Ego Trip and the Instagram Travel Photos Syndrom
If you don’t have photos all over your social media, did you even travel?
When searching the hashtag ‘travel’ on Instagram, one finds almost 380 million results. Photos of unforgettable scenarios, smiles, poses, handstands on the beach. By the way, the poses are the best. Showing your back to camera guarantees you a lot of likes, especially if you’re facing a blue sea on some Asian island whose name we can’t pronounce.
That is not exactly a new phenomenon since traveling has always been linked to status. The very word tourism comes from the European Grand Tour, a journey that passed by the great capitals of the continent. The English aristocracy created the concept in the 17th century by forging “educational trips” whose purpose was showing the world’s best cities to society’s créme de la créme.
After the Age of Discovery, the industrial revolution and the railroads, the world became smaller. Today we have low-cost airlines, TripAdvisor tells you what to do and Booking.com shows where to sleep. The pretext, however, has changed very little. Educating yourself, getting to know other cultures and exploring the world are some of the reasons why people travel. But showing off one’s cultural capital is also a reason to travel, even if unsaid.
Tourism is still an activity that can only be performed by the middle and upper classes. Traveling presupposes having money saved and paid vacations, which stops a lot of people from visiting the Eiffel Tower, for example, because they simply don’t have those things. And there’s no point in saying that it’s just a matter of planning your savings because when there’s no food on the table, there are other concerns.
German sociologist Josef Krippendorf described this phenomenon in the 1980s when he wrote about the leisure-labor dichotomy. In industrialized societies, paid work and the division of time into “working time” and “resting time” have made traveling a synonym of resting. So much so that the Germans, some of the workers who have the biggest number of vacation days, love to travel and take their right to rest very seriously.
The United States, on the other hand, is the only developed nation that does not guarantee workers the right to paid holidays. The result of this policy is that they have just a few days every year to travel, and some workers would rather not taking a vacation to have more paid days. The country ended up with an army of anxious and depressed people, a medicated nation trying to find the right drugs to be happy.
Leisure time is vital for the proper functioning of the human mind. We need idle time to be productive and recover from stress. Deep down, we are a species that was born nomadic and, if we think about the history of the planet, we have not been sedentary for that long. When we wander the world, we fight against the modern sedentarism that hurts our souls. People who travel report feeling happier with the world and with themselves, and even planning a trip already lifts up our spirits.
Always traveling but never disconnecting
Anyone who has a social network account knows there’s always someone out there in the world. “Mary went to China! John is in Spain, how fancy…” are some of the things we think every day when we open Instagram or Facebook. Usually when we’re full of work to do on a boring Wednesday afternoon.
Nothing against sharing happy memories, interesting places and cultures. Before the internet, we’d take the picture, develop the film, and show the album to the whole family after lunch on a Sunday at grandma’s house. We are social beings and we need other people’s approval, admiration, and even opinions. Showing the family our vacation photos is part of our bonding system.
We travel, some of us forever, in search of other ways, other lives, other souls. — Anaïs Nin
With the rise of the internet and social media, a world of appearances, filters and sentimental quotes (unrelated to the photo) became somehow the norm. We don’t travel to see the world anymore, but to be seen while doing it. It’s a symptom of a greater social change where online reputation means a lot, especially for younger generations. In the name of likes and visualizations, people have already done everything, including creating a perfect life that does not exist.
There is even such a thing as ‘travel influencers’, people (usually young and beautiful) who travel around to show the trendiest hotels and resorts with the premise of saying good things about the place to their thousands of followers. They are becoming more and more common, filling our feeds with beautiful images. And our hearts with envy.
On behalf of the competition and internalizing this trend, we do the same. Some people post pictures of everything they do whilst traveling. What they ate, saw, where they walked, the buses, an Italian trash can. They are the traveling aunts from before, but now online. Today, we keep scrolling and move on. Or maybe we click on ‘like’ in appreciation of other people’s happiness (why not? Humans is not that evil).
To be quite clear, I have nothing against posting travel photos on the Internet. Let’s post, let’s show everyone what made us vibrate. Everybody needs to see that magnificent sunset behind a Hindu temple. It’s beautiful, I know, even if the cell phone camera can’t register the colors properly. Besides, life is yours and you can do whatever you want with it.
The problem I notice is when the act of registering the event becomes more important than the event itself. Sometimes it seems more interesting to take a picture than to enjoy the landscape, listen to foreign languages, connect with people and absorb the details. If you can only take a picture of the Statue of Liberty if you are on the frame, you’re doing it wrong.
It’s like proving that you’ve been there, collecting destinations without knowing anything deeply, extracting only what can be seen and sold. Traveling also involves a lot of not-so-nice experiences, like eating an exotic dish and having diarrhea, or taking cold showers when it’s freezing outside. Nobody posts a picture of that creepy hostel room that they shared with a fellow traveler who never showered. But it’s exactly these details that we’ll remember forever. And no photo can capture them.
This article was originally published in Portuguese and was translated by the author.
