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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think it’s related to social media. Guaranteed, part of the attraction to taking all these bougie trips is posting the photos to Facebook and Instagram after.[/quote]

People with disposable incomes have always traveled. And some people always have wanderlust and enjoy it. But social media has ramped up the trend of "competitive travel," where people travel with very high frequency and there is a drive to always be going someplace different or far flung, someplace others have not been.

I have always enjoyed travel and have had the good fortune to do some great trips, but in recent years I've found I don't enjoy talking about travel with a lot of other people I know in the DMV, and it's that feeling of competition. Like in the last few years I've experienced people being annoyed to discover we traveled to the same place as they did (why would this annoy you? isn't it fun to compare notes). Some people aren't even subtle, they'll literally say "Oh I thought we'd discovered something new, guess not" or similar. Like... who cares. It used to be that everyone went to the same places on vacation. It was fine.

I've also experience people acting superior because I have not been somewhere they think you HAVE to go. Like Iceland became a really popular destination a while back because of all the cheap flights, but we never went because the timing was never right and we were taking other trips we'd been planning for longer. But I know people who will scoff at this -- "you haven't been to Iceland yet? wow." Like it's strange for an American to not have visited Iceland in 2024. That's such a weird attitude! Especially when you realize that the people who do this often haven't been to, like, Montana or New Orleans, easy domestic trips that offer very special, specific experiences.

Anyway, I still love travel, but I don't talk about it as much as I used to. It's just not fun when it's a contest. I have no desire to win or lose "vacationing."[/quote]

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