I Don't Want to Be Famous Anymore!

Hi love, it's been a long time since I have written anything on this platform. Maybe because I am right in the middle of my dark night of the soul, and maybe that is why this article is about this very topic.

You know, I used to crave social media fame. I wanted to be known. I wanted people to recognize my work, to have an audience, to have people waiting to hear what I had to say. I wanted the visibility, the opportunities, the feeling that I had somehow made it. And I don't think I was pretending when I wanted those things. At the time, they genuinely felt like success to me.

However, now something has changed.

A little while ago, I uninstalled my social media apps. And this time, something felt different. I didn't miss them. AT ALL. I didn't keep wondering what was happening online or feel the urge to reinstall them after a few days. There was no dramatic struggle with myself. Mostly, I just felt relieved.

I think the noise had finally become too loud for me to keep ignoring my own voice.

For a long time, I thought the problem was Instagram. Then I thought maybe LinkedIn was different. More intelligent. More professional. More meaningful. Then there was Substack, which felt like the place where people actually had conversations and ideas. But the more distance I got from all of it, the more I started wondering if we are simply consuming the same noise in different forms.

The platforms may be different, but the underlying game can be remarkably similar. Be visible. Have an opinion. Build an audience. Create consistently. Establish authority. Turn your experiences into content. Make people remember you.

And now AI has made producing all of this incredibly easy. You can have a hundred content ideas in minutes. You can turn one thought into ten posts. You can make everything sound polished and insightful. And I find that strangely depressing sometimes, because I keep seeing the same ideas dressed up in slightly different language. Everyone sounds like everyone else.

What I miss is someone simply saying something because they have actually lived it.

Not because it is a good content angle. Not because it will perform well. Not because it establishes them as a thought leader. Just because they have been through something, thought about it deeply, and have something real to say about it.

This quiet digital detox has made me question something I thought I had already figured out: what does success actually mean to me?

Because I realise that my old definition of success was almost entirely outward-facing. I wanted to be impressive. I wanted to achieve things that other people could see and recognize. I wanted to travel, build, speak, create, grow, be invited, be acknowledged. There was always an invisible audience in the room, even when nobody was actually there.

These days, my definition of success feels much more ordinary, and somehow much more difficult.

It looks like waking up in a healthy body with energy. It looks like having a healthy family and enough time to actually be with them. It looks like doing art simply because I want to make something, without needing to turn it into a business or post it somewhere. It looks like working four or five hours doing work I genuinely love and then having enough of myself left over to enjoy the rest of my life.

It looks like being present.

I've also started thinking about how much of modern life is spent experiencing something and simultaneously thinking about how we are going to show that we experienced it. We travel somewhere and immediately think about the photograph. We go to an interesting event and think about the post. We have a meaningful conversation and wonder whether there is a lesson in it that we can share.

I've done this too! And I don't want to anymore.

If I go to another country, I want to experience the country. I want to eat the food, walk around, notice things, talk to people, get lost, understand something about how other people live. I don't want the primary value of the experience to be that I can add another country to my Instagram story highlight.

If I have a beautiful conversation with someone, I want to have the conversation. I don't necessarily need to turn it into a TED Talk, a podcast episode or a lesson for my audience.

There is something incredibly freeing about allowing an experience to belong only to you.

I think that is the biggest shift for me. My old definition of success was outward. How does this look? What will people think? How many people know me? How impressive is this?

Now I find myself asking a completely different question: how does this actually feel when I am living it?

Earlier, I wanted to impress. Now I want to express.

Earlier, my definition of success was largely inherited from society. This is what successful people do. This is what they have. This is how visible they are. This is what their lives look like.

Now I'm much more interested in what I would call the soul's standards of success.

And the soul seems to care about very different things.

It cares about whether you are healthy. Whether you have people you love around you. Whether you have enough quiet to hear yourself think. Whether you are doing work that feels meaningful. Whether you are creating something because you love creating it. Whether you are actually present for your own life.

It doesn't seem particularly impressed by follower counts.

And strangely, I don't want to be known anymore just for the sake of being known. I don't feel the same urgency to leave a legacy either. Maybe that sounds strange coming from someone who has spent so much time building businesses, creating things and thinking about impact. But I don't want to create a legacy to prove that my life mattered.

I just want to live a life that matters to me while I'm living it.

I want a quiet life. A peaceful one. A healthy one. I want meaningful work without making my entire identity about my work. I want deep conversations. I want creativity. I want family dinners and long walks and days where nothing particularly impressive happens. I want to be able to put my phone away and not feel like I'm disappearing.

And I still want to have an impact. That part hasn't gone away.

I just don't think impact needs to be loud.

Maybe I don't need thousands of people to know what I am doing. Maybe I don't need to document everything meaningful in my life. Maybe I don't need to build a personal brand around every part of myself. Maybe some things can simply be mine.

I know this is probably contrary to the direction everything is moving in. We are being encouraged to be more visible, more consistent, more strategic, more public. There is always another platform, another audience, another opportunity to put yourself out there.

But I am at a point where I don't want to build a life according to what is trending.

I want to build it according to what feels true.

And right now, my truth is surprisingly simple.

I don't want a loud life.

I don't want to spend my life proving how successful, interesting, cool, productive or accomplished I am.

I don't want to be known just to make my ego feel important.

I don't want to leave behind some grand legacy simply because I was told that was the measure of a meaningful life.

I want to wake up and feel good in my body. I want the people I love to be healthy. I want to do work I care about. I want to make things. I want to have conversations that change me. I want to experience places rather than collect them. I want to laugh more. I want to notice more. I want to be here for my own life.

Maybe that's not ambition in the way I used to understand it.

But it feels like a deeper kind of ambition to me now.

The ambition to actually live the life I've spent so many years trying to prove I was successful enough to deserve.

And maybe, for the first time, I don't need anyone else to see it.

I just want to feel it.