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A few months ago, I read a Vox a story about a trip to the “Instagram capital of the world,” Positano, has haunted me ever since. After the author Rebecca Jennings went to the Italian city for a week, she wrote that the whole vacation made her sad, because her vacation was the same as everyone else’s. him on Instagram. Watching this season of The White Lotus, it is clear that the show is not only aware of the idea of the holiday “Instagram” – it has been completed by friends, Resy reservations, and Google reviews – but he also wants to call from me. And honestly, I’m right.
At the beginning of season two, episode 3, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) and Albie (Adam DiMarco) are discussing how boring life is. “I was very sad at home, I just thought that I would come here and hear something… Now when you come to a place like this, it’s beautiful, and you take a picture and you know that it was taken by the all. a picture from the same place. You made some stupid Instagram captions.” And Albie replied half-heartedly even though he wasn’t buying it: “Throw your phone away. Throw it in the ocean.” Most importantly, Portia is still there and communicating on that phone, which is the opposite of throwing it overboard.
Later in the episode, there’s a scene with Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and Harper (Aubrey Plaza) that takes a different approach to this idea. Daphne asks Harper to go on a day trip to a park in Noto, but when they get there, Harper finds that they are still staying the night. In a rush of excitement, Daphne explains the hijinks by saying, “So I read about Noto in Construction Site, right? And a picture of this beard. So I was like, maybe we can go on a trip. So I called them and they said to me, ‘You can pay the whole place for the night.’ And so I do!” And when Harper responded with great wisdom and precision, Daphne said, “I’ll wait and see if it’s okay but now it’s like, we have to do this, right?”
There is something very funny and dangerous about this exchange. These two women spend the night in a big palazzo alone, without a man, because they don’t see something in a magazine and say, “Maybe I want to do something. like to that,” said Daphne, “I want the same thing.” It’s different. We don’t vacation for ourselves, we vacation for other people—to show that we can go to the nice hotels, eat at the most Instagrammable restaurants, and rent our own proverbial palazzo. We all need to stay in the club wherever we go. We’ll let people tell us what we’re talking about. want, rather than think of ourselves.
And one of the reasons I feel so sad is because I know myself in this way. For every vacation I have just spent hours scouring the internet for the best restaurants. I’ve crawled endless Google pages trying to decide which neighborhood is the best to live in—literally, pretty, and photogenic. I’ve asked many friends for advice and combed through all sorts of Google articles to make sure my vacation was the most “fun” it could possibly be. But, like, for what? So a vibey picture of a hotel bar can sit on my Instagram feed for 24 hours and then never see the light of day? So I can tell my friend also Tried the ravioli at XYZ restaurant, yes, did it change my life? I make all the arrangements because I want to fall in love with every place I visit, but traveling doesn’t always work that way. You can’t love everything. And there’s nothing magical about walking away from a trip and having the exact same story to tell about your best friend who went solo to Paris the year before.
Fabio Lovino/HBO
That’s what Portia said about her conversation with Albie. He wanted to go to Italy to hear something, but he ended up empty handed. (Of course, he’s on vacation with his boss, but the point remains.) He sees his time in Sicily as renewing things like no other. In fairness, people have been living in places like Italy for centuries, so he is is technology to renew things like others. But the difference with social media is that we know about it in a way that we didn’t before. There is an element of FOMO. If you haven’t touched every site that someone else has, you’re missing out.
I am not here to claim that I have found a solution to this problem. I think the show is asking ourselves what we’re missing out on by taking away vacation time. My favorite stories from my travel experiences are the ones that completely abandon the checklist, like stumbling upon a restaurant that smells amazing from the outside and I just have to try it. The whole point is when we go to new places, it’s new to us. And there are benefits to doing so. But if we’re like everyone else, something we’ve watched on Instagram 128 times, is it considered new? Like Portia, I’m not throwing my phone in the ocean anytime soon, and I’m knee-deep in a Google document for a trip I’m taking next week. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll leave the “vacation inspo” Instagram folder untouched for now.
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