Reflecting on the past ten years of Desert Mountain Apothecary in the social media landscape, how the changes in technology, platforms, and aesthetics have shaped the different chapters of my content. Challenging myself to learn how to create video content has been a long battle with a steep learning curve, and in those years I’ve gone through several different iterations of video styles and subjects. One thing that I think rings true from all of my videos is that they all showcase a deep and sincere love of nature, and I’m so grateful to share that with you with Desert Mountain Apothecary. Circling back to an earlier project, I’m reactivating Natural Lifestyle Optimization, which is a method for creating lasting transformational change in your life by harnessing the power of the mind, body, and spirit. Please join me on this inspiring journey of discovery deep into the subconscious where we use micro-habits to improve all aspects of life without making drastic changes. So I hope you enjoy this expansive look back at this fascinating experiment, my calling to re-start Natural Lifestyle Optimization, and some helpful advice for finishing out 2024 and the holiday season.
Streaming Into The Void: From an Edwardian Era Outlook to Live, Loud & In Color Online!
When I started making videos, originally they were just to promote my natural skincare and fragrance collection: Desert Mountain Apothecary. I had grand designs of creating natural hair and skincare tutorials, and creating the kind of polished, well-executed content that I saw online and on social media. I would describe that in hindsight as the apex of the “elderly millennial” aesthetic. That was almost ten years ago now, and the learning curve was steep to say the least. With a ring-light, a digital SLR camera, and a laptop, I went forth trying to promote my business and tell my story as someone trying to help people like me with inflamed, ultra-sensitive skin, and artificial fragrance allergies. I quickly learned just how difficult it is, and especially was at that time, to create high quality video content. It was unbelievably frustrating because until that point, I had never been on social media and had almost no online presence whatsoever.
Growing up in my old-fashioned East Coast town, discretion was the highest virtue, and privacy the ultimate luxury. You could tell how successful someone was by how little of their home you could see from the road. Boxwood hedgerows, brick walls, and metal gates were the ultimate status symbol in a world that looked more backwards than forwards. It was good to have that background, as it helps me every day maintain high standards, and the utility of having that savoir faire from the youngest age; but that day and age is long gone, and it’s never coming back. In this noisy and chaotic day and age, If you are trying to promote yourself, you’re going to have to cut through the white noise of the saturated media landscape, and somehow stand out. Clearly, my stoic and stalwart reserve were not helping me in that endeavor!
Nevertheless, I persevered and after months turned into years, I was making video content to a baseline quality level. This period coincided with what I will always remember as the strangest externality from starting Desert Mountain Apothecary. I had spent years developing a luxury moisturizing skin oil, luscious hand balm, and delicate distilled hydrosol waters, and as anyone in the skincare and fragrance industry will tell you, creating a good product is truly the easy part, packaging and selling and maintaining inventory is far, far more difficult.
It was during this process of developing and testing my products that I started to do in-depth research on my client base. I was shocked when during private conversations, both women and men would tell me that after using my products they admitted that their skin looked better than ever, my skin oil works in one application miraculously, but they still felt bad. They couldn’t shake the feeling of shame, and disappointment in the normal aging process, even amongst people who were far too young to be concerned about aging!
That was when I started to start researching hypnotherapy and guided meditations, I knew there was something deeply wrong in our individual and collective psyches to have a simple question like, “how do you feel about your skin” smash down a wall of pain and unleash a wellspring of repressed misery. I was shocked and traumatized because nearly every single one of my research participants cried during our conversation about their looks. And for the record, all of these people are very good looking, and most people would wish to look like them. But those experiences solidified the idea in my mind that, it wasn’t enough to improve someone’s looks, that clearly wasn’t enough, the issue was clearly much, much deeper, literally woven into the fabric of the mind, body, and spirit. From that moment forward I was obsessed with finding out how to change these beliefs and release people from the chains of bondage of shame and misery.
Those experiences were so shocking, and truly unnerving to hear what people really thought of themselves, that I went on to write and make videos about the mind, body, spirit connection, and also how to unlearn all of those toxic shame-based beliefs, and are-program better and positive ones. My mistake at the time, was not starting an entirely separate social media identity for what would eventually become, Natural Lifestyle Optimization. When you really delve into YouTube and learn how it’s recommendation system works, it’s all about consistency and creating content that your specific audience is going to watch when recommended. So although I felt like my personal development content was great, it didn’t get any traction because my YouTube channel featured too many competing subjects that likely wouldn’t interest the same viewer.
