I do not have a massive following on social media these days, but I do have a habit of posting some strong opinions and moments of personal vulnerability that are relatively well known within my smaller circle of peers.
Most people today probably see me as just another seasoned product designer trying to navigate the endless cycles of tech industry chaos, but they generally do not know about my past life on the internet, or my personal life for that matter. So, don’t judge, people.
Back in the early part of the last decade, specifically around the years between 2010 and 2015, I ran a relatively successful travel blog that somehow caught lightning in a bottle. I killed it eventually, or it naturally dwindled down.
Without following any established playbooks or marketing strategies, I managed to amass over one hundred thousand Twitter followers in just a single year, and that little passion project even won a few industry awards along the way. It was a completely different era of the web, and looking back at it now feels like recalling a distant dream where the internet was still a place of genuine discovery rather than a hyper-optimised marketplace.
Also, mind you, this was a time long before the personal branding snake oil salespeople invaded our feeds with their aggressive courses on how to optimise every waking second of your existence for maximum digital reach. Yuck.
Twitter (yes Gen Zs and alphas, it was called Twitter back then!) was absolutely the bomb back then because it felt like a genuine conversation happening in real time, and personal blogs were still the primary channel through which you could gather an audience of like-minded individuals who actually wanted to read your thoughts.
There was a beautiful slowness to it all, where you would publish a thoughtful post and people would actually take the time to read it over their morning coffee, leaving long and meaningful comments that sparked actual dialogue. We did not have to worry about pleasing some opaque algorithm that decides who gets to see our work, nor did we have to compress our entire personality into a thirty second vertical video just to remain relevant.
Thinking back to that golden era of blogging, the entire ecosystem was built on mutual discovery and genuine curiosity rather than algorithmic manipulation. We would spend hours curating our blogrolls, essentially maintaining a handcrafted list of our favourite writers and thinkers, actively sending our own hard earned readers away to other websites just because we thought their work was genuinely good. There was a palpable sense of community where people would write detailed response posts on their own websites, linking back to your original thought and expanding upon it with their own unique perspectives. The internet felt like a massive, interconnected neighbourhood of independent voices, completely devoid of the centralised corporate platforms that now dictate exactly who sees our content and when they are allowed to see it. It was a beautiful, chaotic, and deeply human way to interact with the world, and I find myself mourning the loss of that digital innocence more often than I care to admit.
People possessed an entirely different capacity for deep reading and engagement during those years, whereas nowadays it feels like you are fighting for absolute peanuts when it comes to holding a stranger’s focus.
We have collectively sacrificed our ability to sit quietly with a single piece of text, trading it for the momentary dopamine hits of endless scrolling interfaces that leave us feeling more empty than before. The reality of this shift becomes undeniable when you consider research showing our digital attention span has dropped to a mere forty seven seconds as our cognitive habits have been fundamentally rewired by modern technology. When you recognise how drastically our brains have adapted to this rapid fire consumption model, it makes perfect sense why the thoughtful and lengthy blogging culture of the early two thousands feels almost impossible to replicate today. You are no longer writing for an audience of readers, but rather for an audience of scrollers who are desperately searching for the next quick hit of entertainment.
Because I experienced that early taste of internet fame, I have frequently heard from a few well meaning friends that I should definitely monetise my current writing or take this whole audience building thing much more seriously. I have even been dubbed a “LinkedIn influencer” on a few occasions, sometimes jokingly by friends who know my disdain for the term, and perhaps a bit more seriously by acquaintances who see my posts gaining traction.
The modern internet ecosystem conditions us to believe that any form of attention must immediately be converted into a financial asset, a subscription model, or an online course that promises to teach others how to achieve the exact same attention you just received. Every single hobby and creative outlet is now viewed through the lens of potential profitability, stripping away the simple joy of doing something just for the sake of doing it.
The entire concept of providing value has become one of the most exhausting phrases in the modern creator lexicon, turning what used to be a joyful act of self expression into a transactional obligation.
Every time I open a social media app, I see endless carousels and threads lecturing me on how to optimise my morning routine, how to maximise my productivity (with AI or without), or how to become a top tier design leader in five easy steps. Then, the career influencers, you can tell a lot about them.
