We just got home from Europe. It’s sunny and beautiful and we’re slowing getting back in our rhythm.
This was one of the best holidays we’ve ever taken as a family— and considering the gallivanting we’ve done, that’s saying something.
The two family nature hotels, the food, the timing — it was all just, chef’s kiss. We spent SO much time outdoors and it was action packed but relaxing at once. We are so not a ‘lay by the pool’ kind of holiday family. We typically cut those kinds of holidays short and fly home because we’re so bored.
The flight home was rough— midday long hauls always are. But having a rough day time long haul means everyone is super tired upon arrival and adjusts better to the time change.
I have noted that many readers want the low down on the trip and specifically, more on travelling with children. That post is in the queue.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic of my last post on how social media has become like only fans but for private information. I shared a teeny snippet of the post on IG and it struck a nerve.
People are tired of knowing too much about other people.
People are tired of feeling they have to jump through hoops, cirque du Soleil styles in order to have their work seen.
People are tired of how addicted they’ve become to Instagram, and then jumping to Substack and becoming addicted to leaderboards and stats there too.
People are tired on a level that tells us there is something very un-human about the para-social nature of social media relationships.
As always, I want to write things to you that free you…. That nudge you even closer to peaceful creative integrity amidst all the noise…. That make you think a little differently.
I’m not on here to be yet another whiner. You know already that I believe that we are all grown adults with full agency. Nobody is holding a pew pew to our heads and demanding we have an online life— anyone who says otherwise is not seeing the picture fully.
I want to write things that give you your power back. That stop the looping agony and victim stories inside you.
Nobody needs to be on social media. It’s a very disempowering belief to have “I want to be off it but I’m trapped’.
You’re not trapped by the apps on your phone. You’re only trapped by your beliefs about how you need to interact with them.
You’ve absorbed too many bits of advice, too many takes, watched too many people do it too many ways and so you overthink everything about it.
The app is not trapping you— you are.
I wrote this yesterday on notes:
Social media is only noisy if you stay too long. Post and ghost my friends, post and ghost. Don’t post and lurk, forgetting that there is a whole door there you can walk out of into the beauty of your life. It’s an app on your phone, not an escape room.
I share a lot on this topic of making sure your online activity/presence is life giving for a deeper reason than you may think.
My eldest is turning 10 next year. 10. Do you know how fast that went? When I am looking at dumb ass videos online and she’s asked me three times for my attention (rare, but it happens), she calls me out.
She is soon to be a pre-teen. She, as all of our kids will, will one day, have her own relationship with her phone, with the online world, with her work, with her boundaries.
She is watching not only my phone usage, but my nervous system, my self control, my ability to live the values I preach.
I have had an online presence her entire life and I have had times where the intensity of it has swallowed my peace— I allowed it to.
This is why I constantly revisit this topic of straightening up our relationship with our online world.
Because our kids are watching. Because not everyones opinion matters the same. Because it can be life giving or it can be life sucking and you get to decide.
I write about it because I too need to hear it.
As mothers, we can’t afford to have our peace stolen by dumb stuff online, by people who truly should not be granted access to our time (impossible to try and be available to everyone regardless of how charitable you try to be). The people in our homes shouldn’t be getting second best energy.
If not disciplined, online life can really affect real life but it doesn’t have to.
And life is short.
We can’t be stuck with our heads on a screen while our life literally passes us by.
We can’t be more preoccupied with taking photos of every single moment than being there for the moment (something I learned again on my recent trip. Logged off all the apps and chucked my phone away for a while).
We’ve got to know the difference between giving energy to our body of work, and getting sucked into trying to maintain a certain image. They are very different and I know you can feel it.
After last weeks post I was thinking about this idea of performance.
While having a massage on holiday that was not deep enough for me so naturally I laid there just in deep thought rather than enjoyment but hey… it’s the luck of the draw (hotel massages always suck, by the way. My Taiwanese guy Dave at home is the best). I started thinking about this…
Are we all performing online?
Like, all of us?
Here’s what I want to give you today. It’s some raw Pk fire with the purpose of more peace and freedom for you, as always.
Some points I want to hit are:
— Are we all performing a little?
— Is performing a little just the nature of having a curated online presence?
— Are people becoming more fake and performative because we have become less tolerant of actual truth and direct honesty? YES.
— Do you really wanna go viral? Probably not. Most people want connection and to be seen instead, but their strategy is all about going viral.
— Don’t trade originality and peace for the allure of virality.
AND MORE. Raw fire. Ok let’s go.