Instagram story viewer> @loismac_> Posts

Lo

@loismac_

223

posts

41.9K

followers

3879

following

🍒 self × strategic expression
💭 philosophy > personal brand
🪽 more findable, fundable + inconveniently human
@writing.wildly @creativeliving.world

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

PLEASE DO NOT BE SO FUCKING FOR REAL.PLEASE BE SO FOR UNFUCKINGREAL THAT THE HEAVENS WANT TO VISIT EARTH JUST TO GET A GLIMPSE OF YOU.Time to be so fucking delusional that when, decades from now, somebody asks you how you did it, you will look at them, genuinely puzzled, and say: Oh. I just decided I was going to.Are we really going to hand the next decade over to the small, bitter voice that has been calling our most interesting ideas grandiose since we were twelve? Are we really going to keep softening, hedging, qualifying, deferring, being practical, until we are, all of us, perfectly indistinguishable from each other and from the algorithm that sorts us?We cannot. We must not. We will not.The last chance to join the Mind of Your Own Creative Living live intensive for $100 off is now.We’re about to go into the depths of our souls and find out what we actually came here to be.We’re about to take our thinking back from the last decade of being told who we are and what to do, and made to feel like we’re unreasonable just for being thinkers.We’re about to get so fucking delusional, together, that the collective vibration from our ludicrousness will create a shift none of us even realised was possible.Are you coming?Comment 💙 you’ll get all the details straight to your inbox. by @loismac_

57k

331

3 months ago

A world that cannot create cannot feel. A world that cannot feel cannot face itself. A world that cannot face itself cannot imagine, or tolerate, anything beyond what already is. And a world that cannot imagine will destroy what it cannot tolerate.After a while, for the small thinker, anything unfamiliar starts to feel like too much.There is a way to remain informed but also remain open to change. And that comes from creativity, imagination and belief.A generation of brilliant, well-read, deeply thoughtful people have spent the last decade being trained out of the only faculty that could have built an alternative future: our own imagination. We have been trained, instead, into a permanent state of being informed. Outraged. Engaged. Sickened. Despairing. Disgusted. Aware. All of which, it turns out, slowly turns us into the very things we stand against.And all of which, it turns out, kill hope for a better future.But there is hope in every person who has decided, this year, to start building something in their actual life. There is hope in every artist who has refused to become reactive. There is hope in every writer who has chosen the slow honest work over the fast outrage. There is hope in every founder making something the algorithm cannot recommend, every teacher refusing to flatten their curriculum, every parent raising children who can sit with complexity, every community organiser doing the work that does not photograph well.There is hope in the fact that imagination is renewable. We can, even now, even after years of attempts to train us out of it, get it back. We can get hope back. It atrophies in months. It returns in weeks. The infrastructure is still there. It is just, in most of us, currently buried under several years of compulsive intake and mindless consumption.The opening ceremony is in 10 minutes. The eight weeks begin Monday.A Mind of Your Own starts now.Comment 💙 and you might just still squeeze in. by @loismac_

74k

322

3 months ago

You are stardust that learned to overthink.You are a walking, breathing impossibility, atoms that figured out how to fall in love, get anxious about font choices, and wonder if their email subject line was “too much”.You’re hurtling through space on a rock that somehow grew trees and oceans and you and you’re still not sure your weirdness “fits”.We treat creativity like it’s something to earn. Like there’s a prerequisite. A readiness level. Some imaginary threshold of “good enough” or “acceptable” we need to cross before we’re allowed to make something.But you were literally forged in the death of a star. The iron in your blood is billions of years old. Your atoms have been recycling through the universe since before this planet existed. You are ancient material arranged into something that has never existed before and will never exist again.The creative cost of waiting until you’re “ready” is collective. Every unmade thing is a map someone else can’t navigate by. Every unsaid thought is a conversation that never gets to happen. Every voice that sands itself down to fit is one less frequency in a world that desperately needs the full spectrum.Creative Living exists because we believe creativity isn’t a hobby or a side quest or something you get back to when life calms down. It’s how you fully experience the absurdity of being alive.It’s how impossible, stardust, skeleton-riding, dream-hallucinating, conscious-universe-folded-into-a-body humans like you make sense of the fact that you’re here at all.We don’t wait until we’ve figured it out. We create FROM the mess, the wonder, the ache of being temporary and infinite at the same time.This month inside Creative Living, we’re pulling up chairs with @arielleestoria and @cbmeditates for a conversation we’ve been needing to have: Creating in Complex Times. Two creators who have continued to create with beauty, truth and integrity as the world gets increasingly loud.How do you hold the wonder of being alive and the weight of the world in the same hand?There’s no perfect answer. But there are better questions. And great people to sit with while you ask them.Comment 🌀 for the link. by @loismac_

