“WE’RE” MOSTLY RESPONSIBLE. THE IS IMPORTANT.

And then the idea suffered a slow, quiet death. 😂

Mostly didn’t completely disappear though. It stayed somewhere in the back of my mind while life moved on and I had much bigger things coming that I knew absolutely nothing about yet.

What I didn’t know was that life was about to give that silly little logo, and especially the (ish), a completely different meaning.

Oh, I’m Jacques by the way, probably should’ve mentioned that before I got carried away telling you how all this started. 😂

I’d spent almost twenty years in retail before moving into financial advice, where I spent another nine years helping people plan for things life has an annoying habit of not planning around. Somewhere in between I became a dad, collected bills, responsibilities and enough life experience to realise that nobody actually knows what they’re doing all the time, even though for some reason I thought I was supposed to.

I thought I should have life figured out, keep everything going and somehow know what came next, so I kept pushing and measuring myself against where I thought I should be. When things weren’t working, I didn’t think, this is difficult, I started thinking, “I’m not good enough.”

The scary part is that I became pretty good at looking like I was performing fine while quietly falling apart, until eventually I got to a point where I couldn’t see a future at all, and I wanted to end it.

That’s when I finally reached out for help. I ended up in a clinic, surrounded by doctors and professionals who helped me start talking about what had been going on instead of trying to carry everything by myself. There wasn’t one magical conversation where everything suddenly made sense, and I certainly didn’t walk out with my sh*t together, a motivational playlist and a sudden desire to buy running shoes.

I was still me, I still had problems waiting outside those doors and plenty I needed to work through, but something important had changed.

I wanted to live again.

I started dreaming again, laughing more and thinking differently, and I started remembering who I was and what I actually wanted from life. Eventually my mind wandered back to that little business idea, Mostly Responsible(ish), but this time just slapping funny sayings onto shirts and selling them didn’t feel like enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I still wanted to sell the shirts. 😂 But I wanted Mostly Responsible(ish) to become more than that, and once that thought got into my head, one idea started leading to another.

The shirts became only one part of what we were becoming, the website became more than somewhere to sell them, the articles gave us somewhere to talk about the stuff we all deal with, and Health(ish), Money(ish), Productivity(ish), Adulting(ish) and Life(ish) slowly started taking shape.

And somewhere in all of that, seven characters started taking shape too, each bringing a different side of real life into Mostly. You’ll meet them properly a little further down.

Somewhere along the way, I looked at this silly name and that beer wearing a halo again and thought, my maggiesgood grief, the (ish) actually means something now.

It wasn’t an excuse for giving up, doing things half-arsed or pretending responsibility doesn’t matter, it was about trying to get life right while accepting that we’re human and we’re going to get some of it spectacularly wrong. Sometimes you absolutely rock it, and sometimes all you’ve got is, “well, that was k*k. Anyway… let’s see what we can do about it.”

And then you try again.

Those five pillars aren’t five subjects I have figured out, they’re five parts of life where I’ve learned things, laughed at myself and occasionally wondered hoe die ongelukhow on earth everyone else makes it look so easy.

Turns out, they don’t.

And that’s probably the point.

MOSTLY IS A COMMUNITY.

Because Mostly Responsible(ish) couldn’t just be about my version of figuring life out. Somewhere out there is somebody having a brilliant week, somebody barely holding theirs together, and somebody laughing at a joke while carrying something nobody else can see.

There should be room here for all of us, somewhere we can share what worked, admit what didn’t, laugh when we can and learn from each other. Maybe something you’ve already survived makes the road slightly easier for somebody walking it now, and maybe something that worked for them does the same for you. You decide what works for you.

That’s when Mostly Responsible(ish) becomes ours.

And ours isn’t going to be a place where anyone needs to pretend they’ve got life figured out, or where gurus hand out motivational BS as if one answer works for everyone. Maybe you genuinely have your sh*t together — lekker, come tell us how you did it. Maybe you’re just really good at making it look that way — I know that trick too.

If waking up at 5am and drinking celery juice works for you, you do you. Just don’t tell the rest of us we have to. 😂 And we definitely won’t tell you to manifest your electricity bill away — Eskom would probably still like the money.

And because every good community deserves some lekker merch, we’re making that too. 😂

So come as you are, bring your wins, your detours, your stories and the bits you’re still figuring out.

You don’t need to have your sh*t together.

Neither do we.

NOT PERFECT. STILL LEGENDARY. 🖤💛