During the pandemic I latched on to a couple of sailing vlogs that reminded me of why I wanted to be out in the world, and allowed me to be out there when we were all sheltered in place. Sailing friends pointed me towards the YouTube channels SV Delos, Sailing Uma and Ran Sailing and I was easily hooked on their visits to places I could only imagine at that time in the pandemic. Those channels led me to other travel channels, and before I knew it I was subscribing to more than I could possibly watch while still living a productive, engaged life of my own.

When the world opened up again, travel vloggers offered an easy research opportunity: to see a place before you visit that place so you may pick the very best places to go when you get there. Want to eat the best pizza in Napoli? There are plenty of vlogs that will point you towards the highest rated, and you hungrily watch as they eat pizza and rate their favorite. From there it’s up to you to follow along or ignore their opinion altogether and go your own way.

Visiting Seceda a couple of years ago, surely one of the most stunning places I’ve ever been in my life, we were struck by the sheer number of people clearly there to use the jagged mountains as a backdrop for Instagram photos and vlogging banter. We could shake our heads at the folly of it all, but the reason I even knew the place existed was from seeing it on a travel vlog myself. Vlogs, blogs and podcasts are the democratization of lifestyle media, and one can appreciate the form without being sucked into the vortex. There’s no doubt it can devolve into a hustle for attention in an increasingly competitive world. Why not simply experience a place instead of launching a drone or reading a script or showing a little more skin? Our lives don’t have to be coin-driven all the time.

Watching a few of these vlogs offers some insight, but who wants to simply fund the lifestyle of someone else instead of finding a way to live a larger life ourself? Instead of vlogging my life for others to see, I write about my experiences in this blog, and happily live anonymously without the recognition a GoPro and a selfie stick offer. My choice is more insular than theirs, but that doesn’t mean I don’t post pictures from Seceda or Iceland or Muir Woods on social media and write a blog post about each of these places too. It’s a fine line between sharing our experiences and bragging about them. And of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Coming back to those sailing channels on YouTube, the trend now seems to be about building new boats or completely remodeling the one they have. Their channels are thus pivoting and they’re asking their subscribers to follow along. It seems that somewhere on the other side of that selfie stick are people who aren’t as satisfied with where they are, or with how much money they’re making, or maybe with the people they’re missing while they’re off making YouTube videos in faraway places. We’re all just figuring things out as we go through life. Some people just post about it more often.

My bride watches home improvement programs and has some great ideas about how to remodel our home. I watch travel vlogs and have more reckless ideas about skipping out of town and seeing the world on a leaky boat over-provisioned with perishables and beer. Reality lies somewhere in between. We’ve made some big improvements on our home and garden as a result of her creativity and my sweat equity, and we’ve been to some places we’d never have gone to otherwise simply because we were inspired by something we saw someone else doing. When it’s all said and done, life is a short dance with our potential. The best vlogs, blogs, podcasts and sure, the best home improvement programs, explore that dance and provoke others to venture further themselves.