The journey of discovery going from an extremely private person who completely skipped the social media experience from it’s inception, to someone who was creating content and marketing himself for all the world to see has been fascinating. It made me realize that it’s important to promote yourself and your ideas, after all why shouldn’t you have your ideals and values taking up room in the marketplace of ideas? I was frustrated at the staggeringly steep learning curve, and the invasive feeling of opening up to the world, but really it just felt like screaming into the void. When the pandemic hit, my message of Natural Lifestyle Optimization just felt suddenly out of touch, and rang very hollow and false.
Really, it was a good message for the time, but that period just felt like the middle of our society was ripped in two. The lucky few were living life like they were on a permanent vacation in their luxurious bubbles, while the rest of us suffered immensely. Living in Indian Wells, California at the time, I felt so caught between the two. I was not living the high life compared to most of my neighbors, but I was certainly comfortable in my luxurious bubble. Those few months at the beginning of 2020 were the last days of a dwindling sense of normalcy that never returned. Compared to my friends and family back in New York City, I was so much better off, the strain of Covid on the West Coast seemed to be weaker and less deadly, and we had the beautiful weather and the facilities set up already to do things outdoors. You would be hard pressed to find a restaurant in most resort areas in SoCal, much less Palm Desert, that didn’t’ already have an outdoor dining area for example.
So I endeavored at first, to create content photo and video content that people could enjoy while they were penned inside and isolated. I tried to share my beautiful world in the California desert, mountains, and coast with everyone as best I could. My elderly grandmother nearly 100 years old was stuck inside in New York City and suffering terribly from the lack of stimulation. To her immense credit she was very active socially up until the pandemic, even traveling to a nearby senior center to play cards and do chair yoga. I spent hundreds of hours or more creating videos just for her, to try and share my good luck in being in such a beautiful area with wide open panoramic vistas. She was able to visit the desert once, and she loved it so much, she really reanimated being around the glorious blooming desert vegetation. Smelling a gardenia brought up memories of the family hacienda, with it’s center courtyard garden, jasmine, citrus, and roses were all blooming during her visit. The red rocky Santa Rosa mountains with the orderly irrigated valley floor reminded her of our ancestral home in the country of her birth.
It turned out that watching my videos was very boring to my grandmother, and as tedious as life was for her at time, watching my videos seemed more tedious by comparison. That was a good lesson that the only viewer you want to try and cultivate, is one that is interested in your content. At first I had shared my ideas with writing, and I hadn’t yet truly grasped the magic of the connection between writer and reader, photographs and written content seemed like something out of the stone age, and completely out of step with the full on takeover of video content at the time. So rather than write essays and articles, through fits and starts, I learned how to film, edit, and publish my videos. It seemed at that time, that people were very unlikely to sit and read long form written content, but were keen to hear the same message by watching a video or listening to a podcast. From that point, it was so difficult learning how to film and edit something that came out as a decent end product.
I turned my lens towards towards the desert at first, because at least that was something I could more easily make look presentable than myself on camera. Uploading my first video to YouTube was such an exciting feeling of accomplishment. Realizing that just uploading a video is the first of many steps towards a successful endeavor however, was a sobering dose of reality. I showed my grandmother one of my videos before the pandemic where I was talking about Natural Lifestyle Optimization and I had produced a really nice, well-lit, nicely edited video that I was so proud of. When we sat down to watch it she let out a deep breath and said, ‘Oh, a lecture.”
As disappointed as I was that she really didn’t care about my video at all, it made me laugh so much. It’s so refreshing to speak to elderly people who really don’t care at all who they offend, and my grandmother was always a fountain of knowledge to many people who sought her advice. Her most common response was, “Live for today, tomorrow is not promised to us.” So that was a great lesson about learning to cultivate an audience that is interested in your subject matter, and not try to get people to consume your content just to be nice, or because you want to share it.
From that point on of “lecture” based videos I endeavored to show her and the world at large my concepts of Natural Lifestyle Optimization. For example, I suggest going for a walk every day if you can, and I filmed myself in my beautiful neighborhood doing just that. I thought to myself that you have to see it to believe it, and not just talk about it or listen to it. After creating more video content like that and making many special videos for my grandmother sharing my world here in SoCal, it turns out she also finds those boring, so also not my audience in that category either! However I’m still happy that spurred me to make more travel videos and document my beautiful world in San Diego County and SoCal in general.
