We've spent more than a decade looking through social media's windows.
Yet the one most worth looking through has been here the whole time, and the views are truly extraordinary.
Remember when travel influencers arrived on Instagram?
What a window into the world that was.
Suddenly, all those expensive hotels and glorious pockets of the world seemed accessible, either through our phones, or for some, in reality. Places that had previously lived only in travel brochures or documentaries felt reachable, at least vicariously.
The world looked enormous and gorgeous and available, lupins in New Zealand, Petra in Jordan, the dunes in Dubai, infinity pools in insane locations, and your phone was the window into all of it.
For me, I started following Marie Fe and Jake Snow's Instagram account back in 2018, during my 35-year-old gap year. I had temporarily left a corporate career that was everything I had worked for, and there they were - this young, in love, relentlessly ambitious Australian/German couple, racing to locations at sunrise, hauling luggage across three continents in pursuit of the perfect shot. My homebody nature meant I had zero interest in living that way, but I was genuinely intrigued by them.
Wow, imagine doing that I thought.
They hustled and it paid off. They hit the market early with a filter pack that reportedly generated around €20k per month at its peak, they reflect that ninety percent of their earnings they invested, while still travelling, still creating. Their account is now at 1.6M followers, with a property business, a social media education business, a beautiful son, and a life split between Bali and Mallorca.
A life built entirely on their own terms, ten years in the making.
Good on them.
The window was real, what's changed is us.
What that era of travel influencers gave us was genuine access and real inspiration.
Real people posting real photos from somewhere you had only dreamed about, and suddenly that place felt less impossibly far away. The wanderlust it sparked was real too, and perhaps most powerfully, it made us want to explore, not just the world out there, but our own capacity to go and see it.
That window has been open for almost a decade now, and for sure something has shifted. I was in Greece last summer, peak wanderlust location, and the lines to get photographs in the (many) beautiful spots, by men and women of all ages and nationalities, was most certainly off-putting. Awkward even. Not at all inspiring.
As I said, something has shifted. What we've learned to see is the frame around the image. The effort, the staging, the gap between the shot and the experience of actually standing there, the context of it. It's hollow. Does this location mean anything to this person, or is it just to boast they were there for literally 2 minutes?
Anyone who has made it to one of those iconic locations recently knows that particular feeling of arriving somewhere that looks truly remarkable on a screen, only to find two hundred other people there with tripods and ring lights, all angling for the exact same shot. A 2025 German study found that 49% of people said a destination didn't quite live up to what they'd seen on social media in reality.
None of that makes the window false - it just makes us more clear-eyed about what we were looking through. I think this is important.
And the behaviour hasn't disappeared, it's unlikely to - 83% of travellers still turn to social media first when planning a trip. We still want the information, the inspiration, the vicarious glimpse of somewhere beautiful, we've just stopped being enchanted by the performance around it.
What I will credit the travel influencer era for is this: it inspired many of us to photograph ourselves in the places we love. I have taken that and run with it. I now have a growing collection of photos of myself doing things I love, in places that mean something to me, and I am so glad I started. I don't aspire to be a travel influencer, but it's rare to find photos of myself before 2023. And, I have always been quietly obsessed with documenting my life in writing so this photograph library adds a dimension I hadn't expected and now can't imagine being without. A lasting and rather lovely legacy of this era.
And yet. On my own phone, I've started asking a question I cannot quite shake loose.
Why am I actually picking up this thing?
I say this as someone who has spent twenty years in marketing and brand strategy, who understands the mechanics of all of this probably too well, and who is still genuinely cheering for everyone building something online.
The creator economy is extraordinary and the volume of content being produced daily is staggering, with 95 million photos and videos uploaded to Instagram alone every single day. The people building audiences from scratch have done something most brands spend millions trying and failing to replicate.
And still. Something in the scroll isn't landing the way it used to.
I am also someone who shows up online, on Instagram, LinkedIn, and here on Substack. I write here every week. I share my thinking, my walking, my work. I am building something I genuinely believe in, and I am doing that through the very channels I'm describing.
So I hold this carefully.
For me, I don't want to perform a life. I want to share one.
Working out what that looks like in practice is an ongoing negotiation, and I know I'm not the only one having it.
When I actually do stop my scroll, I pay attention.
Nowadays, I am most certainly drawn to creativity in its most uncontrived form, artists making things and doing it their way, photographers not shooting for the algorithm, someone working on their life - genuinely.
When authenticity is genuine rather than performed, it still cuts through with a force that surprises me every time. And while I know this theoretically, it is truly - true. It works.
The professionals who have built something meaningful and are talking about it honestly, not the grifters or the quick-win merchants but the ones who share their craft respectfully. You can tell.
They're not trying to give me a window into somewhere I'm not.
They're already somewhere real, and they're simply there.
I think this is the difference.
Here's what I actually think is happening.
The boredom we are experiencing is not a social media problem, I think it's something changing in us.
We spent over a decade building an entire attention economy around looking at other people's lives, their aesthetics, their carefully constructed mornings, their highlight reels and hotel pools.
But the window into someone else's world no longer delivers what it once did, so we keep scrolling, somewhere between habit and hope, looking for the thing we can feel is missing but can't quite name. The thing we used to feel in the early days of social media.
If that's you, I'm telling you now. That thing cannot be found in someone else's feed.
The untapped frontier, and I mean this seriously as someone who works with people on exactly this through The Continuum Process, is the inner world.
Specifically, yours.
Not in a woo sense, not in a healing sense, although it could be, but in a deeply practical, pressing, this is what I actually want my life to feel like sense.
I've had to do real work to be able to say this, but the window of my own life is extraordinary, and it's because of what it feels like from the inside. 🥹
That shift has been deeply intentional and it has taken a long time, because I stopped looking outward for the thing I was actually looking for, and turned around.
Inward.
Regularly.
I inspect myself and my life like a curator who knows the collection is still growing, not looking for what's missing, but genuinely interested in what's there, and what else can be explored, added and adjusted to make it feel glorious to me.
Mine is not a perfect life, whose is. I don't have everything I want or need, and there have been seasons of real difficulty, of losing versions of myself I thought were permanent, of not knowing quite who I was becoming while the old version dissolved.
But alongside that, an aliveness and an expansion I hadn't known was possible, and both things were fully true at the same time.
All of it welcome. This is what it means to be human.
I'm about to enter a chapter of turning outward again, but I'll be doing it carrying everything I found on the way in, and that feels like the difference.
Let me tell you.
Loudly.
Your own window is worth looking through. Just as it is. Right now. With everything you already have, and all that you don't. All you are right now, and all you are becoming.
The window that isn't the curated one, not the one that reflects back what Instagram has decided you should want - but the actual one. What is spectacular in your daily life, in the small and the simple and the unglamorous, in your genuine desires, in the itch that no amount of scrolling has been able to reach. That one.
If you pick up your phone and feel that low-grade pull toward something you can't find there, put it down, and ask yourself one question instead.
What do I actually want my life to feel like?
Not look like.
Feel like.
That's the window worth looking through.
And please, please, please, write down what you see. You'll thank yourself one day as you start to see the beautiful mosaic, the playground, of you and your life as it feels more like yours.
Tell me in the comments, what has actually stopped your scroll lately? And why?
Cheering for us, Alice
