Years ago, when Instagram was just finding its feet, I was very much part of this game. The idea then was different – it was about building something, creating a business, pulling people toward the experiences I believed in. It made sense. It had purpose.
But there’s a very easy slide from using social media as a tool to needing it for validation. And I fell down that slope like everyone else. I got the followers, played the game, fed the algorithm. I know what it feels like to measure the worth of a moment by how many people double-tap it.
Now, though, something has shifted. Where I once wanted to share everything, I find myself wanting to keep moments to myself. Or at least to the people who are actually there with me. People who matter. Because that’s what makes them special.
I can sit with someone and watch a polar bear for three hours. Three full hours of just being present with one of the most magnificent predators on earth. We’ll talk quietly, share observations, feel the cold, notice how the light changes, document the moment, watch the bear’s behavior shift with the wind. It’s profound. It changes something in you.
But online? That same moment gets consumed in ten to fifteen seconds. A quick scroll, maybe a like, then it’s gone. Lost in the endless feed of other people’s curated experiences.
It feels cheap. Like we’re not respecting what the experience actually was.
There’s something obscene about reducing three hours of wonder to a fifteen-second story that disappears after twenty-four hours. About taking the kind of moment that people dream about their entire lives and turning it into content to fill the space between ads for protein powder and vacation rentals.
I spent two and a half hours with an orangutan in the Bornean rainforest last week. Just being there, watching him. He didn’t care about us, we were mesmerized by him. Time moved differently. The forest sounds created this cathedral of noise around us. It was sacred in a way that has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with connection.
But the moment I even think about sharing it, something gets lost. The magic starts to leak out. Because now I’m not remembering the experience – I’m curating it. I’m thinking about angles and captions and whether people will understand what they’re looking at.
The experience becomes a product. The memory becomes marketing.
When did we decide that every beautiful moment needs an audience?
I watch people now who’ve never known travel without social media, and they approach the world differently than I learned to. They see a sunset and immediately think about how to frame it. They encounter wildlife and their first instinct is to document rather than observe. They’re experiencing everything through the lens of how it will look to other people.
The travel out there influencers have made this worse. Much worse. They’ve turned adventure into performance art, creating a completely false reality of what travel and wildlife experiences are actually about. They show up with ring lights in the bush, staging “candid” moments that took hours to set up, selling a fantasy that has nothing to do with the real thing.
I’ve watched them direct their photographers at lodges like they’re shooting a commercial. “Get the shot where I look surprised by the elephant.” “Make sure you can see my face and the mountain.” “Let’s do that laugh again, but more authentic this time.”
Authentic. As if authenticity is something you can direct.
They’re not having their own adventures anymore. They’re producing content about adventures for people who are sitting at home scrolling through their phones while drinking coffee. And they’ve convinced an entire generation that this is what travel should look like.
And here’s the thing that really gets me: the people consuming this content aren’t even really seeing it. They’re scrolling past polar bears and orangutans and landscapes that took you days to reach, giving each image the same attention they give to photos of someone’s lunch. Meanwhile, the influencers are selling them a version of travel that doesn’t exist – perfectly lit moments, flawless hair in impossible conditions, manufactured wonder that’s as fake as the ring light illuminating it.
Your three hours of wonder becomes their three seconds of distraction. Their staged “adventure” becomes someone else’s unrealistic expectation.
There’s a violence in that exchange that we don’t talk about. We’re taking experiences that are meant to be transformative – moments that should change how you see the world, how you see yourself – and we’re feeding them into a machine that turns everything into disposable entertainment.
The influencers have industrialized this violence. They’ve built entire careers on packaging wonder for mass consumption, stripping it of everything that makes it meaningful. They sell the aesthetics of adventure while missing the soul of it completely. They’ve never sat in uncomfortable silence with a wild animal. They’ve never felt the humility that comes from being truly small in something vast. They’ve turned travel into a product and themselves into the brand ambassadors.
I used to think I was sharing beauty. Now I realize I was often just feeding the beast.
The really profound moments, the ones that actually matter, aren’t photogenic anyway. They happen in the spaces between the obvious shots. In the quiet conversations with your guide. Around a campfire. In the way your body feels when you’re truly tired from walking. In the smell of rain on dust, or the sound of wind through leaves, or the feeling of being completely insignificant in the best possible way.
They happen when you’re not performing your amazement, but actually feeling it.
I was with a guest recently who put his phone away for an entire week. Not because it was broken or because there was no signal, but because he made a choice. He wanted to be present. He wanted his memories to belong to him, not to his followers.
At the end of the week, he told me it was the first time in years he’d actually felt like he was living his own life instead of documenting it for other people.
That’s when I understood what we’ve lost.
We’ve created a culture where experiences don’t feel real unless we broadcast them. Where moments don’t count unless we can prove they happened. Where the value of wonder is measured by the response it generates rather than the way it changes us.
But wonder doesn’t need witnesses to be real. Beauty doesn’t require validation to exist. And the most meaningful experiences – the ones that actually transform you – often happen in the silence between the shares.
Maybe it’s time we kept some things for ourselves. Maybe it’s time we remembered that not every moment is content. That some experiences are too sacred to commodify. That the best adventures happen when we stop performing them and start living them.
The polar bear doesn’t care about your follower count. The orangutan doesn’t exist to validate your travel credentials. The sunset doesn’t happen for your story.
They exist for the experience itself. For the way they change you. For the way they remind you what it feels like to be amazed by something real.
And sometimes the most radical thing you can do is keep that feeling to yourself.
Stay safe. And don’t forget to be awesome.
