properly, and letting the stories follow when they're ready to be told.
This is your sign to put the phone down, limit your screen time and go and have fun offline! I promise it will be worth it!
