Life can feel like an endless road at night. There are no clear answers, and yet people keep moving forward, guided by their own lights. Those lights are the ways people choose to live, the words they speak, and the accumulation of the choices they make. We spoke with Annie Lena Obermeier, founder of LAMPPOST, whose work traces these “lights of living,” about her journey so far and the idea of “creativity in life.”

I was supposed to travel to Chichijima Island with the person I was dating at that time. But we ended up breaking up before the trip. The flights, the hotel reservations, the time, and the money were all just left there. I decided to use this as an investment in myself instead, and asked myself, “What could I do with two weeks?” and decided to go to Niigata for an intensive driving course.

I got my license because I wanted to travel. I wanted to find a place to settle down someday, but I felt like you can’t really know whether a place fits you until you experience it yourself. There are landscapes I’ve never seen, sounds I’ve never heard, and people I’ve never met. So I thought, maybe what I need is a home that can move with me. That was the beginning of van life for me. Honestly, heartbreak was part of it too. I just needed to move. Not only myself, but my entire environment. That was the starting point.

To me, life is like traveling along a dark road at night. When you walk at night, you rely on light to see the surrounding landscape and find your direction. During university, I felt like I was on a road where many lights were all pointing the same way — a kind of predetermined track. There were entrance exams, then university, then employment, and life continued along that line.

And I do think that’s a wonderful path. But at a certain point, I realized there were other roads beyond the one I believed was absolute. I realized that there were paths I simply didn’t know existed. That’s when I started to think of other people’s lives as lights. Someone else’s life doesn’t tell me everything, but it can show me that I’m allowed to step in another direction too. That image is where the name LAMPPOST came from.

I started exploring this theme because I personally didn’t know how I wanted to live.

At the time, I was making a living mainly through commissioned work — things like wedding welcome boards and celebratory pieces for special occasions. I felt that in order for clients to easily request my work, I had to keep my style somewhat fixed and recognizable, so I presented my work within a certain framework. But within that, I began feeling a stronger urge to create more freely.

Around that same period, I moved from Kyoto to Tokyo. When I looked around, I saw people creating what they truly wanted to create, writing what they genuinely wanted to write, and pursuing what they actually wanted to do. I admired them deeply.

Doing things for others is wonderful, and I wanted to continue doing that too. But at the same time, I wanted to remain true to myself and live freely. But I didn’t know how. What does it even mean to live authentically? So I thought of asking other people for the answer. That was the beginning.

I wanted to create something where people of all ages, genders, and professions could exist together within a single book. I hoped it would become something that could visualize many different kinds of “light.”

For the first volume, I started with people connected to friends and people close to me. For the second volume, I interviewed people I met while traveling around Japan. Some of them had never appeared in the media before, and some didn’t even use social media. But I realized that I’m deeply drawn to people who are loyal to the way they truly want to live, and I wanted to hear their stories.

I titled the first volume “The Way We Live Is the Way We Work” because I saw living and working as inseparable. Then, I titled the second volume “A Human Exploration of Living” because the interviews began from a question: before there is a way of working, there is a way of living. So how can we live better?

Ideas like what is “normal” or what we “should” do become so deeply embedded in us that we often don’t even notice them. I think I spent a long time restricting myself. The thing that constrained me most was my desire to be “normal.”

I was born and raised in Japan, educated in the same environment as everyone around me, and yet I was often treated as if I were a foreigner. I kept wondering why, and I carried a sense of anger with me about that for a long time. I think I spent years trying harder than anyone to prove that I was normal — that I was no different from the people around me.

But when I studied abroad in America, I began to realize that maybe “normal” itself was just an idea I had constructed in my own mind. The thing deciding what was normal was this internal voice saying, “You should do this” or “You have to be this way.” When I realized that, I understood that I had been the one trapping myself. Of course, simply realizing it doesn’t mean those restrictions magically disappear. But being able to see something that you couldn’t see before makes an enormous difference. Because now, whenever I do something, I ask myself whether I’m doing it because I “should,” or because I genuinely want to. Am I avoiding it out of fear? Am I making excuses? What is it that I truly want? I keep asking myself these questions.

The same applies to the paintings I’m currently painting live. Some of the works near the entrance of the exhibition are relatively realistic, depicting things I’ve seen and been moved by. I originally thought I should paint the nature and moments of inspiration I encountered in Hakone as well. But somewhere along the way, I realized it had shifted from “I want to paint this” to “I have to paint this.” I started feeling like I needed to search for inspiring scenery in Hakone, that I needed to turn it into paintings. And when I asked myself whether that was truly what I wanted to do, the answer felt slightly different from a simple “yes”.

Now, I want to create things in a more abstract way — not simply reproducing photographs, but making things that feel good to me on a deeper level. That’s the challenge I’m exploring now.

That question didn’t exist in the first volume — it emerged while making the second. For me, gratitude has become one kind of compass. There are moments when I’m simply looking at a scenery and the words “thank you” naturally slip out. I want to live in places where I can feel that way. So gratitude is a very important keyword in my life.

As for myself, I think I want to thank the version of me that kept taking action, even in small ways. Changing places, continuing to paint; whenever I felt something needed to change, I tried to move as quickly as possible. Of course, there are days when I hesitate, or days when I feel like I can’t paint anymore. But even then, I keep getting back up and moving little by little every day. I want to thank myself for that.

I think it’s okay to imitate someone else. But in the end, you are still the only you that exists, and even the act of imitation is ultimately a choice you make yourself. So I hope that somewhere along the way, people come to feel that in the end, it’s always been about themselves.

Of course, just because I say “I hope people feel this way” doesn’t mean that’s exactly how they’ll receive it. I think it’s enough if each person feels something in their own way. Maybe it’s just a single phrase that stays with them, or the book becomes a catalyst that helps them notice the light already inside themselves. I would be happy if this book could reach someone in that way.