For content creator and musician Gabe Pineda, any journey to personal peace begins with the right intention.
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“No.” It’s one of the most powerful words in the English language even though it only has two letters. It’s not the easiest thing to say, but it is one of the most effective means to find that peace for yourself. Such is the mantra of content creator and musician Gabe Pineda, who preaches the power of intentionality in fighting your battles. Those down days are real, but for Gabe, the path to the light at the end of the tunnel starts with putting space between you and the noise online and off.
Button-down shirt and trousers by @paradeigma.mnl, Knitted shirt by @milkwearofficial, Clogs by @aleysmnl
It’s ok to say no and limit what you’re exposed to. After all, there’s nothing wrong with putting up boundaries when it comes to prioritizing your well-being. See what the Gen Z content creator has to say about the good and bad of social media on mental health, protecting your peace, and more below.
What does “protecting your peace” mean for you?
It’s always about choosing your battles. I love to draw the line between wanting to create every content possible about every social issue, but at the end of the day, I am just one person who maybe can make waves – big waves. But at the same time, not everything is my content to make, even if it’s lucrative views-wise.
Pero there are things that you need to pick because once you create content about something, it’s sure that it’s almost 50% agree, 50% disagree, and you have to live with that. So choosing your battles is really important. It’s very tempting to just make every single video about every single issue, and that will lead you to exhaustion almost every single time.
Given your fast-paced schedules, how do you find the space for your personal time and care?
It comes with intention. Kasi, you sort of get sucked into the black hole of creating content because it’s addictive and engagement can hack your brain into thinking that you need more engagement, you need more views, you need more likes. And if you don’t set a limit for yourself, you will get addicted to getting attention. Pero, if you set a limit for yourself and become intentional with the breaks that you take, you sort of have a separate persona, you as a content creator and you as Gabe.
And I think a lot of content creators fail in that aspect that they include who they are, personally speaking, as who they are being a content creator. So para sa akin, it comes with intention and it comes with a conscious effort to even take breaks.
How do you think social media has changed the way we talk about and deal with our mental health?
I don’t want to say there’s more good than bad. I would say that there’s an equal amount of good and bad with it. With the way we view mental health, some people have not glamorized it, but romanticized the idea of being mentally unstable to a sense that it gives them a sense of identity, of being na they sort of claim the mental health problem, even if they don’t have the mental health problem.
I think as much as we want to shed light on important topics with mental health, it’s important that we do not glamorize nor glorify being mentally unstable. There are terms such as relapse, that is, in my opinion, being taken lightly, but the meaning of relapse is inherently people going back to their vices and their drugs and their bad influences.
There’s a lot of buzzwords spreading now na ginagamit nalang siya very lightly that defeats the purpose of shedding light on the topic in the first place. I hope that we draw a line in choosing what we say, mental health wise. It’s not taken seriously as it should be. I hope that we tread really carefully, kasi, it can go really, really wrong if we don’t, if we’re not careful.
These are serious things, although there’s a balance in between that hindi naman lahat ng tao sinasabi yan hindi nagpapansin lang, we need to take it seriously. But in order for us to do that all the time, we need to be sure, and we need to put weight on the words that we say, not just like blatantly say them just because they are often used, especially in social media. Now, I know that we’re destigmatizing these things, but we should strike a balance in between.
As a creator whose work revolves around social media, how do you make sure your well-being isn’t affected by the online noise?
It’s sort of like a challenge for myself to maintain a safe distance between my content and me. I don’t really care. Pero, there’s this one time that you read a negative comment that’s nowhere near the worst comment you got, and it just hits you. So para sa akin, it’s really important for me to take intentional breaks.
Not just from exhaustion, but even before reaching the point of exhaustion, I should take a break from social media, that includes Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all the bunch. It comes with intentionality talaga kasi if you take a break out of force that will put you out much longer, rather than taking the conscious choice to take a break now and then gather your thoughts and recalibrate and all that.
During those down days, what do you do to take care of and guard your mental health?
Oh, be with my family. My family boosts my happy hormones 10x because they just know me so well. Growing up, we didn’t really connect with our extended family so much. So it’s always been me and my family. If I’m really down and sad, I’ll just go to my family’s house and spend time with them, not even telling them that I’m not okay. Just being in their presence makes me feel 10x better than when I got there in the first place. And exercise talaga. If you feel really sad, just try to go for a walk for 15 minutes.
Why do you think it’s important to prioritize taking care of your emotional and mental well-being?
We’re not going to be effective members of society if we’re not mentally well. If your mind is not in a good place, your body will follow immediately. And it’s sort of like a back and forth in between keeping yourself healthy physically speaking and keeping yourself healthy mentally speaking.
So it’s really important for us to give priority sa utak. A person with a good state of mind tends to become more resilient, tends to become more diligent and more committed with their task than a person who’s mentally down. And if we do not give priority to our mental well-being everything else will follow, and they can mask it for maybe a week, a month, a year – but eventually, the walls will come crumbling down if they don’t give priority.
What advice would you give to young people who are struggling mentally?
Limit your time on social media. If you find the right people to watch on social media, the Internet is a really kind place. But most of the time, people don’t have that luxury to find the right people on the internet. Limit your time on social media because TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, they are very cruel to the normal human being. I dare say that it’s even more cruel to content creators because it demands you to create more content.
Pero for a student, for example, we have created this notion that after a long day from school, the rest that you get is more screen time, and that drains you even more without you even knowing it. And I know that it’s a hot take, especially coming from a content creator, to limit your screen time, but I think that’s one of the most important aspects to consider. Social media has become sort of like a paradox, where it’s brutally honest but overly glamorous at the same time.
So we’ve created false perceptions about who we should be and what we should do and where we should be at this given age, and that comes with ruining your self-esteem, your sense of purpose, your sense of direction. I think that discovering yourself comes with seclusion from the social media world.
People as young as seven years old, when they come from school, they don’t spend time with people. They spend time with their screens. Funny thing is, the internet was created for us to be more connected, right? But at some point, the internet is becoming a place where everyone is secluded from each other, and it’s created more space between us. It has burnt more bridges than it built more bridges. So even if the main purpose was to keep people connected, it has separated people to a degree.
Photography Excel Panlaque of KLIQ Inc.
Creative and Fashion Direction Andre Chang
Art Direction Gelo Quijencio
Styling Andre Chang
Fashion Assistant Kurt Abonal
Makeup Hidaya
Hair Sam Corbillon and Cath Balingasa of Triple Luch Hair Studio by TLBNS
Shoot Coordination Jasmin Dasigan
This story was first published on the October Zen MyZine print pack. Order your copy now here.
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