Influencered

Yup. Made up a word.

Before we get into that though, today we’re going to try something different. I’m going to attempt to keep this post under 500 words. Every time I write a post, I’m like “just gonna do a quick post, hit the high points, and then get back to whatever else I was doing”. Then I go down a rabbit hole, write for hours, and spend multiple days banging out some 2000+ word post. Like the last one. While this is fun, and I enjoy getting caught up in writing, I’d like to see if I can make a quality(ish?) piece with some fucking brevity. So here goes. Starting…….now:

Recently I went on a week long backpacking trip with some friends in a beautiful national park. It was incredible, serene, relaxing, all that. These guys get together every year for such a trip, and this was the first year I could make it. Thanks FIRE!

These dudes all come from my previous life, and it was good to catch up. They’re older now, and it’s been years since I’ve seen most of them. It’s pretty cool to see the progression of their lives. Most of the dudes are older than me, as they’re at a point in their lives where their progeny are more self sufficient and their work gives them reasonable time off. I was the oddball young guy, as most of my cohort is still working full time and has young kids. My wife was awesome enough to watch our little ones by herself for the week, hence why I was the junior member of the trip.

The nice part about this was it was like looking in the future; seeing guys 5-15 years older than me still being awesome, and dealing with all the challenges that life throws at you when you’ve been working a physically and mentally demanding career for decades. I mostly listened around the fire, and learned a lot. Laughed a lot too.

All these dudes were selected to be hard charging type A guys, and back when we worked together it was always a competition of who could go the fastest, carry the most, eat the least…you know, who could be the best at being miserable. 😉 I thought the hike would be fun, but though they told me otherwise, I expected it to suck a little too.

I was right, and I was wrong. It was fun. It did not suck. Yeah, most everyone was in great shape and if need be we could have moved way faster, slept less, and carried more weight. But we were there to enjoy life. Instead of stepping it out and try to get from campsite to campsite as quickly as possible, we took breaks every 30-45 minutes just to sit around and BS. Any time we came up to something cool, an overlook, a waterfall, some cool animal, we’d sit for awhile and chill.

It was if we had all proven years ago that we could do the hard shit, which now gave us permission to relax and enjoy the moment. A good trip.

As usual, I’m burying the lead. All of the above is to illustrate it was a good trip, and I truly enjoyed myself. Now we get into it:

One of the guys on the trip has had a cool second career which has evolved into him being a successful influncer. He carried a few cameras, and every time we stopped at something scenic, he’d whip one out and take some quick shots. Knowing this ahead of time, I was worried that this would be intrusive. Surprisingly, it was not. During a fifteen minute break, he maybe spent a minute doing his thing. Twice that week he asked us to stand together for a group shot, which we were all happy to do so we could show our families later. I’d guess he did a total of an hour of work during the trip. After the first day, I didn’t think much of it.

The trip ended, we all got some great memories, and parted ways.

Then our friend’s video dropped.

You’ve watched YouTube, you know the deal. This was one of those epic videos; beautiful nature shots, vibrant colors, slow motion captures, music and graphic overlays, all edited professionally. I watched the video, and even though I thoroughly enjoyed the week, this was something else. I wanted to be on that trip. The one on the video looked 100 times more fun than the one I remembered. Hell, I saw myself in the video and I wanted to be that guy. It was like my memory was the black and white before roll of some exercise infomercial, the YouTube video was the oiled up and tanned after part. Though the actual trip was fun, the video was some other world.

And that my friends is how I gained some more perspective. I love to watch various mountain biking, climbing, and hiking YouTube channels. But they make my own experiences look mundane in comparison. Yeah, I’d love to say I’m all enlightened and don’t care. But a little part of me is a tad jealous of those people doing cool stuff on YouTube while I’m just out hitting jumps at my local trail.

Living a great trip, and then seeing the highly fluffed up version afterwards taught me something that I knew academically, but didn’t quite emotionally grasp. It’s easy to feel a little shitty about your life when you subconsciously compare it to stuff you see on the screen. Well I’ve lived my life, and saw a highlight reel of a week of it. Shit we see on the YouTube, or really any other media source, will always look better than the real thing. It is stupid to compare your life to screen world, unless you’re into masochism. I know I’ll keep that in mind next time there’s that pang of jealousy when I watch some epic awesomeness-and try to remember that shit ain’t real.

Crap, over 1000 words. Guess I’d rather fail in that direction! Maybe I’ll try again next time 😉