I feel like I’ve aged 10 years in the last 4, and for a long time I didn’t want to put face to camera, and I hid away behind the cover of a voiceover. A good narration is one of my very favorite things, and I love the flexibility you have just using your voice in a video. That format worked well for me to make travel videos, but one thing I noticed is that there seemed to be a strong preference for promoting different videos based on how much of a human face was present in the videos and also the thumbnail photo. So that insight led me to my current phase of video making, sharing my world and it’s glorious scenery, but instead of a voiceover narration, overlaying a video of myself interpreting what you’re seeing. This way you have both, you have the engagement of having a face speaking to you on video, without having to disconnect from seeing what’s being discussed. And it’s been a good experience learning to be comfortable with face to camera again, because it really doesn’t matter what I look like beyond baseline presentability in terms of making travel or personal development content.
I’m really happy with the results of that format, and I will definitely use that going forward. The way that my Torrey Pines La Jolla video has come out is something I’m really proud of. Unless you want to pay for views (and more power to you, if that’s what you choose to do to grow your business), there’s really not much you can do as a content creator except for make the best quality, engaging content you can, and promote and market it as well as possible. That’s why despite being so discouraged sometimes by videos having low or sometimes even no views, I’ve been pleasantly surprised a few times by videos getting, what is to me, a great amount of traction. At this late stage, I’ve completely detached from caring about view counts and reception, I’m really putting my content out for the love of sharing my world, and whatever happens from that point beyond publishing and marketing is simply out of my hands and I’m not attached to any specific result from that point forward. It’s been freeing.
Over the last few years I’ve finally made the big lifestyle change I’ve always dreamed about by moving to to a small village in a remote, rural area of the San Diego Backcountry. That’s also been freeing, as the Coachella Valley grew into the bustling satellite city of Los Angeles filled with the same traffic and smoggy air people fled there to get away from, I grew out of love with it and sought clearer skies and peace and quiet. Living out here in the wilderness has had many ongoing challenges, and countless hours spent on windy and windy mountain roads driving to get even the bare necessities.
There was a period of time in the first year or two where the power and or the internet would go off almost every day, sometimes for a period of more than 24 hours. The silence was sometimes deafening, and at first it was excruciating. I would lean on my front gate, staring at the sky with the bracingly fresh air billowing down the San Ysidro mountains, and had to learn to live without the constant stimulation and dopamine rushes that we have become addicted to. That went on for about a month or so, and what was interesting is that by the end of the month, I was so much more connected to the real world, and so much more integrated into that instead of social media and the internet, I didn’t even notice when the power would go back on because I would be so engrossed in gardening or some other activity.
During that contemplative time period I started to think back to my previous iteration of video making and writing where I was focused on the subconscious and specifically how to heal and rewire the brain through meditation and hypnosis. We really need to start undoing the damage that social media and the internet is doing to us, similarly to the way exercise and stretching can mitigate the damage that sitting at a desk all day does. I’m going to keep making travel and lifestyle videos, sharing my beautiful world in Southern California for anyone who is interested, but I’m pivoting back to really wanting to help people feel better. Freeing yourself from negative toxic thought programming is one of the most liberating acts in the world. I was able to achieve that through hypnosis and guided meditations, and the best part is that all of the gains from the time spent doing that have been permanent. We really can heal and re-wire our brains, and undo decades of damage by toxic, often untrue beliefs, and download brand new, better ones that bless and uplift us.
Mental strength and toughness are a learned skill that can be acquired and grown, just like strength training. It seems like nowadays people are primed to believe anything except the one thing that will help them. They want an instantaneous permanent change and anything short of that is simply not worth it. I came up with Natural Lifestyle Optimization because I wanted to create a realistic blueprint of what it looks like to remove the negative, unhealthy aspects of your life that don’t serve you, and replace them with relatively small changes that over time create permanent transformative change. Since that requires more effort than the tap of a screen, that may not be a winning message for most people, but for people who do want a positive, lasting change in their life, this is the best advice you can possibly get.
2024 for me as a video creator was about capturing the natural world where I live in SoCal and sharing it at the best quality possible, with more of myself in the videos, and not just an unseen narrator. Over this last year I’ve been out and about much more than usual and so many of my conversations with old and new friends always keep coming back to these same subjects that Natural Lifestyle Optimization. Most of the time it simply boils down to, “I feel bad and I want to feel better”. Travel content, escapist videos just for fun are great, and they certainly have a purpose because we all need to detach and just immerse ourselves in some light entertainment at regular intervals. I’m hoping that with my new style, and some new equipment, I’ll be able to make similar content much faster, which is good because I’m ready for 2025 to refocus my attention back to Natural Lifestyle Optimization.
If personal development, transformational breakthroughs, hypnosis, hypnotherapy, spiritual healing, and guided meditations are of interest to you, I suggest you look into the work of the following people. They have so much knowledge about their specific subjects and offer really wonderful insights and actionable things that you can do to feel better.
