The Path of Least Resistance
There is only one way to get where we're going - ours
In November 2024 when movement broke the spell of inertia that had tethered me for far too long to the wrong path, travel became my laboratory. The more I stopped treating travel as a series of disconnected episodes, as mere consumption and escape, the more I found I could tap into its transformative powers. For the first time, too, I found flow and meaning with movement.
And the more it seemed I embraced travel as a continuous, compounding journey of self-discovery, the more I slid into a soothing synchronicity and rhythm with my values and my purpose. At first dots mysteriously connected until I realized the connection was no coincidence. It was an inevitability. The way the universe responds when we move on the path of least resistance towards what is meant for us.
Without friction and passivity holding me back, I finally felt the energizing peace one does, when what one is called to do, matches what one is actually doing.
What travel’s laboratory cultivated was a deep respect and reverence for encounter and becoming. I felt stories before I saw, heard and tasted them. I absorbed and ingested collisions before I registered them for what they really were. Inside small artisan boutiques, in front of plated purpose and in conversation with strangers who became kindred spirits, I watched as Travel took on its new role as incubator. It was becoming so much more than a mirror, catalyst and muse.
And yet, when I tried to share my experience through reflection, I felt stifled and second-guessed across every distribution platform but my own. I grimaced at the seemingly inescapable distortion of my voice and vision every time I translated my story to capture eyeballs and impressions. I increasingly felt censored and diluted by an algorithm that rejected the unconventional shape of what I had to say and share.
On some days, I felt like a fraud; on others, an outsider, and at my worst, the kind of performative, cringe-worthy storyteller I had come to reject and revile over the years as both a marketer and a consumer.
I could no longer pretend that the sandbox I had played in since graduating from business school was all just part of the gig, the challenge, the marketer’s dilemma. This story, my story, the one I was meant to tell, was far too precious to subvert and subject to all the things that would happen to it when I released it in the wild.
It had been one thing to sense a widening misalignment with my craft while I was working on big corporate brands, but it was altogether another to feel it toiling away on my own creation and labor of love. Any contortion of story here translated into excruciating cringe and manipulation of my own sense of self and integrity. It felt dirty and diminishing.
Having defended marketing my whole career, I saw for the first time its uglier, distasteful side. It was the first time I felt and understood how it could undermine and undervalue. Shamefully, it was the first time I truly cared.
Toward the end of my career, when I couldn’t help but dabble in self-reflection, I realized what I wasn’t doing was the very thing that had drawn me to brand from the start. I wasn’t creating. I was trafficking, dispersing and resizing.
I was on the precipice of excitedly solving for this in my last role when I was let go. But I didn’t let go of where a different way in had been leading me. Fortuitously, I got to save that philosophy and discovery for building my own brand.
What I had been longing to reconcile was the tension that bubbles up between uncovering and feeling a brand’s story and the machinations involved in deploying and distributing it in today’s tricky-to-access, two-dimensional world. That need for reconciliation only intensified as I built The Untethered Traveler. I was determined to harmoniously triangulate what I wanted to say with what I felt compelled to share and how I was left to say it in a way that worked for me, not the platforms.
Just before I left for Mexico City after living with the compromise and cringe for nearly a year, I made myself a promise. I would never try again to shoehorn my potential and philosophy into another Instagram story, Thread, Reel, Snap, TikTok, Tweet. I would never write ever again for character limitations, to stop a scroll, to beg a like, to validate myself through regram, bookmark or follow.
I hadn’t done all of this self-reappraisal and expansion to vainly or impertinently reduce myself and my beliefs to a content distribution system, an algorithm or an establishment that was set on homogenizing and skipping over me. Idealized as my point of view may have been, what choice did I really have?
I could keep at it as I was. Gnash against the process and slowly burn through momentum, confidence and resources. Or I could slice, dice and conform, which meant selling my soul and burning out under a smokescreen of insincerity and self-betrayal. Both would surely mean accepting certain death and obsolescence of The Untethered Traveler at the hands of the system suppressing me.
But there was another way. I could put a film degree, two decades of brand building and 18 months of intentional travel to work. I could still stay unflinchingly true to who I had become and what I wanted to create. And I wantedto create, not package and perform. I wanted to share my story, my truth, my way.
What I knew to be true from traveling with intention, in dining from tables where the story behind the food matters as much as the food itself, in encountering makers and creators who never compromise what they believe, is that true stories always find a way. Even now. Especially now. I had to keep trying to find light for mine.
And I would, it seemed, following the same script that had never betrayed me. First, I answered my compass’s call to Mexico City. Then I kept my heart and eyes open. No longer moving in a state of resistance and conformity, I felt creatively vigilant, attuned and unblocked.
Mexico City wasn’t shy or slow to respond. It nudged me hard. Twice. First, right as I entered the Anthropology Museum. The welcoming sign in the first exhibit hall said something like: what separates humans from other species is their ability to reason and create culture. “Create culture,” bore into me for days. Then, the second sign sprang up on the t-shirts of the staff at Michelin Green Star restaurant, Baldio: El Futuro es Ancestral (The Future is Ancestral).
While I hadn’t been searching for the answer or the confidence for how to tell my story without cringe and compromise, the dots were connecting here and there, pinging about and colliding like a pinball cracking out a record-breaking trip around the machine.
Movement was once more my answer.
We, us, humans are the only recipients, carriers and vessels of stories that actually matter. Similarly, we, us, humans are the original meaning-makers and viral storytellers. Not Meta. Not Silicon Valley. Not algorithms. It was impossible to deny that stories found their audiences long before algorithms curated our feeds, news and opinions for us.
When stories are extracted and refined for humans by humans, built for our natural movement and inclination, magic in motion will follow. This is what served our ancestors and what will outlast every algorithm built to replace it. The emotion that matters happens before the click, the like, the share. It cannot be scheduled or reverse-engineered. It just arrives.
This was the only source of truth and creative well I wanted to draw from. As a long-form writer on a journey of self-discovery, I am not interested in wearing multiple hats as a part-time performer, poser or contortionist. I am interested in protecting and preserving my story, just as it should be told, in the hopes that it, too, will move as so many other stories have for millennia. On its own.
I don’t know if this mutinous strategy will be successful. I do know I must choose protecting the soul of my work and the throughline of my purpose above everything else. And that means trading misalignment for a different type of growing pain: vulnerability and discomfort. It means failing in public across the metrics we superficially measure human achievement against these days: likes, engagement rates and shares.
And yes, that makes me wince. But what it doesn’t do is make me cringe.
The wince feels more like those last few squats in a set. We know they’re good for us. They’re building muscle, but they sting. In the story of my own becoming, I choose to grow just as I choose to create – telling my story, my way. As I wince with each up and down, I’m pressure testing, strengthening and sharpening the only algorithm that matters.
Mine.
