Obsessing Over Likes on Your Travel Thirst Traps? Here’s How You Can Make It Stop
If I had a dollar for every time someone asked if by “travel writer,” I meant “Instagram influencer,” I’d have $$$$ by now. It seems like, without the ’gram, there is no other way to do my job.
Travel journalism is an enviable yet often misunderstood line of work. People think you’re on vacation all the time, that you practically live in fabulous resorts, or that brands pay you big bucks to promote their offerings. But actually, as a writer, I court editors of publications and not individual followers (who do happen to rely on my travel recs too). I also casually document my travel experiences on my IG, @TheBeachBell, because why wouldn’t I?
Given my job and the incredible places I am fortunate enough to visit, I sometimes feel obligated to keep sharing more destination thirst traps on social media, to constantly create more content, and to humblebrag about the people I’ve met and the places I’ve been. When I returned from a spectacular stay at the Insta-famous LUX* South Ari Atoll resort in the Maldives earlier this year, a friend said, “I can tell you had a great time in the Maldives because you posted so much more than usual,” as if real-life fun and digital silence are somehow mutually exclusive.
While traveling, I can say that I’m actually super snap-happy. Photography also serves as a way to take notes, especially when you travel specifically to write detail-rich stories. For example: My camera roll had around 4,000 new images (yes, really) after a weeklong adventure trip to Honduras this summer, but I didn’t post a single one. I get the most satisfaction from documenting my experiences—not publicizing them.
TBH, I find sharing my pics on Instagram to be tedious and mildly anxiety-inducing. I don’t post regularly in general, and I have used the app even less often since the pandemic because of rampant travel shaming (it’s a thing). I would love to say I’m above it, but every time I post, I’m constantly refreshing to see the number of Likes my snaps get or don’t get—sound like a familiar vacay activity? Once upon a time, I would even delete photos that got fewer than 100 Likes from other people, whether I personally was a fan of the pic or not.
“Instagrammability” is now the number one factor for millennials when choosing a vacation destination, based on the results of a poll by UK-based travel insurance company Schofields. And I can’t lie, I fantasize about traveling to specific viral locations for the sole purpose of capturing the ultimate shot, be it the trendy Bondi Icebergs pool, the hot air balloons soaring over Cappadocia, or Bali’s Tegallalang rice terraces. It’s not only our vacation planning that recognition on Instagram affects though; it’s our actual memories and emotional attachments to those trips too.
Why social media impacts our memories
There is already strong evidence that suggests that taking any photos at all causes us to disengage from our activities and worsens our memories of them. However, in a 2018 study, University of California Santa Cruz researchers found that taking photos intentionally, for memory’s sake, causes people to retain memories better than if they take photos specifically to share them on social media. In other words, it’s all about the motivation behind taking a pic that will allow us to actually remember that picture-perfect moment.
More recent research by the University of York revealed that our social media Likes may actually change how we feel about our memories. For real. FB Likes, for instance, can negatively skew people’s thoughts of certain memories, particularly if the pics don’t get a lot of digital love. Social metrics are “shaping how people remember, when they remember, and the attachment they have to those memories,” according to the researchers. So basically, what other people think about our past experiences informs our own memories, and it’s actually sucking the joy and spontaneity out of the present because we’re so focused on the Likes. Which is a great way to ruin your vacay.
How to set yourself free from the BS
As many of us learned during quarantine, travel is an exhilarating privilege, so why waste energy obsessing over double taps and how you’ll be perceived online when you’re out seeing the world? Hiding your Instagram Likes is the ultimate travel hack to ensure that all your vacation moves aren’t influenced by social media popularity, so you can focus on the moment at hand—and it’s as easy as ever to make them disappear.
To stop seeing Likes on other people’s posts, all you have to do is head to the hamburger menu on your profile page, go to Settings > Privacy > Posts, and then toggle the “Hide Like and view counts” option.
For a brand-new post, scroll to the bottom of the final editing screen and tap “Advanced settings.” There you’ll be able to toggle “Hide Like and view counts on this post,” and voilà.
And if you’re liking the feeling of that and you want to conceal Likes on your already published pics, tap the three dots in the upper-right corner of the photo and select “Hide Like count.” This is totally reversible, and you can choose to “Unhide Like count” again whenever you want.
Note that if you opt to hide metrics, you will still be able to check out how many Likes your photos have from inside your own account, but your followers won’t (remember that all Likes are still visible by default unless you actively hide them).
Social media is one of the main ways we entertain ourselves these days (what are you doing in the airport rn?), but the joke’s on us when we fixate on portraying picture-perfect lives in pixels instead of immersing ourselves in the actual experiences of travel. You can actually enjoy your trip so much more when you’re not focused on what other people think of it.
Instagram Likes might be dying a slow death, and truthfully, I couldn’t be happier. The moment this feature became available to me, I raced to my settings and made the switch to literally release myself from being so attached to these metrics that have no real bearing on any important outcomes for me. None. Not my self-worth. Not my work. Not my relationships. Nothing. Red hearts on digital squares can never compete with real life experience.
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