Is social media making us miss the point of traveling?

As someone who is paid to write about my travels, I am aware that I’m in a very privileged position. Recently, however, I have begun to wonder whether my own approach to documenting the globe’s many highlights has lost some of its luster.

The protagonist in this malaise is a good friend whose social media fabulosity puts my meager offerings to shame. While she floods her Instagram and Facebook feeds with images of sky-high drinking dens, liquid sunsets and Champagne pool parties with babes and buff barmen in Asia’s most stirring cities and settings, my own efforts at engagement are somewhat less glamorous.

On a recent visit to Sapa in the north of Vietnam, the best I could muster was a shot of a deformed fiberglass rendition of Scooby Doo giving everyone the finger.

I “like” (but don’t actually love) nearly everything she posts, because (a) she is a friend and (b) I’m as disingenuous on social media as the next person. Pettily, I don’t appreciate her posts because they tend to gain way more traction than my pithy observations about racist toothpaste brands in Thailand and suggestive menu misspellings in India.

Most of all, though, I don’t adore them because they aren’t even particularly representative of how she feels about traveling. On a recent trip with her, to Annapurna base camp in Nepal, hours were lost as she paused for a succession of interminable photo shoots.

For both of us, it was other aspects of the expedition that had more lasting resonance. The lentil curries, frequently gruesome toilets and evening card games felt more integral to the experience (in my view, anyway) than opportunities for personal PR.

We exist in an era where the concept of a ‘bucket list’ of things to do before you die has been supplanted by a ‘hashtag list’ of places to take a selfie before your smartphone dies

If this sounds a little grumpy, I’d have to agree. It is also hypocritical. While she was presenting one face to the world, I was probably sharing a picture of a misshapen pizza or posting inanely on Twitter about the severity of the high-altitude hangovers inflicted by cheap Indian whisky.

Although I rib her for this obsessive curatorship, my friend is far from the worst offender when it comes to not living in the moment. We exist, after all, in an era where the concept of a “bucket list” of things to do before you die has been supplanted by a “hashtag list” of places to take a selfie before your smartphone dies.

At the start of my first ever trip to Southeast Asia, just before the turn of the millennium, I remember being uncritically enthralled by dispatches from veterans of the circuit. As the trip wore on, however, I soon became acutely aware of a tendency for people to reduce travel to a series of ticks in boxes.

I was as thrilled as anyone to see the sun rise over Angkor Wat for the first time. But my patience for my traveling kin began to wear thin by the third time I heard someone say they’d “done” the Cambodian temples, or, after a week-long trip to Vietnam, condensed the essence of the country to Halong Bay and getting cheated by a scam.

Another vestige of those hazy backpacker days was a patronizing Israeli called Zef. As a group of us were floating down the Mekong River in Laos, he pointedly told me to put down my camera and stop taking pictures. “Just take it all in man. Soak it up,” he drawled, handing over a smoke.

A pompous git he might have been, but we could probably all do with paying heed to his words. I wonder what he would say now if he saw my Instagram feed?