The Postcard

Instagram is the postcard. The ice is the crossing. Nobody puts frostbite on a postcard.

I didn’t think about Instagram once out there. Not social media. Not interactions. Not what was happening online or who was posting what or what I was missing. Not once. Thirty days. If I picked up my phone it was to take a photo. That was it. Camera. Nothing else. Just a person trying to hold onto what it felt like to be exactly where he was.

A month without any of it didn’t feel like deprivation. It felt like what life is actually supposed to feel like.

I did document the journey. A live map on my website updated daily through my Garmin. Small blog entries as things happened. But that was different. That was for the people who cared enough to go looking, not content pushed at strangers hoping for a reaction. There’s a difference between documenting something and performing it. I knew which one I was doing out there.

I couldn’t sleep this morning so I opened Instagram for the first time in a month. Just five minutes. Maybe less. Fitness influencers still doing the thing. Safari guides posting the viral clip. Wildlife photographers chasing the trending moment and searching for likes. A month of my life happened, one of the most significant months I’ve ever lived, and the feed just kept going like a machine running in an empty room.

Nothing changed.

And I could feel it happening. That pull. The slow drift into the scroll. Five minutes becoming ten becoming nothing. Your brain going quiet in the worst possible way, not peaceful quiet, just empty. Numbed out on content that looked like life but wasn’t anywhere close.

It wasn’t anger I felt looking at it. Not judgment. Just distance. Like looking at something through glass that you used to be right up against. A month ago that world felt real and necessary and now it just felt thin. Like it was always thin and the ice burned off whatever was stopping me from seeing that clearly. You don’t get that kind of clarity from deciding to take a break. You get it from going somewhere so real that everything false stops making sense.

I put the phone down and thought what the fuck am I doing. Not angrily. Just clearly.

This is not life.

I used Instagram hard in 2016, 2017, building Wild Eye, building a brand. I understood it then and I’m not pretending it had no value because it did. You build something from nothing and you use the tools available. But looking back now I can see what it actually was. You cannot compress an extraordinary moment into fifteen seconds without hollowing it out. What you’re left with is the shape of the experience with nothing inside it. And when the performance becomes the point, when the guide is up before dawn not because the bush demands it but because the light is good for content, when the photographer isn’t looking at the animal because they’re already writing the caption, something real has been traded away quietly and most people don’t even notice it’s gone.

I’ve spent more than twenty years in the bush. I know what it feels like when someone is actually there versus when someone is producing content in a place that happens to be wild. The animal doesn’t know the difference. The bush doesn’t care. But the person does.

Instagram doesn’t show you the place. It shows you the postcard. And there’s a difference so large that calling them the same thing is dishonest. A postcard is chosen specifically because it’s beautiful and flat and easy. It doesn’t show you what it cost to be there. Nobody puts frostbite on a postcard. Nobody photographs the morning you sat on the edge of your sleeping mat feeling nauseous before forcing broken feet into boots for the tenth day in a row. Nobody posts the moment the doubt moved in and stayed. The tears that came without asking. The hours where the horizon didn’t move and something dark sat beside you and you just had to let it.

That stuff doesn’t make the postcard.

But that stuff is the crossing.

Instagram doesn’t just leave the hard parts out. It replaces the real thing with something more digestible and your brain starts accepting the replacement as truth. Scroll enough and you start believing the extreme looks like a clean photo with good light and a caption about growth. It doesn’t. The extreme is ugly and slow and costs more than you thought and changes you in ways you can’t photograph.

We spend most of our time in performance work trying to get under the highlight reel and into the actual thing. The real data. The uncomfortable truth underneath the story. Instagram is the opposite of that. It is the story. The curated version. The life that’s been made safe enough to show.

I was off it for a month and my brain felt cleaner than it has in years.

I’m not going back the same way.

From here I’ll post and ghost. Drop something when it’s worth dropping, something that points back to where the real work lives, and then leave. No scrolling. No drift. No disappearing down a hole of other people’s highlight reels while my own life sits waiting.

Most of what I have to say is going here. To Substack. To YouTube when I’m back. Places where the experience doesn’t have to be compressed into something someone consumes in three seconds while sitting on the toilet. What happened on that ice deserves more than a caption. Same with life. What’s coming out of it deserves more than a highlight. And the people who follow along deserve more than a postcard.

Some people will think I should be back online already. Sharing. Responding. Showing up. I understand that. I also don’t care right now. Not because I’m punishing anyone. Because what I’m carrying hasn’t settled yet and the moment I open that machine it will start pulling at it before I’ve understood what it is.

The ice doesn’t care about your follower count. Neither does real life. It doesn’t care about your engagement rate or your aesthetic or whether the light was good. It just is what it is. Thirty days of the most real thing I’ve ever done and none of it was made for anyone else.

That’s worth protecting.

G.