ALIVENESS
A practical philosophy for living fully in the awareness that life is finite.
For as long as I can remember, I thought I was going to be a filmmaker. I didn’t just like films, I was obsessed and it was my identity.
Aged twenty-six I set up my own production company and pretty quickly it became clear I had a talent for it. I won work. I won awards. I went to Sundance. I got called one of the best young advertising directors in the UK. I was directing commercials, making short films, running a small team, and making a living doing the thing I’d wanted to do since I was a boy.
From the outside, I was becoming the person I’d always thought I would become. And yet, underneath it, something wasn’t working.
Making commercials for a living meant I was helping sell people things they didn’t really need, and I was starting to feel like part of the very problem I was worried about in the rest of my life, this whole culture of over-consumerism, of endlessly wanting more.
The feature film I finally got financed after years of trying, the thing I’d hoped would change my career, was rushed through. It was made to prove something rather than express something, and became a mediocre film with a title, Slumber, that I still smile at, because on some level I was asleep.
The film dream I’d carried since I was a child was no longer nourishing the deeper life that was trying to emerge from within in me. The trouble was, filmmaking wasn’t a job. It was who I thought I was. Walking away from it wasn’t a career decision. It was closer to leaving a marriage.
In 2018 I saw a drone show on TV and it below my mind. I remember thinking… the night sky could become the next great screen. A vast canvas above our heads, epic stories told in light and music, thousands of people looking up together and remembering something bigger than themselves. Each drone was a moving pixel. It felt, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain, like an artistic medium waiting to be discovered.
So in 2020 I founded a company called Celestial. For the first time in my life, I was doing work that felt like it might actually matter. But right at the very start, when one of the founders and I were sitting down to shape the company, I made a decision I would end up spending years understanding.
We agreed that the commercial side of the business would come first, and the deeper, awe-inducing, consciousness-raising side would come second. At the time, it seemed sensible. We needed to make money. We needed to survive.
Looking back, that decision came from from fear and a self-extractive mindset of making sure my financial needs were met. And so I built what I’d hoped would be a vehicle for awe on a foundation of fear, and the culture grew from a compromised vision.
Celestial went on to become the biggest drone display company in the UK. We opened Glastonbury Festival. We feature on the London New Year tv show. We worked on Eurovision. We collaborated with Indigenous elders in Australia on a show that made me cry the first time it flew. We won lots of awards. And by every external measure, the company was a success.
But there was deepening misalignment because the culture wasn’t mine. I had built something extraordinary and I couldn’t breathe inside it.
My spiritual life had been growing in the background. I had started listening to the philosophy of Alan Watts and studying Druidry, drawn to the old British traditions of land and ritual and ancestry. I was reading everything I could find about consciousness, about the wisdom traditions modern life had largely forgotten. It felt like a different part of me was coming alive, off to one side of my working life. I didn’t yet know what to do with it.
Then in 2023, everything broke. The company hit a serious crisis. And at the same moment, something inside me was being called somewhere else entirely, which meant I was trying to carry the survival of the business and the birth of a new life at the same time. It was too much.
I started having panic attacks, which triggered memories of near-death experiences from earlier in my life. Being strangled unconscious by a stranger on a street in Madrid when I was twenty-two. Ego-Deaths I had lived through in plant medicine ceremonies. Holding my father in my arms in 2021 as he died, doing CPR while his ribs gave way beneath my hands. Experiences that had cracked me open.
I hadn’t asked for any of these memories to come back. They just did. The only thing that helped me sleep each night during that time was listening to the philosopher Ram Dass before bed, to calm my nerves. Then one day, I heard him say:
“Working with dying people was the highest work I ever did.”
It made me ask, for the first time, a question I had never seriously asked before:
What if I’m supposed to work with death?
It was the question changed the direction of my life (Thanks Ram Dass!) and that was the moment my purpose deepened.
I trained as a Soul Midwife (a type of death doula), the sacred practice of accompanying people at the end of their lives. I started sitting with dying people in a local hospital. And the work was extraordinarily profound and beautiful.
As I worked with mortality my entrepreneurial mind spotted the giant elephant standing in the room of human evolution.
Our whole culture has made death a taboo. It’s the only thing in life that is guaranteed and yet, we don’t talk about it, we don’t teach it in schools, we hide it away in hospitals and behind closed doors. And the cost of that avoidance isn’t just a bad death. It’s a smaller life, made through the unconscious fear-based decisions we make as individuals and societies.
On the flip side, I also saw that the moment you stop pretending you have unlimited time is the moment you start actually living. That was the paradox. And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
I realised I was looking at a real, solvable problem. Not a small one. A GIANT problem sitting underneath much of the quiet unhappiness I saw everywhere in modern life, from drifting professionals to people who woke up at sixty wondering how their life had ended up looking like this.
The things people regret at the end of life are so often the things they hadn’t done. The relationships they hadn’t repaired. The versions of themselves they hadn’t dared to become. The truths they hadn’t spoken. Again and again, fear seemed to be standing between people and the lives they actually wanted to live.
