If you’re reading this, chances are you feel it too: that quiet, annoying sense that something is off.
On paper your life looks “fine”. You work, you pay your bills, you try to squeeze a whole life into evenings and weekends. But under the surface there’s this constant tiredness, a low-grade anxiety, the feeling that you’re stuck in a hamsterwheel lifestyle you never actually chose.
We live in houses full of stuff, but we feel empty.
We scroll for hours, but feel more disconnected than ever.
Our bodies run on coffee, sugar and paracetamol instead of real rest.
For a long time I tried to play along. I did the 9–5, the commute, the meetings, the whole “be a responsible adult” performance. But around 2020 something in me snapped awake.
I don’t need to tell you the whole episode, you know the drill. But that period forced me to look very honestly at the world and at my own life.
When you zoom out for a moment, it’s pretty obvious that this way of living isn’t working for us.
People are more burned out than ever. More anxious than ever. More depressed and obese than ever. We’re surrounded by food and products and entertainment, but somehow we’re running on empty. Our bodies are tired, our nervous systems are fried and our hearts are lonely.
Most of us know it, quietly.
You wake up tired, push through the day, and need something to take the edge off at night. Scrolling, sugar, wine, series, pills, whatever your favourite flavour of numbness is. Anything to not feel how misaligned this all is.
We live in a way that goes completely against how humans are actually built to live: disconnected from nature, from our bodies, from community, from our own intuition. And then we wonder why we’re sick, sad and overstimulated.
For me, that realisation was brutal but also very clear: it’s not just “me being sensitive”. The lifestyle is insane. And if the lifestyle is insane, it’s no surprise that our bodies and minds are screaming.
So when I say I didn’t plan to become a hippie, I mean this: I didn’t wake up one day wanting a cute aesthetic. I needed a completely different way of living to stay sane and honest with myself.
At some point I had to choose how I wanted to live in this reality. For me, it felt like there were two clear directions:
- either you go along with the digital agenda and a more synthetic way of living with digital IDs, more control, more chemicals in your body and in your home, bad entertainment, low-quality self-care products, less and less real connection with nature and more connection with screens, systems and the whole consumer machine,
- or you go back to basics: to essence, independence, freedom, the strength of nature, real human connection and taking your health into your own hands.
I knew exactly which side of that line I was on.
I wanted to move towards what felt pure and real: the power of nature, slow mornings, working with my hands, walking barefoot, rest, space, real attention, real connection, real products, real food and real creativity. Actually living instead of just surviving. In short: small-scale magic instead of a hamsterwheel lifestyle.
In that period I drew a line inside myself. I didn’t write a neat five-year plan. I set an intention: I’m not doing this hamsterwheel lifestyle anymore. My life has to move back to essence, back to my own independence, back to something that feels human and real.
From that moment on, everything slowly started to roll. In the next posts I’ll share more about the “divine intervention” with a perfect off-grid wooden house in Spain and how Can Hippie was born out of all this. But I already want to be very clear about one thing: stepping out of the system isn’t a clean break; it’s a slow, messy negotiation with a world that still wants forms, approvals and explanations while you’re trying to live differently.
It’s beautiful and brutal at the same time. On the one hand it feels so right in my body to choose this path. On the other hand, the system seems to pull you back in even harder before anything really collapses or lets go. That’s the paradox: just before freedom, everything often tightens.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this. There are so many people who sense that they want a different life. More free, more honest, more aligned. But are afraid to jump or don’t even know where to start.
This blog is my promise to keep it brutally honest. No polished spiritual bypassing, no fake “everything is perfect now”. Just a real story, real struggles, real wins. And from that same place I want to offer real things: real products, real experiences, real stays and real attention.
Because that’s what I believe we need:
less performance, more truth.
Less plastic magic, more small-scale real-life magic.
I didn’t plan to become a hippie, I needed it.
And if something in you recognises this, maybe you need it too. Stick around. This is just the beginning.