It feels incredibly artificial, as if everyone is suddenly pretending to be an infallible expert holding the secret keys to success, completely ignoring the messy, contradictory reality of being a human being trying to navigate a difficult career. I have absolutely no interest in positioning myself as a guru who has all the answers, because the truth is that I am often just as confused and overwhelmed by this industry as anyone else. By refusing to play the game of providing constant, actionable value, I protect my own sanity and preserve the freedom to write about my failures, my doubts, and my quiet observations without worrying about whether they fit into a marketable personal brand.
However, if I am being completely honest with you, I have never done any of this for the money, nor have I ever been motivated by the desire to build a massive audience just to inflate my own ego. I simply want to share my thoughts and experiences with the world in the hopes that someone else might find a bit of comfort or clarity in them. The pressure to turn a creative outlet into a secondary income stream is incredibly pervasive, and I actively refuse to fall into the trap highlighted by reports indicating that a vast majority of digital creators experience severe burnout when they tie their personal worth to unpredictable algorithmic performance rather than intrinsic joy. When you start viewing your readers as customers and your thoughts as content, you inevitably lose the very soul of the work that made it special in the first place. I do not care if a post gathers hundreds of comments and thousands of likes, as long as it authentically represents what I was feeling at that exact moment in time.
When I look at comments and likes on my posts, I do not see them as performance metrics to be optimised in a spreadsheet or leveraged for a brand sponsorship. Instead, I view them as quiet signals from other human beings indicating whether they feel the exact same way or if the problem I am describing is a valid, shared experience within our industry. We are all just looking for confirmation that we are not entirely alone in our frustrations with the chaotic world of product design, and a simple like from a fellow designer across the globe is often enough to validate those quiet, nagging doubts we all carry. It is a form of digital solidarity, a small nod of agreement across the vast expanse of the internet that reminds us we are all navigating the same messy, imperfect reality of building software.
Of course, maintaining this level of transparency online does not come without a significant psychological cost, especially when you are currently employed in the corporate tech world. I have certainly deleted posts in the past, though it is usually because I realised I was not entirely comfortable sharing that specific level of detail about my life, rather than because I was trying to curate a perfect professional image.
I have faced a few real problems in the past regarding things I have said online, and the anxiety of crossing some invisible corporate boundary is something that haunts me every single time my mouse hovers over the publish button. It is a terrifying feeling to walk into a meeting with your manager, desperately trying to read their facial expressions to see if they saw that post you wrote late last night about the exhausting nature of agile development cycles.
Despite this lingering fear of corporate retaliation and the exhausting nature of the modern internet, for me, it is ultimately all about the act of putting myself out there in a genuine way.
The internet can be a very cold and unforgiving place, but it can also be a space for incredible connection if you are willing to strip away the professional facade and speak from the heart. As you might have noticed if you follow this blog closely, I have recently become a bit more consistent in my posting schedule, but I want to be clear that this is mostly just me experimenting with myself to see whether this platform will ever work out as a meaningful channel for connection. This is probably my very first time deliberately trying to maintain a rhythm in my writing since those old travel blog days, and I am fully aware that I might fail completely at maintaining it once my day job gets overwhelmingly busy again.
I really do not see myself as a provider of value in the traditional sense, and I absolutely do not follow any of those audience amassing textbooks that tell you to aggressively hook your readers in the first three seconds of a post. I just do it for fun, and I do it to remind myself that behind all the design systems, the endless stakeholder meetings, and the artificial intelligence hype cycles, there is still a human craft that is worth talking about quietly with friends. Perhaps that is the most radical thing any of us can do right now in a world obsessed with scale and monetisation, just sharing our messy, unpolished thoughts without expecting a single thing in return. If you are feeling stuck in your career or exhausted by the constant pressure to turn your hobbies into a side hustle, I hope you find the courage to just create something for the sheer joy of it today. Even if you create with AI, make sure it’s something that you enjoy doing.
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Consider subscribing, you will get at least a weekly update on things related to alternative views on UX. This blog is an attempt of me to refute, challenge or refresh what I’ve learned and observed about UX design as a career and industry, throughout my 15+ years career as a product designer. Read more about me, or visit my UX portfolio site.