Denzel Washington’s best line in American Gangster, ‘The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room,’ told as a warning to his ostentatiously dressed cousin, has always stuck with me.

For an introvert or anxious type, it’s an idea with an easy buy-in. Not reserved, but powerfully contemplative are we chosen few, the veritable people-watchers of the world. Loud is weak, tantamount to exposure and vulnerability, while taciturnity, reservation and corner-of-the-room seclusion is the stuff of giants.

But it doesn’t really work that way.

I thought it did. I mistook the noise of social media for a ravenous tornado which, if paid heed, would cut a tumultuous path through my sanctuary. I mean, I still don’t want to go near it – but I at least want to know why, and understand the role it continues to play in our lives.

Like many that occupy the fringes of the digital web – the forum lurkers and comment section voyeurs – I’m familiar with the recesses and cubby holes of social media. I write copy for a living, but there’s always that veil. I’m at the edge with a spyglass, surveying the landscape as its bearded with new topography and trends, living in a tent. 

I don’t hate these tools, but I don’t trust them as a way of life, either. I’m wary of distractions and dubious of a tool’s usefulness. We don’t need them as much as we think. We’ve living in a culture that values information, and lauds the tool that cultivates it. We get to thinking: what would we do without X? Email, news, Twitter, RSS. We scurry to alerts and notifications with an addict’s eagerness and tell ourselves the information is useful and pertinent, but we’re craving each time: being needed, wanted or having our attention bartered for.

But they're convenient 

Few conveniences are unconditionally so; for every tool, there’s distraction and noise. And as anybody that values focus will know, a single offbeat note can break a day’s rhythm. To preserve focus, we must build a dam around our thoughts (to learn about the power of uninterrupted focus, check out Cal Newport’s Deep Work).

This is the paradox of the freelancer lifestyle, particularly for those working in the high exposure industries. A marketer that bemoans social media and content delivery tools may seem at odds, but an objective awareness of a tool’s value is part of knowing how to use it effectively – to be the user and not the used.

My point is: we must work, we must be and we must be happy – and for many, they feel paradoxical. By be, I mean being whole and present, content within each moment and not harangued by the past or future. But that’s not easy when you’re in a grey-lit office and it’s still not easy when you’re working from a Thai beach. Temporarily it is. New surroundings are an injection of contentment, with a quick burn rate. It’s Instagram beauty, a more dangerous form of postcard beauty, through which we bask in another's admiration.

This is the millennial curse, but it’s not restricted to just one age group. We want to contribute and do something that matters, and our failure to do so is a self-generating source of angst and self-doubt.

I'd be happier in the sun

I’ve lived and freelanced in a few countries, but mostly Greece and Spain, so I've seen the shedding wallpaper behind these romanticisms – a lone freelancer ensconced in a garret window, with sun shadows sweeping the narrow streets below. But it’s an empty fiction. We perpetuate these fantasies that work is more fulfilling somewhere else – anywhere else – because we need to. It's instilled in us that to lose our destination is to lose our way. 

Work is easier with narrative – the idea that we're in the middle, and there's an end to reach. If you’re running or hiking, your focus and energy shifts when you see your destination, mirage or no. If the purpose of our lives is no more than to take the next step, and we’re not content with where we’re standing, then each step is instantly harder to take. Our brains are gits like that. 

This is the problem with happiness, too. Many of us, including myself, see it as a destination, an endpoint that contextualises our current state of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. That’s why the crystal beach is just a change in our desktop’s background – it’s ‘ah, cool, awesome’ then it’s ‘OK, back to work’. We don’t change just because our surroundings change; happiness doesn’t suddenly find us because we’re elsewhere. Yet many are willing to surrender to that idea – their dependence upon the narrative builds a resistance. It’s like I’m saying Santa isn’t real, and all the stories we tell ourselves are just that: stories. 

I see no end of advertisements of Internet businesses and bloggers advocating for an out-of-bounds life and selling you the chartered path to make it happen. They can work from a farm at the peak of a New Zealand mountain, so why can’t you? These aren’t deliberate deceits, but they’re pernicious fictions. By glossing over the reality of work, and the fact that it’s not fulfilling just because you’re elsewhere, these millennial cartographers are setting up an uncomfortable contrast with here and there. There is where the sun shines and the mundane activity is made effervescent by the setting. Here, however, in the West or whatever hotbed of capitalism we find ourselves, is a dank swamp of purposelessness and faltering direction, in which we’re digging for freedom through bedrock.

I want to write for freelancers and independent workers not operating from a coffee shop in Chang Mai. And even if you are, maybe you’re like me and you’ve hit the end of that rainbow and found yourself in the same country, figuratively speaking. You’ve discovered that the difference is puddle deep. Where you work will change little, only how you work.

I have so many conversations with people of every age that tell the same story: dissatisfaction. Ensnared by the millennial narrative of the intrepid worker, the interloping contractor or the industry-disrupting entrepreneur, their daily story becomes one of ‘am not’ and ‘do not have’. We want to be the ones the stories are about, the ones referenced in forums, namedropped at conferences or idolized in movies or books. We’re all our own protagonists, after all, and nobody willfully takes on an ancillary role.

So what can we do? 

It’s true in everything: if you can’t change the outside, change the inside. Dressing up your work in exotic trappings won’t make it any different. A rose by any other name, etc.

Anything that takes us away from our next step – be it a more satisfactory working environment or a more ‘purposeful’ life narrative – alters our thinking. It makes us fearful and anxious, gazing out over a canyon with little knowledge of how to traverse the gap, beset by innumerable what-ifs. Or for many, it leads to an early surrender – it means pitching at the foot of the climb and the lie to ourselves that we’re content with the view.

None should sell a destination other than where you are; destinations should be residually dreamt up from activity, and never purchased from another. The here and now is what matters – what needs to change is our perception of it, our thinking and how we engage with our work identities. They say you can have it all, but we only need enough. We need stories – right until they become intoxicating, until they substitute rather than supplement reality. Here is where creativity and innovation exists, not under distant sunsets and certainly not in low-value activities that provide shots of relief with long-term dependency.    

The step is the story, so it doesn’t matter if you get what you want in the end. We don’t need our stories to finalise in adaptation. We need them to be and have a next time, a sequence of mini-narratives that take us from our bedrooms to our jobs, and hopefully back again. 

So that’s why I’m sceptical – not of marketing, but of the effects of these tools on our mind-sets when unmitigated, of these Internet rabbit holes that lead us astray and beguile us with false realities.

I was wrong to mistake social media as something evil, but I’m right in recognising it as a destructive force when used unconsciously. It’s important for everyone – not just freelancers – to scratch away the gloss and dispense with self-curated fantasies, to see that there are no greater stories than your story. Your next step is everything. That’s what Denzel is telling me, I think: noise can echo emptiness, and we must sometimes filter it to pursue greater value.