The Phone Book, the Super Bowl, and a Bar of Soap

Last week we went to a small Balinese restaurant in Melbourne. It’s been open since 1989. The first time I ate there was 1997. I was a teenager. I told my daughter that the last time I was there was in the olden days. She looked around and said, “How did you even know about this place before the internet?”

I told her: "the phone book".

She had no idea what that was!

And I realised in that moment how completely the world has shifted. She has never known a world where information wasn’t immediate, visual, curated, ranked, reviewed, filmed.

She has never known a world that wasn’t a screen first. 

I’ve been reading Amusing Ourselves to Death. It was written in the 80s about television, but it feels like it was written about the world right now.

The idea is simple: the medium shapes the way we think.

When culture was built on print, we argued. We read. We followed long trains of thought.
When television arrived, everything became performance.

And now? Now everything is image and spectacle.

This week alone you could see it.

An influencer’s skincare brand launches in Australia and it feels like a global cultural moment. The Super Bowl halftime show becomes the thing people remember, clip, replay and debate, more than the game itself.

History now happens in high definition.

If it can’t be filmed, shared, reacted to — does it even count?

But here’s what struck me in that restaurant.

The family who run it have been cooking the same dishes for decades. The smells were the same. The warmth was the same. The act of sitting at a table, sharing food, talking — exactly the same.

Technology changed how I might discover it today. It did not change the experience of being there. 

And that difference feels important.

Because we are increasingly mistaking representation for reality. You can see a perfect night sky on your phone — colour boosted, framed, filtered.

But you don’t feel the air... You don’t get the quiet awe of standing under it. You don’t get that small human sense of being alive inside something bigger. The image is not the experience.

And yet we are training ourselves to respond to the image as if it is the thing itself.

Sometimes I wake up and think: how do I compete with that?

How does a bar of soap compete with spectacle?

• I don’t have a viral dance.
• I don’t have a celebrity face.
• I don’t have a halftime show.
• I have soap.
• Plant oils.
• Home compostable packaging.
• Made by real people here in Melbourne.

And something else that can’t be captured properly on a screen...The scent of pure essential oils when warm water hits the bar. The way it lathers slowly in your hands.

The feeling of your skin afterwards — not stripped, not coated in synthetic perfume, but nourished. Soft. Alive.

That quiet moment when the bathroom fills with eucalyptus or lavender or lemon myrtle and it shifts your mood without you even trying.

You cannot scroll that.

You cannot filter that.

You have to stand there and breathe it in.

In a world driven by influencers and aesthetics, skincare is increasingly about performance. The shelfie. The unboxing. The routine filmed for strangers.

But soap. Real soap. Is stubbornly physical.

It asks you to be in your body.

• To notice temperature.
• To notice texture.
• To notice scent.
• It’s not content.
• It’s contact.

And yet — when I write blogs like this, the messages come.

People who remember before.

People who feel the fatigue of being told what to want.

People who want something grounded. Something sensory. Something that isn’t built for the camera.

Men. Women. Families. Humans.

It tells me there is still something in us that recognises the difference between watching and living.

There’s a philosophical idea called autonomy — the ability to direct your own thinking and choices.

When everything is image and spectacle, our responses become quicker, more emotional, more reactive.

When you slow down when you cook, when you read, when you wash your face with something made from real plant oils — you return to yourself.

Soap will never be spectacular.

And maybe that’s its strength.

It’s not designed for applause.

It’s not made for virality.

It doesn’t perform.

It exists in your hands.

In warm water.

In the scent rising around you.

In skin that feels nourished by something real.

It is a small, ordinary act that belongs entirely to you.

No algorithm required.

Valentine’s Day is supposed to be about love.

Maybe love, right now, looks like choosing what’s real.

The sky above you, not the one on your screen.

The meal cooked by a family, not the one trending.

The ritual in your own bathroom. Breathing in pure essential oils, feeling your own skin, not the one staged for a reel.

I can’t compete with spectacle.

But I can stand for something human.

And judging by the conversations we keep having here, I know I’m not alone.

Soapy hugs,
Emma xx