We have never been more connected. And apparently, we’ve never felt more alone. A 2025 Canadian government survey found that roughly half of Canadian adults experienced feelings of loneliness, whether through a lack of companionship, isolation, or feeling left out. (Impact Canada)

Half!

That’s an extraordinary number of people surrounded by technology designed to bring us together, wondering where everybody went. You have to ask yourself if we’ve been contributing to that statistic through the experiences we’ve designed.

If you work in a creative profession, it’s a strange existence. You spend your days making things for people you’ll never meet. Communicating through screens. Presenting to little rectangles of faces. Sending work into the world and waiting for someone to react.

The highs can be ridiculous.

A brilliant idea. A new dream client. A piece of work you’re genuinely proud of. That wonderful feeling when something you’ve been carrying around in your head finally exists. Maybe you even got an award or peer recognition.

And then the lows.

The project disappears. The client goes quiet and you’re chasing payment. The work gets rejected. Or the proverbial phone doesn’t ring. It’s even harder now while sifting through emails in your inbox hoping you didn’t miss that email or it arrived in your junk folder.

Sometimes you’re surrounded by collaborators. Sometimes it’s just you, a screen, and the uncomfortable silence of wondering what comes next.

Nobody really talks about that part. Instead, we’re told to improve ourselves.

Optimize your morning.
Fix your sleep.
Build muscle.
Lose weight.
Improve your appearance.
Looksmaxx. Biohack. Meditate. Journal. Become the best version of yourself.

For fuck’s sake. When did being a human being become a renovation project?

There’s always another podcast explaining what’s wrong with you. Another book promising to fix it. Another person with a perfect morning routine, busy social channels, and a discount code.

And the particularly cruel thing about self-improvement is that it can become addictive. You start feeling better about yourself, then immediately find something else to fix. You never arrive. Because arriving would mean there’s nothing left to sell you.

Maybe the problem isn’t that you haven’t worked hard enough on yourself. Maybe you’ve spent so much time examining your life that you’ve forgotten to live it.

Go have dinner with someone!

Not a networking dinner.
Not a coffee meeting with an agenda.
Not an opportunity to discuss your next project, exchange contacts, or tell someone what you’ve been working on.
Just dinner.

With…

• People who don’t give a shit about your portfolio.

• People who make you laugh.

• People who disagree with you.

• People who have absolutely no interest in discussing artificial intelligence, creative strategy, or the future of whatever industry you’re in.

There’s something wonderfully liberating about being around people who expect nothing from you professionally.

And sometimes, the opposite is just as valuable.

Get in the car. Drive into the mountains.
Walk until the reception disappears.
Spend a few hours with nobody but yourself.

Think about the decisions you’ve made. The people you’ve lost. The things you’ve built. The things you’ve neglected. Whether the life you’re living is still the one you want.

Not because some self-help guru told you to practice mindfulness. But because sometimes you genuinely need to figure out what the fuck you’re doing.

There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude: one can hollow you out; the other can help you find your way back. And neither of those is solved by another productivity app.

I love making things. I love creative thinking. I love the work. I love the extraordinary highs that come with creating something from nothing. But work cannot be the entire architecture of a life…it has driven me to some terrible realizations.

Neither can self-improvement by the way.

At some point, you have to stop treating yourself like an unfinished product.

Close the laptop. Call a friend or make one. And take a walk.

Disappear into the mountains for a day.

Get a fucking life.

Not a better one. Yours.