Homeschooling. Full days of homeschooling. I check my email once. Check my email twice. Go to Instagram. I even check TikTok. Everyone is doing live. I should do live. Everyone does youtube. I should do youtube. There’s a great course…. ‘This is what you’ve missed,’ says every email. Every notification.
Noise. More noise.
Pilates online. Yay. Tigerman. What’s that? Likes. Content. Create. Create. What are you doing with your time? Here is another course. Reinvent yourself. Do it again.
Stop. Please stop.
This is the actual virus that we are fighting against. Stop feeding into it, my dear just stop. Instant gratification has brought us to the space where we are at. To not think about the impact of the things we produce; of the shiny beautiful profiles, we build for ourselves, deprived as can be of emotion or self-compassion because we don’t even give ourselves time to feel.
We just make sure they look better. One day will have time to fix ourselves from inside. Let’s just make it pretty for now.
But the time is now.
One of the reasons I studied marketing was this one photograph in the Museum of modern Art in Mexico by Cartier Bresson: a little girl is looking straight at a doll through a store window: she has no shoes. But you can see that doll makes her dream of what it would be like to have that beautiful doll in her arms.
I wanted to have that power of being able to make people dream.
I learned the tools.
I know the science.
And yet in time I discovered that the power I trained myself for can only create a sense of emptiness; of not being enough.
Never enough.
I remember being in Cannes at The Cannes Lions, the Mecca of branding and advertising, and realizing people don’t need to be taught how to dream. They dream enough already. Trying to tell them what to dream about is where the problems begin. The sense of missing out. The FOMO.
That little girl didn’t need the doll to dream. She was enough. Her mind was enough. Matter does not materialize dreams. We produced enough. She was already enough.
And people are dying. Their phones are full of pictures, and content, and plans. Their closets are stuffed with clothes.
There is a Russian roulette ready to shoot at us at any given moment. Without warning.
What things do I need to remember the most? What should I keep?
The moment you start fearing for your life you begin to loose it.
Just go inside.
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