Anastasia Drinevskaya: The future belongs to people

1. If someone met you for only 30 seconds, what would they completely misunderstand about you?

That I’m extroverted and effortless. I’m not. I’m an introvert who learned how to perform energy. And I’m a very strong empath, like I feel shifts in a room immediately. What people read as confidence is often just me managing everything I’m picking up so it doesn’t spill.

2. What version of yourself would surprise the younger Anastasia the most?

Honestly, how free my life looks — and how much it cost me emotionally to get here. Younger me imagined a beautiful life, but she didn’t understand that building it would mean leaving people, breaking attachments, and sitting with a kind of loneliness she wasn’t ready for.

3. What has changed inside you more than outside you in the last few years?

My tolerance for misalignment. I used to stay longer, in conversations, relationships, situations, trying to fix them. Now I recognize faster when something costs me too much internally, even if it looks perfect from the outside.

4. What part of your personality took you the longest to accept?

How deeply I feel people. Their inconsistencies, their silence, their tone. I spent years trying to become less affected. Now I understand that this sensitivity is not weakness and it’s just expensive to have. But there are a lot of people who think I am too fast, reactive and not real.

5. Was there a moment when you realized you were building a life that actually felt like yours - not someone else’s expectation?

It was the moment I noticed that the life I built looked impressive but didn’t feel like home anymore. That was the first honest moment. Actually I thought I already had one, but life showed me recently that it is something that happens just now.

6. What do you think people sacrifice today in exchange for success?

Their inner life. People trade depth for visibility. They become easier to consume, but harder to actually know.

7. What truth about ambition do people usually discover too late?

That it doesn’t negotiate with your emotional capacity. You can get everything you wanted and still not have the internal structure to hold it. This understanding did both — helped me and destroyed me many times.

8. Have you ever had to completely reinvent yourself? What triggered it?

Yes. Every time something I depended on disappeared — a relationship, a role, a version of stability. It was never a choice, it was a survival. BUT now I understand why.

9. What feels “normal” today but will probably seem absurd in ten years?

Living in constant exposure. Documenting everything. I think we’ll look back and realize we gave too much of our lives away in real time.

10. Which human skill will become more valuable in the AI ​​era?

Emotional precision

11. Are we becoming more connected or simply better at looking connected?

Real connection requires discomfort, and we’ve optimized everything to avoid it. (Said the person who hates calls lol)

12. What future excites you - and what future scares you?

I’m excited by the possibility of making more art. More freedom, more scale, more ways to express things I don’t fully understand yet. I’m scared of losing that ability. Losing the sensitivity, the depth, the need to create. The moment where everything becomes efficient, but nothing feels alive anymore.

13. Do social media reveal people or help them perform a version of themselves?

They reveal the performance people choose. Which is still a truth — just not the whole one. We have a saying between my best friend and I: “Ana will always do good in Instagram”

14. What do you think people are secretly tired of online?

Constant self-explanation. And probably fomo of losing a moment if it is not posted. We seek validation and we are tired of it at the same time.

15. If your life had no audience, what would you do differently?

I think some parts of life lose their intensity the moment they become visible. I understand it more and more now. I deleted my public TG channel, private one too and I decided not to expose my life in Socials that much. I love the idea that people do not know anything about me except a few photos. At this point of life there are just a few individuals who know how I live and breathe day by day, what my personal and love life looks like …. and this is honestly a true freedom. Guys, you have no idea how happy and fulfilled I feel.

16. What’s a belief you held strongly five years ago that you no longer believe?

That if you are good enough, people will treat you well. That’s not how it works. People meet you at the level of their own capacity, not your value.

I have a line in my poem which says that everyone will receive the version of Ana they are ready for and deserved.

17. What question are you currently trying to answer in your own life?

How to stay open without becoming emotionally unprotected.

18. What do you think people misunderstand about happiness?

They think it’s something you achieve. It’s not. It’s something that appears briefly when nothing inside you is resisting your life.

19. If life had chapters, what chapter are you in right now?

The part of the film where everything that looked stable starts collapsing — and you realize it was never real to begin with. No resolution yet. Just the moment where truth replaces illusion, and there’s no way back.

I had dozens of questions regarding my life choices. I cut all the people who were devouring my energy.

20. Imagine someone listens to this conversation one year from now. What do you hope stays with them?

That it’s okay to outgrow versions of your life — even the ones that once felt like everything.

21. One revelation you had recently?

That not every connection is meant to be resolved. Some are just meant to be understood and left.

22. Finish this sentence: “The future belongs to people who...”

I would delete one word and finish it the way it already is: The future belongs to PEOPLE. Period.