Who says that? A certified teacher? Bernard Drainville?
Inoxtag.
Who?
Barely a year ago, this influencer spent his busy days filming himself with his cell phone, talking about everything and nothing, from hair products to young people who, like him, spent endless hours with their faces glued to their screens, scrolling endlessly through stories bland, playing video games, watching people play video games.
Then one day he set himself a goal: one year to climb Everest.
It was in his logic of image, of exposure, to seek to show himself to the whole world at the top of this mythical mountain. He said to himself, I presume, that will give me lots of views, I will be even more popular, it will be a hit.
Inès Benazzouz, her real name, is from France and Algeria, she is 22 years old. She has eight million subscribers on YouTube, where she started filming herself playing Minecraft at the age of 15.
Overnight, he started eating better, training, going to summits, hiking, he didn’t turn up his nose at the sponsors who got on board with his idea. And still, a year later, he reached that famous summit. He did everything under the eye of the camera, the mountains he climbed before, the training, the moments when he almost gave up, those when he got back up.
He made a two and a half hour documentary about it, Kaizenwhere we follow him in his daily life, in his quest for the feat.
We follow him to the top.
And that’s where it gets interesting. Because he realizes that the feat is not to be stuck there in the middle of dozens of other climbers, it’s to have tasted real life. Kneeling on the roof of the world, moved, he says this: “We have to stop being behind screens. Go outside, if you have a project, do it. […] If you want to do something, do it. And if you fail, it doesn’t matter, you will have learned life, it is made of learning. That’s how we live, that’s how I learned life and I feel alive.”
He talks about humans, about helping each other. He knows very well that without the Sherpas, without all those who helped him, who believed in him, he would not have made it.
After Everest, he didn’t pick up his virtual life where he left off. He pushed himself for three months, completely disconnected, to work in the fields, growing tobacco and planting rice on a farm in Cuba. “I got closer to the real moments of life and everything I wasn’t experiencing because I was in the world all the time. [la vitesse]in filming, videos, screens. […] There are a lot of cool things to do on your phone, but there are too many times when we are passive, doing nothing, scrolling in the void, making ourselves stupid.”
Those damn screens.
With a clear head, he returns to Everest. “Basically, I am not a mountaineer, I have never been to a mountain, I got moving. I said to myself “come on, I am going to climb Everest”, except that when I said to myself “I am going to climb Everest”, I didn’t think I was going to do all that. What I remember is not even Everest. It is everything I discovered, all the adventures I lived, all the people I met. I opened up possibilities in my life.”
He tells young people, and everyone really, to get moving. “When I was at the bottom of Everest, I was looking at Everest and I thought, ‘I can’t do it.’ I think there are a lot of people who are like that in their lives right now, people who are out there with dreams that are so big that they think, ‘This is not possible, I can’t do it.’ Well, little by little, you can climb it. Take all the time you need, you can climb it and sometimes, it’s going to be hard.” […] Kaizen, It means improving day by day. Becoming better little by little. Little by little, you climb the highest peaks.”
Figuratively and literally, and ideally not Everest, we can clearly see in the documentary the effects of overtourism. Inoxtag contributes to it, denounces it.
The documentary was released for free on YouTube on September 14th, and has over 31 million views. My two teenagers devoured it in the early hours, and maybe yours will too. They won’t throw their cell phones in the trash, but I’m sure the message got through.
While we’re pitoning, life passes us by.
A few days later, my youngest, 14, showed me a photo he had taken the day before, a magnificent photo of a late afternoon sky in shades of mauve, with the sun’s rays reflecting on the Saint-Charles River. “I made a detour to take it,” he told me, satisfied with his shot. The first in a series, he has since been capturing sunsets.
I suspect Inoxtag.
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