For most of my adult life, I was good at being adjacent to ambition.

I worked in technology, innovation and social impact, often alongside founders and investors who were willing to make themselves visible in the world. I helped ideas move from concept into reality. I worked with accelerator ecosystems like Techstars, learning from some of the best mentors and founders globally. I spent nearly eight years at Investec, where I learned about strategy and finance, how ecosystems grow and how ideas scale.

Then I got sick.

Five years ago, I contracted COVID. What followed was long COVID in a severe and disabling form. I became bedbound and cognitively impaired. My capacity for work disappeared almost overnight. Brain fog settled in and stayed. My body stopped behaving predictably. There were periods when survival itself felt uncertain.
I didn’t leave my career because I wanted to reinvent myself. I left because I no longer had the capacity to participate.

Illness has a way of stripping life down to its most basic questions. When productivity disappears, when momentum collapses, the scaffolding that usually holds identity in place falls away. I felt present but unmoored, alive but disconnected from the systems I had once navigated with ease.

At first, I resented the stillness. I wanted to do something, anything. But gradually, I began to reframe it. If I could not act, perhaps I could reflect.

I turned inward. I read more slowly. I listened to long-form conversations about personal development, spiritual growth and nervous system regulation. I began to understand my body not as something broken, but as something overwhelmed. Healing, I learned, was not linear. It was relational. It required patience, safety and time.
At the same time, my faith in mainstream medicine quietly eroded. Not out of cynicism, but exhaustion. There were no clear labels for what I was experiencing, no insurance codes that captured its complexity, no definitive cures to offer. The system was not malicious; it was simply limited.

So I began exploring complementary approaches, not as replacements, but as companions to my healing. Breathwork. Meditation. Sound. Stillness. Time in nature. At the very least, these practices gave me language for experiences medicine could not yet name.

As my capacity slowly returned, I began imagining a future self.

Not a more accomplished one. A more embodied one.

I pictured dancing again at Spiritfest. Practising yoga at Retreat Yourself. Sitting in silence at Bodhi Khaya. Being in beautiful, natural spaces where the nervous system could soften without instruction. These images became a kind of bucket list, not aspirational, but orienting. Proof that my body might one day trust the world again.
I wasn’t well enough to do any of these things yet. But I wanted to know they existed. I wanted something to move toward.

So I started looking.

What I encountered was less a lack of options than a lack of coherence. Information lived everywhere and nowhere at once: Instagram posts with missing details, WhatsApp recommendations that disappeared, websites that assumed prior knowledge. Finding experiences that aligned with my values, my timing, my location and my health felt oddly difficult in a world supposedly saturated with wellness.

This difficulty began to feel less personal and more structural.

Wellness discovery, like so much else, had been absorbed into the logic of the internet. Algorithms privileged visibility over discernment. Practitioners were doing deep, often transformative work, but finding them required stamina, being privy to an inner circle, proximity and endless scrolling. Access was uneven. Orientation was rare.
All of this was unfolding against a larger backdrop.

We live inside systems designed to extract attention. Artificial intelligence shapes what we see, what we desire, how we move through the world. We are constantly connected, yet increasingly disembodied. And alongside this saturation, a counterlonging has emerged.

A longing for nature.
For beauty.
For physical spaces that invite presence.
For experiences that bring people back into their bodies and into relationship with others.

It’s tempting to frame this as a rejection of technology. But that feels incomplete. Technology isn’t going anywhere. The more urgent question is how it might be used differently.

As my health improved, I realised something that surprised me.

I was getting better. And with that came a decision I never expected to make.

My career was rarely front-facing. I was comfortable being the wind beneath other people’s wings, a connector, a problem solver, someone who helped the machinery work. I didn’t particularly want to be a founder. I understood too well what that role extracted from a person: visibility, confidence, appetite for risk and a tolerance for being constantly interpreted. And seeing the need, the problem to solve and found myself in the role of founder.

I am also not a practitioner. I don’t teach yoga or facilitate breathwork or hold ceremonial space. But I deeply respect the people who do. And I could see that my contribution might sit a few degrees away from the work itself: supporting those practitioners by making their offerings easier to find, easier to trust and easier to access.

Serene Scene grew from that intention. A technology platform, yes, but one designed to reduce friction rather than generate it. To create access without extraction. To use the internet not as an end point, but as a bridge back to embodied, real-world experiences.

It was founded in Cape Town, a place where land, ocean and wildness insist on presence. But its vision is not local alone. The hunger it responds to, for nature, for connection, for meaning, is global. Beautiful, grounding experiences exist everywhere. The challenge is helping people find them, when they need them.

I am ambivalent about technology. I always have been. But I am also pragmatic.

If we are going to live inside these systems, we have a responsibility to ask what they make possible and for whom. Platforms can extract, distract and overwhelm. Or they can create pathways, reduce noise and return people to places where attention can rest.

Building Serene Scene hasn’t resolved that tension. It lives inside it.

But perhaps that’s the point.