Allan, excellently said! In the end it is for ourselves and our own memories and old age 😀

And you’re right: it slowly becomes work. Worse, it becomes performance. Somewhere along the road, the ride risks turning into something I refuse to call “content production.”

Because I hate that word: content.

It reduces stories, encounters, mistakes, wonder, discomfort, and human connection into something that sounds like packing peanuts in a shipping container. Fill the feed. Feed the algorithm. Produce more content. Ugh. I’m tired.

Here’s the thing about that word: content is what goes inside something else. A shipping container has content. A folder has content. A database has content.

Which raises the question: what’s the container?

The platform? The algorithm? The feed?

Because if that’s the case, the work no longer stands on its own. It exists only to fill space. And that’s not why any of us picked up a camera, or a pen, in the first place.

What you describe isn’t just social media fatigue. It’s the creeping pressure of feeling like life only counts once it’s been documented, edited, captioned, uploaded, optimized, and approved by strangers scrolling while half-watching Netflix.

I’ve fallen into my own version of it. Not so much the pressure to post constantly, but the guilt of not posting.

“Damn… I shot all this footage and still haven’t done anything with it.”

Suddenly the ride becomes a backlog. A to-do list. Homework waiting on hard drives. And sometimes I simply don’t want to work. That is the whole reason I hopped on my bike in the first place.

Here’s what’s funny, though. During the earliest years of my WorldRider journey, before Instagram, drones, doom-scrolling and the rest of this endless churn, I wrote. Every day. Long-form stories, reflections, conversations, moments. Not optimized snippets designed to stop thumbs mid-scroll. Just honest writing.

Somewhere between YouTube, cameras, editing software, thumbnails, metrics, and “the algorithm,” that writing quietly faded into the background.

Recently, I’ve rediscovered how much I love it.

My WorldRider blog alone sits at more than 900 posts — north of a million words when you add the book, journals, newsletters, and Substack essays. And sitting down to write again feels more connected to the original spirit of travel than chasing another cinematic drone reveal ever did.

Words slow the brain down in a way video often doesn’t. They ask you to reflect instead of react.

Which brings me to what I quietly appreciate most about this post:

You didn’t film a dramatic YouTube confessional with sad music and jump cuts of burnout. You picked up the pen. Alright, maybe the keyboard. 😄 But you wrote. And that choice itself says something.

Because in the end, you nailed the central truth:

The best moments on the road happen when nobody’s filming, nobody’s posting, and nobody’s trying to prove anything.

Just dust, distance, bad roads, good people, and maybe a cold beer—or a killer bottle of wine—at the end of the day.

Thanks for writing this.

Netso Gerrit! 😀

Thanks, and seriously hope we hook up again Aaron! 😀

Exactly, and they were good times; people back home love it when they get a card. 🙂

Very well Georgie, and being able to flaunt sex appeal, as they say in marketing, sex sells 😀