Stretched out on a sun lounger, beating the heat beneath one of the white pergolas on the balcony of Lo Scalo in Puglia, I find myself not admiring the view of the Adriatic Sea before me, but instead, the older man to my right. He’s around 60, sunglasses on, and has finished taking drags of a cigarette before leisurely working through a dish of olives, popping one at a time and washing each salty bite down with sips of his white wine. He looks like he’s lived a life: He’s a bit too tan, has a few questionable tattoos, and is sporting a low belly pudge that tells me he enjoys indulging without much negotiation, but what I can’t help but notice is how free he seems. He’s relaxed in his body, seemingly oblivious to what’s happening around him.
And it’s not just him, it’s virtually everyone around me—almost all older people. They have a certain ease about them that has all but disappeared from my Millennial peers, and even more so from younger generations. None of them has their phone out. No one is taking incessant pictures of themselves or the view. There isn’t a selfie stick in sight. And I can’t help but think maybe their sense of ease comes from actually being here, present, not in some fictitious future where they imagine themselves posting European summer thirst traps on Instagram and watching the likes roll in.
It's almost comical to consider how out of hand this has all gotten, and how synonymous travel has become with image. It used to be culture first, traveler second—you went somewhere to be changed by it. Now it seems to be the other way around: the traveler is the subject, and the culture is just the backdrop. Who needs the Adriatic Sea in focus when your tiny waist and plump ass are the stars of the show, and who cares if you have to use FaceTune to achieve the ideal proportions, am I right?
But none of this is actually very comical at all. With all the blessings that come with being a Millennial—a childhood free of cellphones and social media, yet the young adulthood domination of the platforms and the simultaneous knowledge sharing it’s given us—the trap of social media comparison seems to be one of our curses; in everyday life, of course, but also when it comes to travel.
It turns out we are no longer traveling at all; we are traveling inside an image of ourselves.
What I used to think were normal, passing comments from myself and friends about feeling bloated, missing our workout routines, or fearing incessant amounts of sugar while on the road, have grown in frequency and intent. I noticed it on this trip to Italy, made up of several girls’ trips stitched together into a continuous flow of seeing multiple friends in myriad places. While staying at dream locations like Borgo Egnazia in Savelletri di Fasano, Don Totu in San Cassiano, and Palazzo Daniele in Gagliano del Capo certainly controlled much of the narrative, at almost every touchpoint, the inevitable seemed to happen: Either me or one of my friends would somehow get triggered and thrust out of the enjoyment of travel, and almost every time, it had to do with our bodies.
According to the Mayo Clinic, this kind of talk teeters into the realm of body dysmorphic disorder, a mental health condition in which someone can’t stop thinking about one or more perceived defects or flaws in their appearance—most often something so minor that it’s unnoticeable to others. Research shows that body dysmorphia affects as many as 1 in 50 people, and social media–fueled vacation culture may exacerbate it: a Forbes Health–OnePoll survey of 2,000 U.S. adults revealed that 51% of Gen Z and 42% of Millennials feel pressure to look a certain way before a trip, and 56% have avoided vacations due to body image concerns.
I’ve never not taken a trip because of my body image, but it’s a thought that crosses my mind nearly every time I travel. My struggle has never been that I necessarily feel ugly. It’s that I never fully shake the sense that my body doesn’t quite match the version of me I think I should be—a hot girl on vacation, effortlessly perfect against some sun-drenched backdrop. I feel beautiful and never quite beautiful enough, at least not enough to share it, especially raw and unfiltered.
It seems I’m not alone. Psychiatrist Ashwini Nadkarni, MD, who cares for patients at Harvard Medical School-associated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, sees an even more damaging connection with social media filters and how they allow people to create and share idealized versions of themselves. "We’re not just comparing ourselves to others anymore—we’re comparing ourselves to our idealized selves as a result of social media filters,” says Dr. Nadkarni in a recent post. She believes this comparison can be especially harmful for people with body dysmorphia, as they may see their filtered self as how they should look. As a result, their real appearance may seem even more flawed.
So what happens when someone’s carefully planned routine is shaken up during travel? The body dysmorphia monster rears its head. There is no longer the precise set of barriers that keep body dysmorphia at bay—workout schedules, meal prep, and the daily structures that keep self-image intact—and when you layer that vulnerability onto a culture of heavily filtered, meticulously edited travel content that bends reality, the results are almost predictable. At best, the filters and editing tools are ruining our travels; at worst, they’re ruining our lives.
On my trip through Italy, I dove into this topic with a group of girlfriends at a villa we rented in Sicily. After we went hard into the cliché and took about a thousand half-naked portraits of our silhouettes as the sun set, we had an open and honest conversation, and it was like the bubble of body dysmorphia finally burst. The masks came fully off, and we discussed it all. We’d all felt this way at some point. And some of us had even sought procedures and surgeries in pursuit of an impossible standard, all attempts to dress the same wound—and we ate and drank to our heart’s content while we talked about it. We arrived at something rare: a shared understanding of how deeply conditioned we'd been to think something was innately wrong with us.
But the full-circle moment came at my next stop, San Montano in Ischia, where I attempted to enjoy the healing thermal pools in a bikini, trying not to inventory every portion of spaghetti alle vongole and pistachio gelato I’d happily consumed, my soft tummy the evidence. On my last day, despite how I felt, my friend and I took a boat trip around the island with Ascanio Charter Boat and Yachts, and I felt unexpectedly free. That night, I stood on the balcony of our clifftop Lighthouse Suite—a stunning two-villa complex with a glass house living area offering panoramic views of the Tyrrhenian Sea—as I watched one of the best fireworks shows of my life while my friend and I waited to go out with two men we’d met a few days earlier. My body felt pudgy, and I was sure I had gained weight (I hadn’t), but I showed up anyway—and had one of the most memorable nights of my trip.
After this trip, I decided to put an end to this once and for all. It’s like I’d finally hit the bottom of it—and when I reached the true depth of feeling this way, it lost its power over me. I stopped blaming myself for whatever this perceived weakness said about me. My body was never a problem to fix. It’s the culture around it that needs to change—the impossible standards, the Ozempic-thinned bodies setting a new baseline for what “healthy” looks like on vacation, and the social media filters wreaking havoc on our psyche.
I recently tested my theory by going off Instagram for about four months. For the first time in my adult life, I was fully present. Not performing presence, but actually inside my life. I stopped photographing my travels—the meals, the views, the carefully angled version of myself inside these scenes—and something happened as a result: I regained this childlike approach to life I thought I had lost, and I started to love myself more. Not because I had changed anything about myself, but because I’d stopped measuring myself against a version of me that doesn’t exist. I remembered what travel actually felt like before I turned it into content—the way a place can get inside you when you're not busy trying to capture it.
A few weeks ago, on a beach in Baja California Sur, drinking a margarita with one of my best friends, I finally realized I’d given myself the same freedom as that old man in Puglia: the pleasure of being fully present somewhere, while simultaneously belonging to no one’s feed, not even my own.
