Stories, not content; because the world doesn’t need more obscene digital landfill

Why we refuse to degrade our stories to ‘content’ and how good stories are the antidote to this epidemic of meaninglessness

Every time we get a commission inquiry for ‘content creation,’ I have to swallow the nauseating feeling before patiently explaining why we don’t do that. Because what they probably mean by ‘content’ is, in fact, much more than that.

Let’s be clear—content wasn’t always this despicable. The term emerged innocently enough during the early days of the internet, used to describe anything published online: text, images, videos. But as digital spaces evolved, and businesses began hiring marketers to fill endless feeds, the word ‘content’ became a catchall. Its meaning flattened. And with that flattening, came a normalisation of meaninglessness.

‘Content’ now refers to the endless digital detritus churned out to satisfy algorithms, not audiences. It’s a word that makes no distinction between a lazy meme, a heartfelt documentary, a research-based article, or an empty carousel of brand clichés. ‘Content’ strips intention from information. It assumes that everything we put online is just there to fill space.

And that is obscene.

Because silence is not a gap to be filled. It’s a necessary part of life. Infants find solace in it. Animals retreat into it. The idea that businesses must constantly post for the sake of filling the silence—adding to the noise of the world—is a symptom of our deeper discomfort with stillness.

And it’s not harmless. Everything we post has an ecological cost. Yes, your post about the cupcake you ate does cost the planet. This is the reality of our digital excess. It’s not just overwhelming. It’s wasteful.

The antidote to this is not more content; it’s meaningful stories.

A story is not something made to fill a calendar. A story has reason to be. Stories deliver new insight, a sensory experience, transformation, discovery, amusement, inspiration, leadership, compassion, caring, understanding, empathy, or to liberate the audience or solve a problem for them. A story engages your intellect and emotions, and we don’t mean this through the terminology of engaging equalling commenting, liking, or sharing on social media. To engage is to think about and allow space in your mind, regardless of whether you hit that like button. A story considers its audience, their state of mind, their mental space, their world and its current situation.

The term ‘content’ became more mainstream as businesses cut budgets and turned to marketers to produce creative work. But that’s also when the trouble started. As social media platforms pushed more advertising space into our lives, the volume of content exploded. The result was what some called “content shock”—a tipping point when there was simply too much stuff and too little attention.

Many who weren’t truly equipped for the creative work of story-making still stepped into these hybrid creator-marketer roles, underestimating just how much it takes. It seemed easy—just post something, anything. And so, meaningless filler became the norm. But authentic story-making isn’t easy. It demands craft, insight, originality, and emotional intelligence.

Marketing and story-making are never the same thing; too often, they require two very different kinds of thinking and creativity. That’s why we don’t substitute our work for a marketer’s—or vice versa. We always partner with exceptional marketers and don’t pretend to be them. And when clients come to us without in-house marketing, we collaborate with experts from our carefully chosen circle of affiliates. Because meaningful connection doesn’t come from either side pretending to be both.

And now, as audiences begin to retreat from the noisy public squares of social media—into private, quiet, curated digital spaces like DMs and group chats—there’s, hopefully, less room for meaningless noise. People are becoming extremely intentional about what they give their attention to. We think that’s a good thing because it’s an obvious preference for stories over ‘content’. 

So, no. We don’t do content. We do better than that. We do stories—good stories that exist for a reason other than the inability to sit with silence.

The Mango (Part 3): histories shaped under the mango tree

Two instances when the mango tree became iconic in Sri Lanka’s stories

In Sri Lanka, myths, faiths and histories are often woven around some kind of tree. From sagely Banyans, serene Bo’s to Neems and Jaks that bridge to the netherworlds, trees have often been made into icons and symbols of ideas close to local culture.

Among them, the mango tree appears again and again—not as a sacred shade, but as a witness. To sermons. To ships. To the tides of transformation.

Local artists and craftspeople depicted mango trees in art, wall paintings, and jewelry, as well as motifs on textile borders.

One of the oldest stories begins in Mihintale, Along the hundreds of granite steps that climb toward Mihintale, mango trees still grow where they were iconised as witnesses to a historical philosophical exchange between a monk and a king.

You see the mango forest periphery along the stone stairways going up the now sacred rock—rooted in granite, branches reaching across the old sky, offering brief shade to pilgrims and wild monkeys alike. It does not announce itself; but the mango forest has always been here.

Mihintale is where King Devanampiyatissa met Arahat Mihindu—emissary of Emperor Ashoka, monk, teacher—and was asked to think, before he was asked to believe. The two men, at two extreme poles of secular and spiritual paths, met through an intellectual exchange.

