Why can’t we admit to not enjoying a bad holiday?
- Written by: Samuel Cornell, PhD Candidate in Public Health & Community Medicine, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney
Everyone always loves a holiday – at least, that’s how we portray them. Holidays present a chance to unwind, relax and decompress from life’s day-to-day struggles. But they don’t always go to plan, and they’re not always as amazing, relaxing or enriching as we like to think.
Yet admitting you didn’t enjoy your holiday remains surprisingly taboo.
The holiday performance
For most of human history, ordinary people didn’t take holidays at all. Holidays were once the preserve of the extremely wealthy, like those aristocrats who embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe in the 1800s.
Echoes of that aristocratic impulse still pervade the way we talk about holidays to this day. On social media travel has become a form of very visible cultural capital – a way of overtly signalling not just where you’ve been, but your tastes, knowledge and refinement. The trip itself isn’t important. What is important is what the destination – and the way it’s shared – says about you.
A holiday is the perfect stage to perform status, by jetting off to the right (most popular) destinations or by photographing iconic landmarks.
In the social media age, we can expect to be bombarded with photos, reels and videos of holiday content every summer – sun-drenched beaches, sunset cocktails, mountain vistas and smiling families who appear to have achieved the perfect blend of leisure, self-care and cultural sophistication.
In this, the modern holiday has become less about encountering a place and more about signalling that you know where to go, how to look, and how to curate the experience for an audience. We follow a certain holiday script. This is known as the tourist gaze.
The American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen described this over a century ago: the affluent signal status through what he called “conspicuous consumption”.
And this performance pressure helps explain a peculiar taboo: we rarely admit to having a bad holiday.
Why we can’t admit to a bad holiday
To say a holiday was stressful, disappointing or simply ordinary disrupts the moral script of travel as inherently enriching and restorative. It challenges the idea that holidays are not just leisure but proof of a life well lived.
Taking a holiday – and all the myriad choices that come into play in the decision – has a lot to do with signalling taste, class and status.
The choice of holiday destination, restaurant, even the “aesthetic” of the trip all function as cultural capital. And the idea that all of this can sum up to a bad experience can be seen as “failure” or to have morally erred.
As in any performance, there’s little room for error, lest there be great disappointment. And the stakes now are higher than ever.
A bad holiday can feel like a step backwards in a person’s identity building – in this case, the identity of cultural sophistication and being “well traveled”.
Therefore, the bad holiday must be carefully curated online, so as not to reveal its true nature. This is what is called “impression management” – the way we consciously shape how others see us by controlling what we show and what we hide.
We curate our “front stage” selves for an audience, concealing the mundane or messy behind the scenes. Social media turns holidays into content and travellers into performers. The trip must not only be enjoyed. It must be seen to be enjoyed.
And when everyone is having the best holiday ever (online) that pressure compounds. To return from Bali or Paris having had an awful time is practically heretical. A character flaw. A personal failure at least.
In an era where image is everything, and people prioritise experiences over and above material possessions, holidays are some of our most visible and expensive acts.
They function as a form of prestige signalling; enabling us to demonstrate our social position, resources and means to others. Travelling to the “right” places and curating aesthetically pleasing images is a subtle way of communicating: I have the means, knowledge and cultural competency to do this properly.
What does it mean to go to Bali – and to come away disapointed?
Life with the Singh Sisters/Unsplash
Prestige signalling also helps explain why certain destinations become cultural gold. A trip to Sicily, Iceland or Kyoto carries different symbolic weight from a budget hotel in Surfers Paradise – not because one is necessarily more enjoyable or even better, but because one signals a higher level of social capital and prestige.
It’s not surprising then, that admitting to not enjoying a holiday carries an element of reputational risk.
It’s unrealistic to think that all travel will always be glorious, leisurely, enriching and rewarding. At some point and time, we’ll all find ourselves having a bad experience.
Perhaps it’s time we were honest about it, to ourselves and others.
Authors: Samuel Cornell, PhD Candidate in Public Health & Community Medicine, School of Population Health, UNSW Sydney
Read more https://theconversation.com/why-cant-we-admit-to-not-enjoying-a-bad-holiday-267978
