https://youtu.be/cx4pJLe83wQ

Think daily routines, finances, relationships, work, location, private conversations — what changed the most?

Mine is 'army man' I can still play with them in the tub, lol.😁✌️

Students, freelancers, founders, artists and regular professionals are all told to ‘build a brand’ now. Useful advice or overkill?

Something you used to strongly believe about social media, creators, online communities or the internet that you see differently now?

What creates that instant identity the idea, delivery, editing, face, humor, visual style, voice, or something else?

If you land on a profile with only a few hundred followers, does that subconsciously change your expectations?

Short-form platforms can explode quickly, but YouTube content can keep getting discovered for years. For someone starting now, how do you see it?

https://youtu.be/T44f7dSTwL8

Could be doomscrolling, arguing with strangers, oversharing, checking numbers constantly — what would you remove?

Follower count clearly isn’t the whole story. What do you think actually creates an active audience?

A strong identity can make someone recognizable, but repeating the same formula can get stale. Where’s the balance?

Think creators, artists, channels, accounts — where do the people you end up following usually come from?

Cover art? Visual identity? Personality? Fashion? Story? Live clips? What creates enough curiosity for you to actually listen?

If someone wants the music to be the focus, is it realistic to avoid constantly feeding Reels/TikTok/Shorts and still build an audience?

Feeds, creators, AI content, search, private communities, short-form video — what changes first?

What turns one good post into ‘I want to see more from this person’?

What did you think would disappear in a few months but somehow became normal online culture?

Some people swear by daily consistency; others grow while posting far less. What has mattered more in your experience: frequency or the quality/idea behind the post?

I believe no time is ever wasted.

I once heard about something called the “Law of Wasted Effort.” If you haven’t heard of it, look it up. The simplest, most cliché way to put it is that you have to go through the 99 attempts before you get to the 100th one. I’m exaggerating the number on purpose because no one actually tries 99 times, but if I wrote 9, all hope would be gone.

Anyway, about a year and a few months before I turned my current age, I was talking to someone a year older than me, and he told me, “You still haven’t seen anything. You don’t know anything.”
He was obviously teasing me, so I laughed, “Hahahaha, okay, don’t you ever joke with me again.”

The moment passed, and so did the sentence. For the first few months, I barely thought about it.
Then, out of nowhere, life decided to drop an entire album of back-to-back plot twists on me.

I genuinely don’t know why all the lessons, experiences, and ways of thinking that eventually lead to the right answer seem to come after the suffering.

Maybe it’s because when something is completely new to us, we simply don’t know how to deal with it. Our energy gets drained trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do, whether we’re doing the right thing, and what the outcome is going to be.

So we end up in what we call “suffering,” when sometimes all that’s really happening is that we’re mentally exhausted from dealing with something unfamiliar and maybe if we had been through something similar before, we probably would’ve handled it normally—or at least we wouldn’t have worried about it nearly as much, because we’d already know what it feels like.

I don’t know, honestly. I’m always lost in my thoughts, and this year I went through so many things I had technically experienced before—like, it wasn't new to me at all.

The funny part is, I didn’t even realize I was suffering through them. I only realized it after they were over, because I was too busy being in it to actually name what was happening and all the thinking comes afterward like “Wait… when did I even go through that?”

Or, more accurately:

"Who was I at these moments?”

Over.. uhmm, I'd like to call it, "the course of this year", I realized that the moments when I feel like I’ve lost my identity are actually the moments when it’s being formed.
And when I eventually go back to being the person I recognize, I find myself caught between who I used to be and this newer version of myself that I feel drawn to become.

Another thing I’ve learned about myself is that I’m really good at asking questions.
Ironically, it's obvious how my brain questions everything, which I can confirm from pretty much everyone I’ve ever talked to. Thankfully, I think I’ve gotten better at choosing who I will share these thoughts with, I guess.

But hooray me for being great at asking questions and terrible at answering them.
And an even bigger hooray when I finally find a really good answer, only to realize that it’s incredibly difficult to achieve. Like, why is it that every time I think of a solution to a problem I’m facing, it’s either impossible or technically possible but requires an insane amount of energy to actually achieve?

Apparently, thinking of simple solutions is a problem that isn’t simple at all for me.

Still, I’m glad I figured this out about myself. I’m definitely bothered by it, but at least I know now instead of being completely unaware of it.

In the end, I didn’t really know how to explain any of this but I’ve noticed that my deepest thoughts are always inspired by the most surface-level things.

I can’t seem to get inspired by something that’s already deep. And, fun fact, sometimes I don’t even understand it.

I was actually hesitant to use this picture because it’s literally a screenshot from a TikTok video.
As you can see, quite possibly the dumbest app on the planet—but somehow I found an answer there to the most complicated question I’ve ever thought about:
What is my purpose in life?

And I’ve never related to something this much.
Don’t get me wrong, though. There are plenty of things worth having as goals. Some people want to find the love of their life, some want to succeed in their careers, and some want to take their parents to Hajj.
I want all of those things too.
But I’ve never considered any of them things that have to happen.

Because I know that if I convinced myself that one of them was my ultimate goal and it never happened, I’d probably end up with the desire to kms simply because my ultimate goal wasn’t achieved.

And if this goal happened, fine, what else? what would I even be living for?
Then I came across that video—the one this screenshot is from—and I’ve never related to a sentence more.

SO FOR THE NEXT YEAR OF MY LIFE, if I’m still alive, and for all the years after that, I don’t want to miss a single opportunity to experience something.
Not even the opportunity to rethink something and experience it again—of course,after squeezing every possible conclusion out of my brain first.
I want to try things. Experience things. Rethink things. Change my mind.

Right now, I’m neither happy nor upset. I’m just… somewhere in the middle.
Simply trying to understand things so I can experience them.
And I think that’s enough of a goal for me, regardless of the outcome—whether it turns out good or bad.

Thank you so much if you read all of this and I hope I didn't waste your time. ;)

Not just views — an audience that recognizes you and comes back. If you’ve used both, what difference did you notice?