To be online or not to be.
Today is 3rd November 2025 and I am, yet again, back to creating content for Wonderful Mess online - or at least, aiming to do so.
This may seem a small thing to some readers but it has been a constant battle for the past 3 years since I launched Wonderful Mess.
As an individual, I don’t use social media (apart from doom-scrolling on FB when I feel low. Yes this happens to trained mental health professionals too).
The truth is, I was on Instagram up to September 2020 but decided to quit it after posting a seemingly happy picture that hid how I felt inside: depressed and desperate for lockdown 2.0 to end in Melbourne (I didn’t know yet that four lockdowns would follow and I would feel even more desperate exactly a year later). As a migrant in Australia, this was my lowest point, stuck in this country not knowing if or when I would be able to see my loved ones in Europe again. Yet here I was posting a sunset, or maybe it was a delicious meal?, on Instagram. The irony and hypocrisy of it hit me and I straight away deleted my Instagram account and never looked back. I only keep a Facebook account for FB Marketplace and the Messenger group chats, having deleted the FB app from my phone at the same time as I deleted my Instagram account.
I feel like a dinosaur who refuses to live with my time as I write these lines and every time I am made to explain why I am not on Instagram.
Yet I find it even harder to justify why I don’t post regularly on Instagram as a counsellor. It feels that our modern world has accepted that self-employed professionals MUST have an online presence, even though it seems well recognised in 2025 that social media have a very low chance of bringing clients to mental health professionals.
I still decided to create an Instagram account and a Youtube channel for Wonderful Mess 3 years ago, because there are many things about mental health and wellbeing that I want to say to the world.
But I have struggled to keep up with posting because 1, life happens and I don’t want my life to revolve around making time for creating and posting online content. 2, I regularly panic at the idea of all the data that has to be stored somewhere in the world because of my posts (welcome to my life of thinking of the environmental impact of every action I take).
Reasons 1 and 2 have been significant enough for Wonderful Mess to have a reduced online presence until last year.
But this year, another factor has surpassed these reasons to become my number one reason to struggle with coming up with content: the rise of AI.
People who know me know that I am not worried about AI taking over my job as counsellor, because I believe that the yearning for human connection will only increase as AI takes over aspects of our lives. Don’t hesitate to watch this great talk by Esther Perel to understand more of what I mean here: https://youtu.be/vSF-Al45hQU?si=rjtfkl2qC6yispNO
However, the one aspect of AI that worries me is the seemingly unchallenged acceptance of its presence in our lives. I am one of the only people yet to have a ChatGPT account in the Western world. I have just completed my Master of Social Work and I did not use AI once, not because I wanted to prove that I could graduate without AI, but because I simply refuse to let AI replace things that I can do on my own. To be clear: I do not judge people who use AI, all I say is I am making the personal choice not to use it.
I believe in the words of French neuroscientist Albert Moukheiber: if something can truly be replaced by AI, we should be wondering if that thing has any point of existing in the first place, or any point existing in such a way as it is expected to exist. For example, do we need the “improved writing” enabled by AI or was our world ok with “imperfect writing”?
When people suggest using AI to create videos or blog posts for Wonderful Mess, I reply I would rather not post anything than posting something created by AI. Yes, I didn’t post anything for 6 months because my studies kept me busy and left no mental space for me to create content for Wonderful Mess. Now I wonder if there is even a point publishing content that does not use AI if it is drowned in a mass of online content created by AI.
So I will allow myself the grace I encourage my clients to allow for themselves. One day at a time. Today I’m writing this. Who knows what I’ll do tomorrow.
