Travel Destinations as Identity Statements: Ego Trips Formerly Known as Wanderlust

I wanted sun and sea. A Spanish coastal destination felt like a good choice. So I booked it after Claude and TikTok confirmed.

I did not realize I was also booking a personality assessment.

The reactions arrived before I'd formed a single opinion of my own. The smirk when I mentioned where I was going. The stereotypes offered freely and without invitation. That's when I realized, your travel choices make statements.

The moment you share where you're going, it stops being just yours. It enters a ranking system you never agreed to participate in. A cultural hierarchy that was running long before we booked and will keep running long after we get home.

Picking a version of ourselves instead of a destination.

Destinations carry a personality now. Not a vibe, not an aesthetic. An actual legible signal about the kind of person who goes there.

Iceland says something. Tbilisi says something different. The Maldives says something about your relationship with money and what you think you deserve. Japan has become the default signal for aesthetically discerning millennials who want culture without chaos. Bali peaked and became passé. Portugal has been Lisbonified, a term now used to describe what happens when a destination is consumed by the very people who came looking for something unconsumed.

There is a formal concept for this in tourism psychology called self-congruity. The greater the match between how a destination is perceived and how you perceive yourself, the stronger the pull toward it. Which means most people are not choosing where to go. They are choosing who to be seen as. The destination is the signal. The trip is just how you collect it.

Did social media turn wanderlust into something else entirely? Not necessarily curiosity about the world, but a confirmation of ourselves within it?

The numbers are in. We can look away if we want, though.

75% of millennials' travel decisions are influenced by social media. 46% travel specifically to explore places they've seen on Instagram. 38% of Gen Z travellers admit to overspending to match social media travel trends. 73% of millennials have spent money they didn't have because they didn't want to be left out.

These are not numbers about wanderlust. They are numbers about ego dressed up as adventure.

And it costs more than money. 97% of millennial travellers post daily while travelling. The trip is being narrated as it happens. The experience is being converted into content before it has finished being an experience. You arrive somewhere and immediately begin translating it into something consumable for people who are not there.

Is the world outside the window nothing else but a backdrop for the story we wish to tell about ourselves?

Leaving with lots of content but not a vivid memory.

At some point after I came home, the post-holiday blues hit and a genuinely unsettling thought followed: if I'd tried hard enough, I could have just imagined this vividly from the photos I'd saved online. And saved a lot of money.

When a single viral video of a sunrise in Hainan, China caused visitor numbers to spike from 50 to 600 per day in one month, those 600 people were not discovering something. They were confirming an image that already existed in their heads before they boarded the plane.

On July 23rd 2024, 11,000 tourists disembarked on Santorini in a single day. The island has a permanent population of 20,000. The municipality even posted a warning for residents to stay indoors.

A researcher studying this put it precisely. We no longer seek the unknown, or even what is familiar. We create images to confirm an existing fantasy.

The world used to be the point. Now is it proof? Proof that we went. Proof that we chose well. Proof that the version of ourselves we are presenting to the world is the right one.

The ego trip is not always loud. Sometimes it's quiet and well dressed.

Bali went from aspirational to passé. Tbilisi, Chiang Mai, and Medellín emerged as signals that you travel before the crowds, which is itself a more sophisticated ego trip than just going somewhere expensive.

In corporate environments, this hierarchy is particularly visible and particularly unexamined. The destinations mentioned casually in meetings, the photos in Slack profiles, the offhand references to where you spent the long weekend. All of it is doing quiet social work. Signaling taste, income, cultural awareness, and the kind of person you want to be regarded as.

JOMO is just FOMO for people who find FOMO cringe.

Gen Z noticed this and announced it was done with it. Enter the intentional trip. The slow travel. The wellness retreat. The digital detox in a beautiful remote location that costs significantly more than the Instagram holiday it was designed to replace.

Is this maybe the most expensive ego trip of all?

Choosing Montenegro over Croatia is still a signal. Going to a silent retreat is still a performance. Just one with a spiritual credential attached and a higher barrier to entry. Is the anti-Instagram traveller also performing for an audience? Just a smaller, more curated one with stricter admission requirements.

The escape from ego has been repackaged and sold back as the most sophisticated ego move available. The performance didn't end. It evolved.

Some go all-inclusive. Existential crisis about the destination? Not included.

Some people still go on holidays in a way we might have forgotten was possible. Not performing it. Not narrating it. Not pre-managing how it would land when they got home. Just there, in the sun, without an audience in mind.

Because the thing that gets lost when travel becomes an ego trip is not just the destination. It is the experience of being somewhere without needing it to mean anything. Without needing it to confirm anything. Without needing it to say anything about who you are to people who weren't invited.

The place was Benidorm, by the way. The worst destination on earth, according to the cultural consensus (something I discovered after I'd already booked). The stereotypes were real. But the sun and good vibes were real too. And the people who were just there, without bothering about any of it, were apparently having the time of their lives.

It made me wonder. How many other choices do we approach the same way? What we say, what we share, what version of ourselves we put forward before anyone has even responded. How much of it is genuinely ours and how much has been quietly filtered with an imaginary audience first.

I just wanted sun. I came home with an underexplored topic to write about.

Today's micro-fable:

A king conquered every kingdom he had ever heard of. He kept records of every border he had crossed, every city he had entered, every flag he had raised. He was the most respected ruler of all times. On his deathbed he asked to be buried in the place he had loved most. His generals argued for months. Not one of them knew the answer. Neither did he.