A Boy And His Vision Boards

The first few vision boards I made were beautiful and almost entirely useless. They were full of the right things—high-rise apartments in NYC, bookstore cafés, business-class seats, luxury vacations, ripped abs, wads of cash—everything filtered through golden light. Lives that looked correct from the outside. I treated the process like curating a mood, not examining a desire.

I grew up watching the “girlies” do it with a level of un-ironic bravery I hadn’t yet mastered. I watched my sister and her friends with their scrapbooks—filling pages with outfits, homes and city views as if they were claiming territory. There was no apology in their wanting. On Pinterest and Instagram, the vision board aesthetic is undeniably skewed towards this feminine clarity. I was and continue to be a fan. I followed their accounts, admired the curation, and even got influenced by it. I wasn’t looking down on the desires for the cottage in the woods and the supreme bookstore-cafe-plant-shop combo; I was jealous of the transparency.

For a long time, I did it quietly. I hid my ambition in the dark mode of my phone, tucked under folders and secret boards labelled “inspiration” and “references,” as if I were conducting clinical research or making business strategies rather than admitting to a desire. I treated my screenshots like a secret. But eventually, I realised that calling it “inspiration” was just a way to avoid saying it as it is: “I want”.

Over time, the practice moved out of my phone. The wants stopped being relegated to secret boards and hidden folders. They made it into a collage that became my lock screen and then later something I printed and stuck to my wall. Always in my line of sight. Not as decor, but as a surface I return to. A place where the noise of daily logistics falls away and the quieter question remains: is the life I’m building moving in this direction?

Eventually, I would realise—a vision board wasn’t meant to itemise your desires in attractive images. It was a way to sit with wanting—to stay with it longer than feels productive, without immediately turning it into a plan optimised for efficiency. As I sit at Bengaluru airport at 4am, heading seaside for a work trip, writing this, I can feel that shift more clearly than I could have named it before. The move from aesthetic to intentional didn’t happen all at once; it happened slowly, the way most forms of self-knowledge do—through noticing. Noticing what I kept adding back year after year, and what I kept avoiding.

Nowadays, making a vision board begins away from the screen. I sit still and ask what I want my days to feel like, because I’ve learned the feeling comes before the image. I don’t look for the glossiest pictures, but for the ones that land somewhere in the body. An edited screenshot of my name on a New York Times bestseller list or YouTube million-subscriber plaques used to be prime material, but they have started to feel like trailers, not the movie.

What stays now are messy moments: Carrie Bradshaw at her desk, cigarette in hand; coffee rings marking long hours on wooden tables; glasses clinking around a dinner table. Less arrival, more work-in-progress.

A vision board isn’t a shortcut that will give you a private jet or briefcase filled with cash. It gives something better: the ability to recognise your own life and then bring it forward. It provides an anchor—the kind of weight that makes sitting in the airport for seven hours feel less like torture and more like a deliberate choice.

I’m not in the business-class lounge, waiting to turn left after boarding. I’m at a crowded gate, yawning over a lukewarm coffee, wearing a jacket that has seen better days. By the standards of my old vision boards—the ones littered with NYC high-rises and champagne glasses at 30,000 feet—this current state would look like a failure of the “vision”.

But as I look at the ticket in my hand and the neck pillow clipped to my bag, I realise I’m fulfilling the exact image on my current board: someone exhausted in transit, rumpled and half-asleep—but still moving through the world for the work he chose.