52k

1k

5 months ago

They deleted the post and we got zero acknowledgement or apology. LAME.If it’s 2026 and you’re making upwards of $50million a year and you still need to steal the ideas of independent writers and artists, you’re in business for the wrong reasons. It’s time we all started calling this shit out.(btw THANK YOU to every single one of you who went to the post and commented on our behalf. By the time they deleted it, it was racking up hundreds of comments 🤣😭 this is why integrity matters, because you get to be surrounded by the best people)But I’m less interested in the copying than I am about what it reveals. Because people think creavity = finding “good” ideas. It isn’t. Nobody knows if their idea is any good, and that’s the beauty of it.If you didn’t have to risk anything for it, does it actually matter? By the time an idea looks culturally valuable, the hard part has already been done. I remember this specific post, I started writing it and i dropped it into @maiaben and I’s shared content calendar and tagged her with something like: this one feels scary.Maia did what Maia does and said, LFG. We sat with it and deliberated it. We rewrote it, questioned it, left it alone, came back to it, and eventually decided we believed in it enough to put our names underneath it.Then Maia spent houuuuurs turning it into something beautiful. And then people think they can just copy-paste and somehow it’ll work for them. But the actual value of creative work is the thinking underneath it.It’s sitting with an idea for weeks because something about it won’t leave you alone. It’s changing one word thirty times because none of them feel quite IT.It’s Maia spending hours making sure the design carries the weight of the words instead of just decorating them. It’s pressing publish before you have any idea whether people will ignore it, laugh at it, or misunderstand it.I feel sorry for the brands with no soul, who come along & think they can steal that from a creative. They’re missing out on all the best bits. Brands are drunk on “VALUE” and “ideas” - none of that matters if you don’t have a HEART that is willing to stand behind something before anyone else does. by @loismac_

419

117

2 days ago

I AM ONLY INTERESTED IN THE KIND OF AMBITION THAT CAN LOSE WITH GRACE.Years can pass between wanting the thing and hearing your name. If your ambition can’t survive that distance without becoming suspicious of everyone else’s good fortune, it will make the life you wanted unbearable long before you get to live it.This isn’t an argument for wanting less.Want it with your whole fucking chest. This isn’t an argument for caring less.Please, care more than is sensible.Imagine the weight of what you really want in your hands. Let losing break your heart for an evening. Just don’t confuse the size of your desire with evidence that the thing was owed to you.Anyone can keep their principles while everything is tilting their way. The more interesting question is what happens when the door closes.Can you allow somebody else’s day to remain entirely theirs, without deducting it from the future you imagined for yourself? Can you clap while your own heart is still catching up? Can you go home, resist rewriting the truth, and return to the work before disappointment has time to unpack?Your ambition must be able to survive the long creative life, the wins and defeats, not merely secure the next result.That’s the kind of ambition I want.The kind that can wait without curdling. Win without becoming enormous in its own imagination. Refuse every shortcut that would make victory taste more bitter than defeat.I want to arrive with my joy intact and every part of myself still present.Otherwise, I am no longer interested in arriving. by @loismac_

798

55

5 days ago

208

37

10 days ago

Fuck the niche.Or, more accurately: fuck the idea that the only way to become known is to make yourself smaller.There is a difference between being specific and being narrow. Specificity helps people recognise themselves in your work. Narrowness makes you amputate half your brain so the algorithm knows where to put you.We have got to stop asking: “What single topic am I allowed to talk about?” or “what’s my thing?”and start asking:“What’s the worldview underneath everything I talk about?”Take your last 20 ideas, posts, essays, conversations, offers, voice notes, drafts.Now ask:What do I keep arguing for?What do I keep arguing against?What do I notice that other people seem to miss?What kind of future am I trying to move people towards?What belief keeps showing up, even when the topic changes?In there is where your real positioning lives.A person can talk about writing, marketing, creativity, AI, motherhood, business, visibility, money, culture and still feel coherent if there is a clear philosophy and full, interesting human being underneath the lot.The goal shouldn’t ever be to become easier to categorise, or even easier to remember just so that hopefully someone might one day give you some money. That’s literally the quickest way to lose anything that makes you worth paying attention to in the first place. The goal should be to become harder to forget.We have lost the art of actually having something worth saying and suffocated ourselves in templates and boxes and frameworks until we all sound the same.You are an interesting brilliant complex person. Resist the urge to file all of that down so that hopefully someone might like you.Fuck. The. Niche. by @loismac_

751

187

16 days ago

I actually wrote this before yet another technologically-assisted decision yesterday left millions of people feeling even less certain that football’s institutions deserve their trust.More “proof” doesn’t always create more trust. The more cameras, sensors, reviews and technology we introduce to make the game feel beyond question, the more obvious the inconsistencies become.I grew up understanding belief through football.Before I understood class, politics, corruption, money, power or why institutions so often ask for our loyalty long after they’ve stopped behaving in ways that deserve it.Football got there first.And in a culture that is increasingly unable to trust beyond its own small circles, I’ve found myself watching this tournament and thinking:Our capacity for collective belief is still completely fucking intact. We’re just looking for it in the wrong places.Egypt made the inevitable feel negotiable.England and Mexico both held on until the very last final whistle.Cabo Verde, a nation of half a million, made us BELIEVE a different future was possible, against the reigning world champions.A 40-year-old goalkeeper stood between the accepted future and another possible one and changed our minds over and over again.Fans who the media want to paint as “dangerous” proving that we’re all the same deep down.Millions of strangers believing together. Maybe we’re not in a trust crisis. Maybe we’ve removed the conditions that make anything worth believing in.Proof can explain what happened. Belief is what changes what happens next. The future has to become imaginable before we can trust it.Sometimes that begins with a political movement.Sometimes with an artist.Sometimes with a founder building something everybody else thinks is ridiculous.And sometimes with ten exhausted men in white shirts holding a line for dear life while an entire stadium of fans believes it can still be broken, and a Nation on the other side of the world still believes that maybe, just maybe, it might actually be coming home.Belief is contagious.Please give yours somewhere to live. We need it.Comment ⚽️ to read the full essay on Substack. by @loismac_

