Is too much information and too much choice creating a breed of over-anxious consumers, travellers who fear missing out on some stuff while doing others?
Going on your dream holiday is a little bit like being faced with your teenage crush. Everything your hyper emotional heart has ever desired is staring back at you, though you stand frozen, unable to make eye contact and terrified at the possibility that they won’t live up to your expectations (or if being totally honest, the fear you won’t live up to theirs).
There’s a certain level of pressure we put on ourselves to make it perfect and, as is often the case, this is what leads to our downfall. It could be in simple things like building up your appetite for a favourite restaurant you used to visit and being let down by its distinctly average tastes or something deeper, like finding that a neighbourhood you once fell in love with had changed over time or even totally disappeared.
At its worst, it’s when you realise that the things you chose to do during your precious time didn’t turn out to be as good as the alternatives.
No matter what activity I am doing, a little thought at the back of my mind itches and I start to wonder… what could I be doing instead of this? Are we just heading towards another tourist trap? It might be a mild form of anxiety that is totally unique to me, but I doubt that greatly. I can almost guarantee that anyone who suffers with vacation-linked decision-making has gone through this or at least a very similar struggle!
What I mean to say is that the fear that we are not making the most of whatever we do often bogs us down. We have this insatiable curiosity to know what the alternatives are and whether it is too late to back out of whatever commitment we have made to doing something or being somewhere else. It’s like the different mental wrestling of a decision behind whether to order a la carte or from the set menu at a restaurant.
With a set menu’s hidden culinary compromises of taste and variety, it offers less choice and therefore less worry over picking the wrong thing. An a la carte menu brings a world of struggle with so many layers of choices – meat or fish? Should you skip the starter? Would you regret ordering or skipping dessert more?
Prior to my trip to Perth, each group member was given the choice of three tours to embark on; each designed to showcase the different qualities of Western Australia. I opted for the most popular choice, exploring the Coral Coast – visiting famous natural sites like Shell Beach, Monkey Mia (for its dolphins) and the Pinnacles. The others involved introducing Perth and its surrounding area and the last explored the wine regions of Margaret River and Albany.
To keep in contact with the others once we split up on our separate familiarisations, a WhatsApp group was set up. It wasn’t particularly useful other than a social means of sending photos of what we were doing and seeing how other trips went.
Though everyone was in high spirits and excited about what lay ahead, there was an underlying, unspoken competition running as to who were having the best trip. Night one saw the chat bombarded with carefully composed photos of dinner, with day two seeing uploads of stunning scenery or expensive freebies from local producers. It was clear that everyone seemed to be having a superb time on their own respective trips but we were all equally curious to find out what we might have experienced had we opted for a different tour.
It opens up the question of – how do we know when we are ‘done’ visiting a place? Do we ever reach a moment where we think, “okay, now I’ve seen everything”? When we pay attention to what else we could have done with our days, we make a brief mental note that the next time we visit (if there even is a next time), that there are still plenty of things to do.
The only real issue comes in whether we feel passionately enough about those things to plan another trip back to the same place. Or, do we resign ourselves to having ‘missed out’ on something, accept that we can never truly have it all and just make do with what experience we did have?
