A lot of people don’t know this but I used to be a travel blogger a decade back. I started blogging because I loved to document my travels.

Slowly the focus moved from the travelling to the blogging. I stared traveling mostly so that I could blog. All the comments on my blog led to a feedback loop that fed my fragile ego and let me to imagine that my life was far more adventurous than it actually was.

I started drinking the koolaid way too much.

Blogging was supposed to be a complementary activity to my travels. Not become my primary focus. The photos were supposed to complement the blogs, and not the reason I actually traveled.

I started asking myself: What are you optimising for? and I realised that I was no longer optimising for the joy of traveling.

So I stopped traveling. And also blogging. Because I never started traveling to gather page views or earn money. It was supposed to make me happy. But optimising for the wrong things killed that joy.