I wonder how much energy one expends when procrastinating. I really do sit here and think that if I hadn’t spent all of those hours staring into space trying to come up with a big idea that is going to change the course of my life, I could probably have changed the course of my life.

That might be going a little far, but I’ll try and explain. If I’m honest, my life is great. I live in one of the best cities in the world, I surround myself with amazing people and I have reached a point in my career that makes me happy. I am happy. But there’s always more, isn’t there?

I set this blog up almost nine years ago. It has given me some of the best experiences of my life, but there have still been so many times where I have thought about jacking it all in, or refreshing the blog in an attempt to do something better. The ‘something better’ is the key here… everyone I have spoken to about this has asked the same question – ‘what is wrong with it’? And it had me wondering – is it really that bad?

The issue is – recently I have been drawing blanks so badly and at the start of this year I seriously considered hitting the delete button. But it’s like that time I cancelled my gym membership and ended up with an ‘all club’ membership two minutes later. Last week I hovered over the delete button on WordPress, but was drawn to buy a shinier plan instead. That’s just me.

Bear with me though – I really am going to try and explain why I find this blogging world much harder than I did all those years ago.

Firstly, the landscape is almost unrecognisable now. Does anyone actually read blogs anymore? What, with Instagram having taken over every single smart phone over the last couple of years – people want short, snappy visually appealing content to slobber over. I tried to get good at photography, and if I’m honest I wasn’t that bad. But, as with most things I’m not naturally good at, I eventually lost interest. It was too much hard work and I wasn’t willing to put the effort in. There were other things I wanted to see, other activities I wanted to do. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything. I have found this out the hard way.

I also don’t get the satisfaction from taking a picture, popping a filter on it and thinking of what hashtags to include. I want to write. But what about? The obvious option is food. I’m out at least three times a week and I have a catalogue of photos that, if I wrote about each of them, would keep me busy for a year. But even that feels a bit old now.

Another thing I realised is that I hadn’t always been entirely honest in my approach. I used to accept free meals. If they were dire (which, believe me, a lot were), I didn’t write about them. Most of the time however, I did put fingers to keyboard, and as I used to work in restaurant PR and knew how much a good review meant to multiple people down the chain, probably embellished the posts just a little too much.

The reality is I have very high standards. But there’s something in British culture that shames people who are honest. No one likes a moaner, do they? I remember being outraged by bloggers who were opinionated all those years ago. I didn’t like it. But I think the ‘always perfect’ social media culture has just gone too far. I don’t want to see the back of beautiful girls’ heads looking out to the perfect sea on the top of a rock, somewhere really far away. I don’t want to see picture perfect dishes of food that have been styled up the eyeballs. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to see posts of fake happiness anymore – I’m totally and utterly bored of it. An influencer is meant to be someone you trust the opinion of. How can you trust the opinion of someone you know is being false?

My niceness and falseness has to stop. If you know me, you’ll know that I’m opinionated. I am very aware that my views can be a little odd sometimes. But you know what? Sod it (still can’t bring myself to swear online, sorry), it’s me and I’m pretty sure that being myself is going to make Life’s Loves more enjoyable for everyone involved.