According to Sri Lankan chronicles, it was in a mango grove on this very hill that Mihindu Thero posed a series of riddles to the king to assess his capacity for logic, reflection, and comprehension—the tools necessary to receive Buddhist philosophy. The King passed. The exchange marked the formal arrival of Buddhism on the island.

And the mango forest became a witness.

That mango forest is not remembered in marble or bronze, but the living forest itself. Its presence here was never ornamental. The trees bore fruit, gave shade, and anchored one of the most important philosophical encounters in Sri Lankan memory. And so they were left alone.

To this day, the mango forest of Mihintale remains.

Its canopies have sheltered centuries of thought. Its cycles of fruiting and falling have marked time outside the calendar. And in June, as pilgrims ascend those stairs for Poson Poya, it is not only the shrine they come to honour—but the path itself, lined by the forest that once overheard a new way of thinking take root.

The mango forest is still part of that rhythm. Quiet. Bearing witness. Offering stories to the ones who remember to look up.

The young leaves of mangoes take shades between tender orange and deep brown. Then, they grow into a vivid green before maturing into deep green. Areas like Mihintale in Sri Lanka, where mangoes grow in large groves, and are left untouched due to their historical significance, the tree tops take on colours from orange, brown, and vivid green to sombre green.

Another historic story took shape under a mango tree.

The origin of Colombo’s name, according to one etymological thread, points to a mango tree that never bore fruit. Kola-amba—meaning ‘leafy mango’—described a great mango tree near the mouth of the Kelani River. Vast and evergreen, yet never yielding fruit, the tree became a marker for seafarers for its sheer size. Kolamba thota—the port of the leafy mango—eventually became Colombo. To be named after a tree that offered no mangoes, yet remembered by every ship tracing the routes to riches; quite fitting for a city that barely a few can call home, but so many reside in.

Mangoes were among the most commonly documented trees by early visitors to Sri Lanka. 1656, the mankó, Michał Boym

The mango tree marks both a spiritual turning point of a nation and its colonial threshold. Trees do not pick sides, after all. They hold memory, not judgment. And in their shade—where faith began, where names were made—we are reminded how trees hold the stories of who we are, and where we’ve been.

Why things should be allowed to die

What Vesak lanterns teach us and when preservation becomes pathology

Walking past a school just before the Buddhist Vesak festival, I saw a group of young girls hang up lanterns with covers of transparent polymer. On the news, I saw coverage of the army dressing up the streets for Vesak with elaborately made lanterns, all protected from the elements by covers of plastic. With that, they reduced the profound lesson of the Vesak lantern and limited it to mere ornamentation.

2000, embassy Vesak lanterns covered in plastic

Vesak lanterns, traditionally made from bamboo and fragile tissue paper, carried the lesson of impermanence. As children, making a Vesak lantern—painstakingly tying bamboo pieces together—you learned about geometry as much as paper craft. It took days of cutting patterns and shapes and pasting them with a sticky homemade glue of flour and water. These were labours of love. But the lesson of the lanterns only revealed itself once they were hung outside, exposed to the elements. The Vesak festival, celebrated in the monsoony month of May, inevitably included rains. Nothing taught the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence like discovering the lantern you built, destroyed by rain. What was once loved and luminous now hung limp, skeletal, and beyond repair. It was a tradition that made the day after Vesak into a life lesson. Past the fairy tales, you had to reconcile with the reality of being alive. You came to understand that life and death weren’t opposing forces, but parts of the same process.

Covering this important lesson in plastic is a symptom of the deeper confusion of our time: the need to preserve what was never meant to last in an obstinate and unconscious drive to outsmart death.

1959 home and living magazine advertisement for Seran Wrap to ‘save’ things

Today, everything is wrapped in polymer sleeves. Earphones. Fruits. Flowers. Leftovers. Even the things that should be allowed to wither—old letters, sketchbooks, bills—are now preserved past their timeline. We keep birthday balloons. We vacuum-seal sentiments. We embalm objects not because they are precious, but because we can.

This isn’t preservation. This is pathology.

Plastic reflects our unspoken belief that decay is a problem. That entropy is failure. That change is loss. But when we try to keep the past intact, we keep the present from moving. We try to keep the earth from smelling like earth. We try to turn the world into a museum of itself.

2020, plastic is too expensive a ‘preservation’ tactic for the planet, Divotomezove

But what if we allowed things to soften? To shift? To be held for a while, then returned to the soil?

Not everything needs to be preserved.

Things need to be used.

Things need to end.

Things need to break down, to feed what comes next.

And perhaps the small return can begin—with one thing left uncovered. One child allowed to build a lantern that falls apart. One memory allowed to fade, so it can be reborn differently. We can choose to not plastic-coat rituals that honour impermanence.

Preservation is not the same as reverence. Stories don’t need to last forever to mean something.