Don't Leave It In Default

Why did nobody warned me that most people live their entire lives on factory settings?

I noticed it first with phones. Then with people.

You give someone a new device — something full of options, built to be customised, loaded with possibilities they've never even seen — and they will take it out of the box, set it up to the minimum required to function, and leave it there. Forever. The default ringtone. The default background — well maybe sometimes you might have a stroke of narcissism to change it but i digress. The default version of themselves in every room they walk into. Because adjusting takes time, and time is the thing everybody says they don't have.

I have always been a tinkerer. Give me anything new — a phone, a city, a relationship, a concept — and I am going through every corner of it. Slowly. Methodically. Asking what's behind each setting, what changes if you shift this, what opens up if you go deeper. This is not something I was taught. It is just how I move. And for a long time I assumed other people moved the same way.

They don't.

People meet each other once, in one context, on one bad day, and they draw the conclusion. Fixed. Filed. Done. They encounter one type of music, one version of a place, one angle on an idea, and they build their entire understanding of it on that single exposure. They never go back through the settings. They never ask what else might be in there.

I understand why, genuinely. Because going through things takes time, and we've been collectively convinced that time is the one resource we cannot afford to spend. The world runs on urgency. Always behind. Always catching up. Always racing toward something that keeps moving the moment you get close to it.

But here's what I've come to know: the rush is a lie.

Life is not a race you can win by running faster. If you rush life, you reach the end of it — and you were too busy sprinting to actually see what you were running through. The end comes for everyone, regardless of pace. What changes with slowness is the quality of the looking.

I think about this in terms of creativity, which is the thing I've always been most protective of. Growing up where I grew up, creativity was something you kept close to your chest. Drawing. Writing. Ideas. The things that felt true to who you actually were, rather than who the environment required you to be. Because you couldn't just bring those things out into the open. Not if you wanted to stay part of the bundle.

There's a metaphor I come back to. One stick breaks easily. A bundle of sticks bound together has real strength. That's true — community holds, belonging protects, and I needed the bundle and I know it. But here is the other side of the stick: sometimes the bundle is what keeps you from bending. From being flexible enough to grow in a direction that doesn't match everyone else's shape.

So I kept things private. The drawing, the reading, the hours spent absorbing ideas that had no currency on the estate. And I don't say this with bitterness. I say it as a record of how much extraordinary interior life goes undocumented, simply because the exterior world never made it safe to document.

Creativity does not thrive in conformity. It thrives in variation. And variation requires a willingness to step away from the defaults — not dramatically, not at the cost of everyone you love — but quietly. Deliberately. Going through the settings at your own pace, adjusting things to reflect who you actually are, rather than who the box came pre-loaded for.

We've all seen the pipeline. Everyone gets shoved through the same narrow channel — squares, triangles, whatever shape doesn't quite fit — and we come out the other end sanded down to a similar smoothness. Same opinions, same signals, same curated version of rebellion. And we call it individuality.

But some of us are still in there, still shaped like ourselves. Still tinkering.

Don't leave it in default. Take your time. Go through the settings. The rush was never real, and the end comes either way.

Might as well know what you're actually made of before it does.