576

58

17 days ago

Winding down from another breathtaking retreat week.Another week of river water, jungle rain, damp notebooks, shared rooms, big laughs, small realisations, stories told with wet hair, and women arriving with one idea of what they came to write and leaving with something far less obedient. And every time, this is the part that gets me.People arrive wanting to organise the work before they’ve even met it.They want the story to make sense before it comes out.They want the idea to justify itself.They want the essay to have a five-year plan and a landing page.But then we get halfway down the Pacuare River at the end of the week. And suddenly everyone is just a damp mammal in a helmet, floating through a place so wildly, offensively beautiful it makes the spreadsheet look deranged.There are ancient rocks. Trees growing out of impossible places. Water moving with absolutely no interest in your content pillars. Birds screaming. Rafts spinning. Someone laughing because they almost fell out. Someone crying because they finally said the thing. Someone realising their “messy idea” was not messy at all. It was just alive before it was organised.And I swear, the river does something to the part of us that keeps trying to make everything neat enough to deserve existing. The pressure comes off.You are here, in this ridiculous body, in this ridiculous world, for such a short and ludicrous amount of time.Must every creative impulse really arrive pre-approved?Must every piece of work be impressive before it’s honest?At some point, maybe the work gets to be muddy first. Maybe it gets to have river water in its shoes and no idea where it is going. Maybe that’s how anything good begins.Again and again, I watch women come to the retreat trying to optimise *into* the thing they want to say. And again and again, they leave realising the key is opting OUT of the rules. They leave bursting at the seams with heat. And the memory of what it feels like to stop managing the work long enough for the work to move.And that, for me, is literally the whole damn point. Not to become more efficient with your aliveness, but to stop abandoning it before it even has a chance. by @loismac_

448

29

a month ago

This is a part of Costa Rica that has not been flattened by tourism, and I hope never will be.Nobody is selling you a retreat package out of a beach hut where they’ve never actually spent any time.Everything we buy, every business we work with, every plate of food on the table, every transfer, every guide, every coffee, is a Costa Rican person being paid properly by another Costa Rican person. That’s just how we want to run things, that’s where the idea for Writing Wildly came from, to bring more people to this place we love and has given me and my creativity so much. Because these are our people and we just aren’t interested in any other way.These people, and this place, have made my creative life what it is. The river taught me to write differently. The mornings here taught me to think differently. Diego taught me what slow actually means, and it took me about five years to understand it 🤣 the biggest reason I do this retreat (bigger than my own enjoyment of running it) is so that I can hand a piece of this special special place over to other writers and watch what it does to them. When you come to Writing Wildly, you are in the hands of the best team I know. Most of whom I am related to, married to, friends with, or have eaten approximately a thousand dinners with.This place, this land, is theirs. They are just, very kindly, letting us in. by @loismac_

423

86

a month ago

280

26

a month ago

Before anyone starts warming up their fingers in the comments, Im not saying I love AI.I have feelings. Many. As a writer, I have feelings about the ethics, the scraping, the publishers pretending they can’t tell, the environmental cost.I also think some of the fear around AI is keeping us from seeing the bigger cultural thing. Because people were already being trained to sound like machines long before the machine arrived. For years, people were told to shave off the parts that made the work harder to categorise, automate, scale or sell in seven seconds to someone half-looking at their phone while making toast.Then AI arrived and everyone panicked because the compressed version of human thought suddenly became cheap. But, of course it did. The machine can imitate the part of you that was already imitating something else. What it can’t do is live your life and turn it into meaning.It can’t remember the exact quality of light in the room when you realised you couldnt keep building a life around the version of you other people understood most easily.It can’t have a body, a childhood, a mother, a wound, a sense of humour, a moral line, a recurring dream, a bad habit, a reason.The future we thought we were walking into as creatives is already over. It died in a Google Doc while someone was asking ChatGPT for 30 hooks in the voice of a woman who has never said anything she would risk being known for.The real future belongs to the people who can still think. Who can bring a world through their work that didn’t exist before they made it. And yes, the soulless grifters are going to grift. They were doing it before AI.They stole your language and called it inspiration before AI. They built entire businesses out of having the same emotional threshold as a damp sock before AI. But the more synthetic the internet becomes, the more important real creative force will feel.I don’t think this is the end for artists, writers, thinkers.I think this is the part where the lights come up. I think this is the decade of the true artist.So please don’t throw up your hands and surrender your work to the doomsday vendors. We need you alive and thinking by @loismac_

585

87

2 months ago