Or at least, I hate what marketing often is: manipulative, braggy, sometimes outright dishonest. Disinformation is at an all-time high, and it can feel like every ad or post is designed to tug on our psyches without our consent.
There’s a part of me that wants to drop it all and live off-grid. Eat eggs my own chickens laid, harvest vegetables, make baskets. I have a vision of idyllic close-to-nature life that I yearn for. (Yes, I know that’s a fantasy. I’ve owned chickens who were massacred by a fox. I’ve weeded a garden in 90-degree heat while being eaten alive by mosquitos.)
Still, I long for a simpler way of being. Our needs as humans are beautifully basic. Food, connection, music, conversation. A sense of belonging. Most of it doesn’t require a corporation, or an endless feed of entertainment.
How did these tech behemoths come to own so much of our attention, our communication, our lives?
And yet, here I am. Sitting at a computer, day after day, creating digital graphics.
I do this for social impact organizations, for people and projects I deeply respect. For work I believe in. I feel mostly at peace with how I make my living. But I still wonder if I’m feeding the same machine I want to escape from. Marketing, even ethical marketing, is about persuasion. About capturing attention. And our attention is such a precious, powerful thing.
(Side note: if you haven’t read The Sirens' Call, it gets at this idea—the danger of being pulled away from ourselves by glowing screens.)
And still… I love it.
I love the act of creating. I love listening closely to someone’s vision and translating it into something visual, something that carries feeling. I love helping organizations reach legislators or donors or the community with stories that actually matter. I love making things that help people care.
This is what impact communications is at its best: storytelling that moves us, data that helps us understand what’s changing (and what isn’t), design that builds engagement. But even this work can sometimes feel too tidy. Too polished. Too shiny for the messy world we live in.
I want to tell the raw stories. The real ones. Not the before-and-after “look what we accomplished” but the “here’s how hard this was, and here’s where we failed, and here’s what we still don’t know.” I want honesty.
Like the Dove campaign from 20 years ago. It’s almost cliché to reference it, but it was one of the few big campaigns that simply told the truth about how women look. And people responded. Because we’re all hungry for what’s real.
So this is me. Torn between the homestead and the internet. Between the simplicity I long for and the digital tools I know can be used for good. Between wanting to run away and wanting to dig in.
For now, I’ll keep pushing pixels for beautiful change. And I’ll keep escaping to the country when I can, for some nature and solitude.
I’m curious… are you torn, too?