Your vacation wasn't perfect, and you can tell
A challenge pops up from time to time on my Facebook feed advocating that one you must not complain for 21 days for your life to change for the better. Apparently, it is a kind of summary of the book A World Without Complaints by Will Bowen . The author argues that if we stop complaining by what happens to us, we will be happier. And people share it as if his words were a mantra to live by.
The world of travel seems to have swallowed Bowen's manual whole. open instagram : one of your friends is in London, posing perfect in front of Notting Hill; another appears in Venice, where she has gone with his partner to celebrate Valentine's Day; your cousin is putting her hair smiling in front of a typical Thai boat.
And that you have not yet come across no influencer , because in this area, the images already acquire almost mystical tints, with colors that can hardly exist and tans that it is impossible for them to last all year. The accompanying text, whether taken in India or Paris, it would make Mr. Wonderful himself pale.
On Instagram, you only see the kiss... not the discussion you had when you were wrong on the way
In the social networks We are not jet lagged, nor are we exhausted from driving five hours every day to complete that roadtrip that is so photogenic on Facebook. In that universe, low cost flights and their annoyances do not exist , we never have a hair out of place and we don't even notice that the cute hotel that was supposed to be five minutes from the center is, in reality, 40.
"Clearly, on social media, there is a tendency to show only what we think is good ", admits the psychologist and author jara perez . "This is something inherent to being human, because we want to be loved and accepted in the group, but today it is getting out of hand. We are turning our image into a grotesque caricature , and the worst thing is that we believe it. We believe that there are people who are divine and always well, that everything they post on their networks is real and that they go on trips to the most exclusive and remote places. Look, it seems like a joke to me, "she tells Traveler.es.
The price to pay for constructing these almost fantasy stories takes the form of exorbitant expectations -and its consequent disappointments-. Famous are those places in the world, exploited by Instagram, that many visit hoping to find paradise... to meet the absurd reality.
We are talking, for example, about the case of the Gates of Heaven in Lempuyang, in Bali, a monument in the center of which every instagrammer worthy of being called that has taken their portrait. On the net, it seems that the whole place has a fantastic and spiritual air, a hoax enhanced by the shots in which it seems that said door is on a lake. However, the reflection that we can see has been achieved by placing a mirror under the camera!
Many of those who are photographed in Lempuyang, moreover, do so in a meditative posture, when the truth is that they are surrounded by people: all those who wait, in queues of up to three hours, to collect the same image. The phrase that accompanies these images, yes, has nothing to do with: "Dead tired and hot after waiting in line for half a day to take this photo" . Rather, it often resembles: "Touching the sky with my fingers. Blessed to visit one of the places of my dreams."
The influencer world makes the messages of Mr. Wonderful pale
"It would be much more natural to generate our own realistic travel accounts : You don't have to tell everything, obviously. In fact, you don't have to tell anything if you don't want to, but making a realistic account of what your vacations are like or what your life is like would help us feel a little less cheap, a little less worried about not being enough," adds Pérez.
She also knows what she's talking about, because she constantly turns the tables on what Instagram is supposed to be through her profile. in the mud . In the account, the network of images is filled with words, which take its participants to tell the stories of abuses, addictions and fears normally hidden on these platforms, and, many times, also in our day to day. The objective? Normalize everything dark that we carry inside, and make our peers feel less less 'weird', less alone.
"Obviously, we always feel that we are the cheap copy, the imitation: that is the game of capitalism . We are made to feel that we have to improve, that we are never enough, that we do not contribute as much as we could. That is why you have to work more, train more, go out more, buy more, and more expensive, and more exclusive", summarizes the expert.
Could we, with a more honest account of our travels on social networks, stop that tireless wheel, lighten demands and feel better about ourselves ? The movement has already started a long time ago, in relation to body image, in accounts with astronomical numbers like those of @imrececen or @chessiekingg.
In them, the influencers showed how just arching your back can completely change the image that we project in a selfie. Perhaps it seems obvious, but, judging by the number of applause they received -and the pressure they themselves said they felt before the photos of other women-, that naturalness must have been very welcome for his followers.
If the hotel is not what you expected, you can also tell
With a more honest account of our adventures, in addition to contributing to making the trips of others better -which could avoid disappointments like those of Lempuyang-, we could also be helping to alleviate a public health problem. We talk about the anxiety that many people feel when they browse Instagram, which has the questionable honor of being the network that most negatively affects the mental health of young people, according to a study by the Royal Society of Public Health and the University of Cambridge.
Could a movement of realism similar to that of body image be created in the world of travel? Should? We seem to have the ability to do so: just take a look at platforms like TripAdvisor , where we don't mind - quite the opposite, it seems - throwing out angry comments about our horrible travel experiences. "It's unreal to shove dirt under the rug forever, it has to come out somewhere. Human beings have a lot of bad blood, that's also our nature," Pérez explains.
So tell it. Tell it if the pizza you ate in Naples it was not up to its price ; if you love to travel with your baby, but it was a real hell to do that journey by train; if the hotel, despite looking great in the photos, had a lousy breakfast...
"A world without complaints is the perfect plan to become a great henchman of the system. No matter how much mud you have to eat, you are not going to complain because complaining is for the weak, right?", analyzes the psychologist. And she ends up going back to that 21-day challenge that will surely appear on your wall soon. The one that is supposed to give a radical turn to your life, even if everything falls apart around us. "With this novel technique, you are going to be able to annul your desire and your will, to, instead, enlarge your swallows in terms of precariousness and abuse. Why complain when everything is great? " ironically the psychologist.