Strap in if you’re interested, because I’m figuring this out in real time.
And honestly, I’m going to make them coexist either way.
The hardest part of living this way is not the living. It’s the explaining.
The Explaining
I don’t know how many times someone has looked at my life and quietly drawn the wrong conclusion. She’s always on holiday. She doesn’t have a real job. Must be nice. And I get it. From the outside, what I do doesn’t look like work in the way people expect it to. There’s no office. No commute. No neat job title that settles the conversation in three seconds.
When people ask what I do, there’s usually a pause after I answer. A head tilt. The polite silence that says, right… but what do you actually do?
The truth is I work constantly. I think about what I’m building every single day. I wake up with ideas and go to sleep with questions. But I also had lunch outside today. I also booked a trip last week because it felt right. I also lit a candle on a Tuesday for no reason other than I wanted to.
And somehow that’s the part people notice. Not the work. The lunch.
The Two Extremes
I think we’ve been trained to recognise ambition only when it looks like suffering. Long hours. Burnout. Sacrifice. A packed calendar with no gaps. If you’re not visibly grinding, you’re not visibly serious. And if you appear to be enjoying yourself, you must not be working hard enough.
On the other side, enjoyment only seems to look legitimate when it’s been earned. The holiday after the deadline. The dinner after the promotion. The trip after the big quarter. Pleasure as a reward, not a rhythm. Something you cash in rather than something you live inside.
Most people I know swing between the two. Grinding until they need to escape and then escaping until the guilt kicks in. I’ve done both. I’ve sat at a desk counting the hours until Friday. I’ve also spent sixteen weeks on yachts in Croatia wondering why I was craving a salad and a quiet evening.
Neither felt like mine. One was too tight. The other was too loose. Both left me reaching for the next thing instead of being in the thing I was already in.
The Middle
What I wanted was something in between. One where I could build something meaningful without losing my life to it. Where enjoyment wasn’t the break from work but the texture of it. Where I could be ambitious and present in the same breath.
And I don’t think that’s lazy. I think it’s actually harder than either extreme, because there’s no script for it.
Hustle has a script. Wake up early. Outwork everyone. Grind now, live later. It’s simple and it’s easy to follow because someone else already laid it out.
Escape has a script too. Quit the job. Book the flight. Find yourself somewhere else. It’s romantic and it’s easy to follow because it feels like freedom even when it’s just another loop.
The middle doesn’t have a script. There’s no one to copy. No aesthetic for it. No playbook that tells you how to build something real from a café while also being fully present in the conversation you’re having. You just have to feel your way through it. And I think most people would rather follow someone else’s script than trust themselves to figure it out without one.
The Filter
That’s what I think actually makes this way of living uncomfortable for some people. Not that it doesn’t work. But that it requires you to trust your own judgement about what a good life looks like. And that means being okay with the fact that some people won’t understand it.
The friends who chose the grind look at you and wonder if you’re serious enough. The friends who chose escape wonder why you’re still building at all. You don’t quite fit in either conversation. And at first that can feel quite lonely.
But over time it becomes a filter. The people who get it get it immediately. They don’t need the explanation. They recognise the rhythm because they’re looking for it themselves. And the people who don’t get it were probably never going to, no matter how many times you tried to justify a Tuesday lunch.
The Shift
I stopped explaining. That was the shift for me. Not because I don’t care what people think, but because the explaining was costing me more energy than the living. Every time I softened what I do to make it sound more reasonable, I moved a little further away from the thing I was actually building.
Trendie is what happened when I stopped trying to translate my life into other people’s frameworks and just started building my own. Not a rejection of ambition. Not pure hedonism. Something in between. Intentional, felt, and built to last.
I still don’t have a neat job title, and I don’t plan on having just one. My work sits between brands, content, and lived experience. I build things through how I live, what I notice, and what I care about. It’s not conventional, and it’s not always tidy or easy to explain, but it’s intentional. And it’s something I’m still figuring out as I go.
Trendie isn’t for everyone. It’s for people who care about what they’re building and how they’re living. Who want both and are quietly refusing to believe they have to pick.
This is me figuring it out. And inviting others to do the same.
Stay Trendie x