What a Fake Moon Taught Me About Real Life
- Stella Beckmann
- Oct 20
- 3 min read
One time, I visited the moon.
The terrain was dry and barren, made of fine volcanic gravel that crunched underfoot. Dusty rock rose steeply before flattening at the top, forming wide reddish-brown slopes. The volcano was pockmarked with craters you could peer into, and from the ridges, you could look out across vast green grasslands stretching to the horizon.
I was at Wulanhada, a volcanic park in Inner Mongolia famous for looking like the moon — a place where dusty roads led to this wide, cratered mountain, and wild horses galloped across open plains. It’s been described as peaceful, beautiful, and unique.
Well, that would have been nice.
Here was the reality: tourists cosplaying as moon colonists, “moonwalking” up the slopes and posing endlessly. My friend and I, in our jeans and T-shirts, were the odd ones out. Everyone else wore clunky bubblegum-pink or state-issued white space suits, striking heroic poses — sometimes waving the Chinese flag — as if they’d just discovered Mars. They looked like Among Us characters on a field trip. In truth, they’d paid forty yuan to rent the suits for an hour.
Volcanic dust swirled dramatically around them — partly cosmic, partly because someone kept kicking the ground. Every few seconds, a new burst of colored powder misted into the air — pinks, blues, purples — staining the wind. Families hired fluffy lambs for their five-year-olds to walk like pets. Down below, visitors zipped around a go-kart track in the valley dust.
It was lively. Dynamic. Gimmicky.
These props were distractions disguised as entertainment — new ways to turn beauty into a business. Was the mountain itself not enough? The volcanic grandeur had become a backdrop for social media trends, advertised on Xiaohongshu (China’s biggest social networking platform) as the must-see “moon experience.” Tourists simply followed the script they saw online. That’s how you increase tourism, I suppose.
And maybe this is the strange mirror of our own lives.
We, too, decorate our mountains with distractions. Ours just take different forms: Slack notifications, weekend trips, gym classes, dinner plans, dating apps, podcasts, online courses, the endless scroll of digital noise. Each one is colorful, exciting, maybe even fulfilling for a moment — but together, they blur our focus and crowd out the stillness beneath.
In a world built to capture attention, the challenge isn’t to add more — it’s to subtract.
Subtraction requires clarity. To see what’s a distraction, you first have to know what matters. A purpose so clear it pulls you out of bed and away from the reels. Goals that make you want to be fit and healthy without needing any gimmicks. A mission that shapes which creators you follow, which conversations you say yes to, and which you gently let go.
When your purpose is sharp enough, the unnecessary begins to fall away on its own. You no longer need the astronaut suit or the colored smoke — you realise stillness and simplicity feel better than spectacle.
And alongside purpose comes values: your life, your loved ones, your faith, your craft, your health. These are your mountain. Everything else? Label it a distraction. Enjoy the indulgences now and then — take a sheep for a walk if you must — just remember, the sheep isn’t the summit.
These days, even simplicity isn’t simple. Minimalism has become a TikTok aesthetic, a 456-page book, a course sold back to us online. But if you don’t choose where your energy goes, the world will choose for you, and the distractions will gladly keep you entertained while your purpose gathers dust.
I enjoyed reading this article. Stella shows a great inside of understand.