This includes going to off-the-beaten-track restaurants that serve up eclectic cuisine, visiting exhibitions in side-street galleries, and going for evening runs through big city parks.

“So where are you looking?” I asked.

They had an offer in on a house in a sleepy commuter town far away from Dublin. This is not a column about the housing market or living costs or repressed salaries. This is about life in theory or fantasy, versus life in reality.

“When we sat back and looked at it, we realised that we liked the idea of going to all these restaurants and plays and galleries, but in reality we might get out to dinner once every two months. Really, we go to work, come home and crash, more or less. We had a theory of what our life was like, but in reality it’s a lot different,” she explained.

That conversation was followed this week by another friend telling me about her love of minimalism. She’s really into the concept of minimalism. There is even a popular documentary on Netflix about it that I could watch. I thought: “No thanks, I once gave up all sugar (including the absolutely essential teaspoon needed for my Weetabix) and went to Mass every morning before school for Lent. I gave up on minimalism a long time ago.”

I had minimalism all wrong, she explained. It’s more about decluttering to make space for the things that really fill you up in life, the stuff that actually brings you joy. So, I relented and watched the Netflix documentary.

Surprisingly, I found myself not guilt-tripped. I did not need to go without hot showers and I was, in fact, allowed to purchase more than one pair of jeans every two years.

I got back on to her and told her how much I liked Minimalism, the tagline of which is: “A documentary about the important things.”

She then introduced me to another concept within the school of minimalism. It’s called “Fantasy Me”.

Fantasy Me is a bit like my house-hunting friend believing she regularly eats out in eclectic restaurants, visits art galleries and goes for runs through the cityscape, when in truth, she does not.

There are even videos on YouTube about the concept and how you can declutter Fantasy Me. Some people, for example, clear out their wardrobe where they might be harbouring multiple starched white shirts to be worn for the fantasy boardroom meetings, which they have never once attended.

This got me thinking. How much of my life was theoretical and how much was truly lived? In theory, I make interesting vegetarian dishes nightly, I wake daily for sunrise and take jaw-dropping photos.

I am always covered in a smattering of freckles from my weekly hikes in the great outdoors.

I can slip into crow pose at the first whisper of a namaste. I work from coffee shops with white marble table tops, with a latte positioned neatly beside my MacBook Air. Oh, and I also hang out at the back of a jeep, with salt in my hair as I peel off my wetsuit after catching 35 back-to-back waves off the west coast of Ireland.

In reality, I couldn’t be bothered spending two hours cooking every evening. I haven’t seen sunrise since I had to get up very early for a flight a few weeks ago and not only do I despise coffee, I genuinely believe I am allergic to it.

Minimalism friend and me then began thrashing out, think Frankenstein, how Fantasy Me was created in the first place. This inevitably led us to discuss social media, Instagram and Facebook in particular, and how we peruse all of these highly-curated galleries and showreels of people’s lives.

We then arrived at the obvious conclusion that they look nothing like our own messy, textured, chaotic, unpredictable, hormonally-influenced and emotionally charged lives.

All of this got me thinking. How much time do we spend observing the lives of others, as facilitated by social media, while vaguely fantasising about how we would like our life to be?

We use up all this time and energy, focused on something external to us, when we could be using that effort to make our own lives better. We end up getting caught between voyeuristically observing and salivating over other people’s lives while vaguely fantasising about our own.

Hold up.

What about if we stopped scrolling and turned that focus inwards for a moment, use that time to get some clarity around ‘Fantasy Me.’

There are Silicon Valley design innovators working in Stanford University, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who run an extremely popular and successful module there, called Designing Your Life.

They have also written a book. They use basic design tools to help people explore what they really want out of life. There is way-finding, prototyping and mind mapping, all done outside the realms of Facebook and Instagram.

The thing about social media is, it’s 2-D. It’s highly-edited and yet our brains absorb the images it broadcasts without any critical thinking.

Social media lacks texture, feeling, context and reality. Whereas in reality, we know our livesare filled with friction, grit, conflict, traffic, cold cups of tea we forgot to drink, ripped school uniforms, children wanting that new tracksuit with the latest label, and ageing parents who are starting to need our help more and more. But none of these things fit nicely on to a photo grid owned by multiple shareholders.

These are the moments and events of our lives and while Fantasy Me provides some food for thought, that is all it will be until we get clarity about how we really want our lives to taste, feel, sound, smell and look like.