Marisa Peer
https://www.youtube.com/user/MarisaPeer1
Michael Sealey
https://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelSealey
Lisa A Romano
https://www.youtube.com/@lisaaromano1
Aaron Doughty
https://www.youtube.com/@AaronDoughty44
So now at this late stage, going forward I’m going to try and balance the fun, nature-inspired videos that are more light entertainment, and more Natural Lifestyle Optimization content. I realize now that we need them both! I hope that you enjoy the rest of 2024, and the happy distractions of the holiday season. This is a great time to try and lose a little bit of weight before Thanksgiving, and then the deluge of holiday goodies leading into the deep dark winter. I always find that losing a few pounds before Thanksgiving gives me that little bit of leeway to indulge in all of my holiday favorites. My motto always when it comes to eating in general, but especially the holidays, is to enjoy and indulge, but not binge.
It’s so easy to just mindlessly start stuffing your face and guzzling down alcohol once the holiday decorations come out and the onslaught of parties, gifts, and get-togethers starts in full force. So I encourage you to mindfully savor your favorite treats, especially if they have happy memory associations. There are just certain things that when I eat them, like Swiss milk chocolate with whole hazelnuts, and it just takes me back to such a happy state of mind as a child, and unlocks so many happy family memories. After the first couple of indulgences, if you’re very mindful and aware, you’ll realize that you aren’t even tasting them to the fullest extent anymore, you’re just binging and overloading your body with sugar, fat, calories, alcohol, etc. So when you’re out at holiday parties this year, or at home with your stash of treats, remember to mindfully savor, but never binge. That’s only ruining next year by starting the year so overweight.
Just like food can have strong memory associations, so can everything associated with the holidays. We go through so many different seasons of our lives, and the losses in our lives can be so heartbreaking that the holidays can be a season of pain instead of a season of celebration. I think it’s really important to enjoy holiday traditions to your heart’s content, but also realize that every holiday season and each holiday itself is a blank canvas if you want it to be. One of my closest friends lost her husband far too young, and after a long, cruel battle with a terminal disease. For her, the holidays are nothing but painful memory triggers of her husband’s slow, agonizing passing. She moved to a new country with a blank canvas, and a completely new and different culture with it’s own new traditions to create new associations with. We always joke that she’s going to spend the holidays for the rest of her life touring the muslim nations of the world.
So just remember if the coming holidays bring on a pang of trepidation and pain, do it your way, all, nothing, or anything in between. You don’t have to put up the Christmas tree, put up lights, you can decline holiday parties, and it’s not too late to plan a vacation in a different climate. Christmas itself is actually one of the best travel days of the year, with the extremely low volume of travelers.
Thank you so much for joining me in this meandering essay about everything and nothing. I’m so grateful for the encouragement and engagement of so many people on all of the different platforms I’m active on. For now, I’m going to just keep doing what I’m doing, and try to create content for you to enjoy, and have a little respite from the chaotic world, in my little video world, where the sun is always shining, and we’re out on a fun adventure somewhere beautiful.
All the best,
William Z. Brennan & Desert Mountain Apothecary
Join Me On A Journey Of Discovery To The World Of Desert Mountain Apothecary!
Torrey Pines – La Jolla, California – San Diego Pacific Ocean Beach Adventure!
The sun is out and the surf is up, so let’s hit my favorite stretch of coastline under the towering cliffs of Torrey Pines in the gem of the San Diego coastline: La Jolla, California:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLyySza85jA
Anza Borrego Desert Wildflower Superbloom:
Please Enjoy Anza Borrego Desert Wildflower Superbloom – We had the most incredible wildflower superbloom in the California Desert this past year, join me from the beginning of the cold winter through the waves of dazzling blooms to the searing hot end of the season.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwYyoCODUeU&t=203s
Let’s Connect & Get Social!
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Please Enjoy More Videos!
Supreme Superbloom! Anza Borrego Desert Spring Wildflowers! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGDPHEmN3v8
Grateful Desert Ocotillos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bstybc3XcAk
Coyote Canyon Offroad Adventure! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQYPvqj2ouU
Julian & Santa Ysabel, CA Epic San Diego Backcountry Road Trip- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Z_o0S4Hpg
Bellport in Spring - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J9hzsFhS-k
Santa Ysabel Preserve – Backcountry Hiking - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLrSJMLXUw
Rusted & Rustic Adventure – Santa Ysabel, Wynola & Julian - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxoSZmpcUcM