Warren Buffett once famously said, when everyone is doing one thing, do the other. It’s something I try and keep in mind whenever I feel a herd instinct come over me. It’s something I do particularly over the holiday season – while everyone’s travelling, I have a “homeliday”.
A holiday at home is one of the most under-rated things ever, I reckon. Yes, there’s also “staycation” but that usually means you check into a fancy hotel or resort where you live and enjoy the delights of not being at home even though they try their best to make you feel at home.
But really there’s no place like home, and there’s nothing like staying home and having a holiday. Which means do everything you’d do in a resort abroad – sleep in, have a late breakfast, go to the pool or beach, swim, walk, whatever takes your fancy, grab a light lunch, read, have a snooze, go to a bar to have sunset cocktails and dream of what you’re going to have for dinner. Oh yes, catch a movie or two.
And if you miss your friends, well, you can always go to social media and travel vicariously with them through the amazing, awesome photos they keep posting – some generously sharing up to 12 posts a day.
On social media, pictures are not worth a thousand words.
Through them, I’ve been all round the world – Bali, Phuket, Spain, Japan, Los Angeles, New York, Australia, New Zealand, Cuba, Florida, New Caledonia, Maldives and remote islands you’ve never heard of.
Now you could either look at these photos and get eaten up with envy and jealousy and get depressed or you could get inspired and say, got to go there someday.
Or you could give yourself a little smile and know that despite what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words, actually on social media, it isn’t.
On social media, the pictures being posted of awesome scenery and awesome experiences do not tell the whole truth. In the days of old, when we looked at brochures of pretty pictures, we knew they were from companies trying to sell us something – now our friends are all trying to sell us something and maybe we believe them more than we would companies, but as they say, buyer beware.
Travel, we all know, is messy. It’s part of why we love it. Airport queues, lost baggage, bad service, rude people, bug bites, mosquitoes, bad weather. I caught up with a couple of friends who had been posting pictures of their holidays and that’s when it all comes out.
In Cairns, you can’t swim in that big blue ocean because of gazillions of sea lice. In Western Australia, where a friend stayed on a farm, his two kids were sick most of the time and he spent more time looking after them than playing with the animals on the farm. In Togean Islands, you swim through gazillions of jelly fish – except these Indonesian species don’t sting you, but you could end up killing them with your sunblock.
I once sat on a cushion at Made Warung in Seminyak, Bali (a very popular eating spot) and ended up with hundreds of flea bites on my legs. Did I post that? No. I posted pictures of the food, gushing, “Amazing nasi campur. Must have in Bali.”
There’s been a lot of talk about how we now live in a “post-truth” era where truth doesn’t really matter now. It’s becoming hard to distinguish between real news and fake news. Everyone’s got their own spin. Things are edited to tell the story we want to tell and share. We all put out our versions of our truth.
If we’re doing it at our level, imagine what the experts are capable of.
Anyway, with the “homeliday” over, it was time to get back into work mode this week and face reality. No more “La La Land (great movie by the way, made me fall in love with jazz all over again), time to catch up on the news, real or fake.
So like millions of my fellow Earthlings, I watched President Obama’s farewell speech where he called on every citizen to be vigilant and thanked his wife and daughters and Donald Trump’s first press conference where he called Buzzfeed “a failing pile of garbage”, CNN “fake news” and likened US Intelligence Agencies to “Nazi Germany” and marvelled at the contrast between the two men.
I wished I had stayed in “La La Land”. Or maybe this is the new La La Land we live in.
