Effort is the currency I care about in online content.

Everyone has a story. But if I’m going to put ours into the world, I need a reason to think it should be heard over others. Our story is trivial beside catastrophe, so at the least my effort in creation should justify the effort each audience member must spend to parse it.

Goodwill versus effort

Take my pet peeve: voice messages in text threads. They are a zero-sum game, saving the creator time but costing the consumer. Reading takes seconds, listening takes minutes, often in an unconducive environment. This exchange works only because of the goodwill of the consumer.

For one-to-many, the dynamic is different. Strangers owe you nothing, so greater effort is required. Unscripted, rambling monologues, AI-generated videos - the result needn’t be subjectively ‘good’ per se (reminder that you are allowed to have hobbies you suck at) but it should be shaped and good to me.

These are the standards I hold myself to for video creation. That’s why I can enjoy making and watching ‘slow TV¹’, even if many people can’t stand it: I appreciate the effort taken to produce it.

A pixel or a picture?

This leads me to the point: paradoxically, daily reels seem low effort, yet still burned my time without giving me the reward of ‘real’ work. They look lazy whilst still falling far short of my own bar as outlined above, meaning they felt inauthentic to me.

Updating friends and family was only a side effect of reel creation, as I largely quit social media (at least on my phone) some years ago and would prefer to just communicate with that circle directly. Their main purpose was ‘engagement’: to try and convince more people to care about our story in advance of my longform video releases.

The result of a daily cadence was also necessarily shallow and temporal: we woke up here, then we ate that, then we saw this. There was no chance to group themes, weave threads, build narrative across time, more carefully select music, or improve pacing that a larger timeframe and bucket of content makes possible. Just pixels, not a picture².

Work I value, work I’ll keep

Of course, I want as many people as possible to watch and enjoy these films, but I have made videos since I was eight, long before YouTube, and mainly for myself. I still learn something new each time (animated maps were a first for this one), and this learning, the practice of putting something creative out into the world, and the crystallization of my memories for the future is also reward enough.

Spending nights hunched over CapCut then, making what were essentially ‘ads’ for the ‘real’ videos, felt true to neither our own unfolding travel experience nor my goals as a filmmaker. I don’t want my creative backlog to be these reels: I won’t rewatch them in 20 years, but I will and often do re-watch the travel films I make.

So I’m not going to do daily reels any more. Social media is a trap, while longform films reward both me and the audience.

Deleting Instagram again was a relief, as I return to using less addicting external desktop or third party apps now I can update less often. I had only reinstalled it for these reels, but found it immediately, insidiously, again capturing my daily screentime.

The current picture

With this, I’m proud to announce the first full episode in the ‘Noobing Around’ series, covering Tina and my anything-but-circumnavigation of the globe by bike: The Netherlands ‘Hansa’ Route: Bikepacking on Easy Mode.

Baby goat rainbow = the clickiest of thumbnails, according to an extremely small focus group.

It is not profound - it’s fun. But the Netherlands was fun - traipsing about on bikes, in the country with the safest cycling infrastructure in the world, in spring, stopping to admire baby goats, couldn’t be anything but.

It may seem odd to get philosophical only to release something so lighthearted. But I also wanted to share my conscious reasons for stopping reels, and my realization that I should focus only on the kind of work I truly value.

50+ hours for 30 minutes feels like a more-than-fair trade for your time. I am proud to put it into the world. Hope you enjoy it!