The Ice Cream Van Rule

There's a card on my desk with a drawing of an ice cream van. The line underneath reads, roughly translated: "If you want to impress me with a car, come with an ice cream van instead." I've kept it for years. I think it says, in one sentence, more or less everything I believe.

I see the same thing in cycling, gravel biking especially. So much of that scene has become about style and expensive essentials, about speed, about posing for the next photo. Meanwhile, the actual point of being out there on gravel is something else entirely: being in nature, enjoying the quiet, maybe spotting a deer on the way if you're paying attention instead of chasing a personal best. That's why I ride. And it's also why I'm regularly baffled by how disrespectful and oblivious some riders are out there, tearing past wildlife, showing no consideration for the people or the landscape around them. Somewhere in there, the whole point got lost.

Somewhere along the way, without really noticing when it started, comparison became the default setting. Who's faster, who's further ahead, who has the nicer thing, the better body, the more impressive life. It creeps in early, too. I watch it happen even among small children, long before they've learned to tie their own shoes: who ran first, who's got the newest toy, who's "better" at something that shouldn't be measured at all.

I don't want that for my daughter. What I try to tell her, over and over, is this: it doesn't matter who's faster, or who has nicer things, or who can do more. None of that decides anything. What matters is doing something good together, right now, with whoever happens to be next to you.

It's a small sentence, but it's surprisingly hard to hold onto, especially as an adult, especially when everything around you seems to reward the opposite. Optimise more. Achieve more. Compare, adjust, improve, repeat.

This is the whole idea behind House of Vida, really. Not a rejection of ambition or quality, I still care deeply about doing things well. But a refusal to let speed and comparison be the measure of a good life. Some days that looks like slowing down on purpose. Some days it looks like a poodle who genuinely couldn't care less who finished first. Either way, the point stays the same: come along, not ahead.