It’s a depressing day at the office, with an especially grumpy boss and hopelessly untenable deadlines. You check Instagram at lunchtime, where bloggers smile at you from dream like beaches.
According to their captions, they are perfectly happy and keep bugging you to step out of your comfort zone. They claim that anyone can do it, and that happiness can be yours if you too jump off the treadwheel and take on the world.
You press “like” but sigh “I wish”. And it annoys you even more that your life is not like that.
Sounds familiar?
Then let me tell you how this world really looks like behind the scenes. Let’s take it step by step….
„I am perfectly happy”
I don’t want to wash anyone’s dirty linen in public – especially people I know personally – although I know exactly what kind of flouncing and expediency their Instagram-life entails.
I’d rather talk only about myself, from two aspects.
There was a different kind of happiness before blogging
The first aspect is that even though I worked my ass off at two multinational companies for 20 years, and now I zip about the world all the time, I am not entirely sure that I am happier now. That probably sounds shocking, but as you know happiness is a complex thing – you can’t narrow it down to one small part of life.
It’s true that all my life I wished I could travel more and I really can’t complain about that now. I spend most of the year on the road, but many other parts of my life were much better back then. Above all, my parents were still alive, I had a cat and I loved to visit them on weekends. It felt good to love them and to be loved in return, and I miss them terribly.
Also when I was still working, my free time was much more varied – I went to the gym 3-4 times a week, watched lots of movies and read lots of books. My phone was always ringing because I was out and about with friends all the time. Sadly I’ve had no time for these activities in years – travelling and writing has sucked me in so much. Of course it’s up to me, but I love my blog so much and keeping it up-to-date doesn’t leave me much time for anything else. When I travelled less, this wasn’t a problem, I wrote about the 2-3 trips I took each year and did other things for the rest of the year. No-one rings me nowadays, my friends can’t follow me whilst on my adventures, so I have to check in on them when I get back. Whichever way I look at it, in a sense, my old life was much more complex.
Instagram and what’s behind it
The other aspect of this fake Instagram-life is that outsiders rarely see the truth behind the photos. Where we see a photo of a beach, the reality could be that the digital nomad posting it left their hostel solely for this photo because they have to return to work at the hostel, entrapped by poor wifi and sharing an untidy, and always noisy, room with five fellow sufferers. Maybe they work on a cruise ship for 10-12 hours a day and could only get away for a few moments to post a grinning selfie. If they are a known blogger, they might be on a press tour, where they are taken to places important to the organizers. The blogger could be bored to death yet still posts a photo radiating happiness, paying extra attention to make sure that others from the same tour aren’t on the photo – as this would spoil their image.
Bloggers rarely share the darker side of their life as no-one is interested in that. But believe me, no blogger’s life is perfect. In fact, one female Canadian blogger is suffering from a condition that’s got her tied to her bed, and another’s blogger’s life was hanging on an edge when it turned out she had leukemia. I also know of someone who had a serious alcohol problem before fleeing into travelling, and someone else who became worn out from travelling so much that after many years, they couldn’t wait to have their own home. Now that I think about it, there are lots of people who have had a bellyful of travelling after just a couple of years.
„Everyone can afford it”
Of course not everyone can.
There’s a thing as being responsible for someone or something
I know from my own life how it was when, as an only child, I hardly dared to leave the sides of my terminally ill mom, or my dad who was unable to walk. For me, this was only a temporary period, but there are people whose whole life is about taking care of a sick child or elderly parents.
But it’s not just sick relatives that can stop you going off into the world – the same applies with healthy children. Whilst one of my blogger acquaintances doesn’t take their kids to school, but does drag them around the world, I am not sure it is a good example to follow.
Who bakes the bread then?
Those who leave home for years often return to stay at their parents’ place – without thinking about the fact that if they don’t make a home for themselves, they won’t be able to give the warmth of a home to their own children. I don’t condemn them – for one thing, I don’t have children either – I just don’t want them to look down on people who work for their families.