And the deeper I looked, the bigger the problem became. Our avoidance of mortality doesn’t only shape individual lives. It shapes our culture. Fear finds its way into our politics, our economics, our education, our relationship with nature and even our ideas about success. I began to wonder whether a society afraid of death might ultimately become afraid of life.
The irony was that I was still doing exactly the same thing.
I told almost nobody at work that I was training as a Soul Midwife. I was terrified of what investors, clients and the team might think. What would they make of the founder of a tech company secretly training to sit with dying people? So the most important part of my own awakening, the part that felt most alive, I kept hidden.
I was beginning to understand how fear creates smaller lives while allowing fear to make mine smaller too.
And that is what finally broke me. Every morning I was walking into a company I had lovingly built with my own two hands, wearing a mask, pretending to be a version of myself I no longer was. Coming home each night more depleted than the night before. Getting further from the person I was becoming.
I couldn’t keep doing both, so I began to step back from Celestial. It took time. I stayed until I knew the company could stand without me. I had a responsibility to the team, to the investors, to the shows, and walking out on any of it would have been running, not moving.
Then my wife and I made the bravest decision we had ever made. Using the wisdom of hindsight from people at the end of life, we reverse engineered my life from how we wanted to feel aged ninety (using the Ultimate Meditation), trusted a feeling and acted on the dream we had been postponing for years.
We went travelling the world.
It wasn’t the first time we had done something like this. Years earlier, we had felt something pull us towards Frome in Somerset, a place we had never been to, and moved our young family there on the strength of a feeling neither of us could explain.
Only later did I discover that Somerset was my ancestral home. My family had lived on that land centuries before. That was the moment the instinct became a compass. We started to trust it. And we noticed something about it. It always seemed to arrive at the point where fear met excitement.
So when the feeling came again, this time pointing outwards, we listened. We sold our house. Left our beloved friends and family. Packed up the children. Got on a plane. We spent a year travelling the world.
I launched a newsletter and here we are.
Somewhere in all that movement, after months of not knowing where we were going or what I was becoming, a word arrived that suddenly held everything together.
Aliveness.
I know, it’s a simple word. But when it landed, everything I had been circling for a decade had a shape. It wasn’t about success or achievement or spiritual performance. It was about the felt experience of actually being fully alive in the awareness that one is mortal.
The trail of breadcrumbs kept going. And it eventually led us to a regenerative community in Costa Rica. Fresh water. Fresh vegetables. Fruit growing on the trees. Neighbours who wave. The kind of life my wife and I had been describing to each other for years, without knowing it existed anywhere.
I remember one afternoon standing outside our house watching my two boys walk off down a jungle path to a neighbour’s house. No lift, no supervision, no phones, just buzzing with freedom. In a country I hadn’t even visited months earlier.
My wife and I stood there and thought, this is exactly what we had imagined our life could be.
I couldn’t have designed this life on paper. I couldn’t even have imagined it. I could only walk towards it, one honest decision at a time, trusting the feeling and letting the next breadcrumb appear.
Today, my work is about helping other people use the awareness of mortality to see their lives more clearly and find the courage to act on what matters.
For the first time, my work feels rooted in courage and service rather than fear and extraction. And now I’m giving Aliveness workshops in different countries around the world.
Looking back, the pattern is clear, though it wasn’t at the time. Each time a life I had carefully built stopped serving me, I listened. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes years too late. Sometimes I tried to make the old life work long after everything in me was saying it was over. But eventually, even if it took me a while, I listened.
When filmmaking stopped nourishing me, I stepped away from an identity I had carried since I was a boy. When Celestial became something I couldn’t breathe inside, I let go of the company I had built.
And when death started calling me, I followed it, even though it was terrifying at first and made no sense on paper. The twenty six year old filmmaker me could never have imagined that his life’s work would one day be helping people face their own mortality so they could live fully.
That’s what my life has taught me so far. Fear isn’t always a stop sign. It’s often a compass. The very thing you’re most afraid to look at might be pointing you towards the life you’re actually here to live. And that’s what Aliveness has become for me. A practical philosophy for living fully in the awareness that life is finite. A way of bringing mortality back into the room so we can see more clearly what matters while we still have time.
But I’ve also come to believe this is bigger than any one person changing their life. If fear shapes the decisions we make as individuals, it inevitably shapes the families, businesses, institutions and societies we create.
What might change if more of those decisions came from courage instead?
That’s the question at the heart of Aliveness.
If any of this has landed, welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
Live happy,
Hoppy
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I am a former CEO, filmmaker, Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Several times in my life, the life I was living no longer aligned with the person I had become. Finding the courage to make difficult changes led me closer and closer to my purpose, and eventually to work I could never have imagined doing today. Aliveness grew from that journey, with a dream that it might one day become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice that helps people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and build a more present and generous world.
Beautiful piece! Thank you for sharing your story and using your knowledge to guide and educate others.
Nice to meet you. LIFE IS WEIRD ISN'T IT? Ahhhhhhhh, the mysteries.