Someone once commented, under a video of a family travelling the world in a motorhome, that not everyone can travel the world because then there would be no bakers left to bake the bread in the morning. I was astonished at some of the replies the commenter received over the next few days. Amongst other things, he was told that a travel blogger doesn’t write for those who cannot shrug off the yoke of a 9-5 job!
I want you all to know that if you are like that, I am writing for you guys too! :-))
Because travelers like this often forget that if everyone truly did as they do, no-one would have a car that they could hitch a ride in, no-one would have a home that they could stay in, and no-one would work at places from which they could ask for certain products and services.
„This is the only real happiness”
No. Happiness means something different for everyone.
For some people, happiness means free travel, for others it means a job. Obviously it’s very hard for someone to understand this when they don’t like to work, but there are quite a few people who find real joy in teaching, curing the sick or baking bread.
I myself love to tinker away with my blog. In a way, I work more now than when I worked at a multinational company, because even on weekends I rise and sleep with it. Admittedly no-one would haul me up if I didn’t write about every trip in detail, or if I didn’t edit the videos that have been waiting to be cut for months, or if there wasn’t any English content on the page and so on. However, knowing I won’t get into trouble doesn’t make me dangle my feet. I inherited a strong work ethic from my dad, he was the workaholic, my mom loved to chatter away so I bring my desire to communicate from her. I am quite a mix. 🙂
But I don’t think you should criticize or pity those who are perfectly fine with their little world, job, family, hobby. Theirs can be a fulfilling life too, and in a sense it is fuller than going about the world.
I don’t have to go far for an example, my dad was like this. As soon as he was home from work, he would go out into the garden to tend the grapes or cut the grass, then when it grew dark he would tinker in the basement. Once mom succeeded in making him accompany her on a vacation to a Hungarian spa-town, where he quickly found himself something to do – he mended the old fence. Because that’s what made him happy. He worked, he dined, watched some TV and cuddled our cat, Cili. He didn’t yearn to go to Bora Bora.
Why do bloggers write such nonsense anyway? For sure every blogger knows that not everyone can travel the world, just as they know that their own life is not always fun and games. But the fun posts are the ones that get lots of likes and bigger traffic numbers, which is what this is all about – growing their own popularity. Often posts like these contain no useful information.
To inspire, not to spoon-feed
I know many domestic and international bloggers, and I can count the ones who live truly free on just one hand. In my view, those who don’t depend on sponsors, or income from advertisements, those whose posts don’t smell of the lamp and who haven’t bought their followers are the true influencers.
They are the ones who don’t boast about their lifestyle. They know exactly how much work and luck is needed to get where they are and they don’t rub it under other people’s noses by saying “See, you should be doing it this way too”. Instead they inspire and set an example with their writings, but don’t put themselves in the limelight. They don’t build a ’self-brand’, they create value.
But Eva, why do you care what others do?
…. asks my friend frequently. She is somewhat right – usually I try not to take notice of anything that brings me negative energy. But I cannot let go of this for several reasons.
Let’s set aside the problem where suddenly there are too many bloggers and the ’trade’ bleeds of a hundred wounds. Most operate with an audience that has already been bought, so not creating as big of a return for their clients as promised. On top of this, they mislead their own community because they write paid advertisements as if it were their own opinion. These are all different subjects. The part belonging to this ‘Instagram-life’ is that bloggers are, to use a fashionable word – influencers. See, if their job is to influence then they had better not deceive people, and need to tell the truth. Show the whole picture, not just a small part.
I believe it is especially dangerous to create illusions towards the young, who already have a huge compulsion to conform and hang out too much on social media. It even happened to my bright and intelligent friend, a mother of two children, who after seeing all the success stories on social media, succumbed to depression, but luckily realized her mistake in time and temporarily quit all similar accounts.
So all I want to do is make it clear that life isn’t all that rosy for us travellers either. Travelling is not the only way to salvation and trust me, you have as much joy and happiness in your life as those whose photos of beach sunsets you see. Of course it is worth doing all in our power to achieve our dreams, but you shouldn’t go crazy if not everything is perfect. Always concentrate on what is beautiful in your life rather than what is missing. I think this is real happiness, not ‘Instagram-life’
