Smoke, social media and the shame of the perfect holiday shot

My holiday plans went up in smoke this year. Days before we were supposed to catch a train to Arcachon, I watched as the Gironde wildfires tore through south-west France. The blazes were on the same trajectory as the place we too were heading towards. With 24 hours to go, and an evacuation notice, we scrambled to find a new Airbnb.

Boo-hoo. The experience was but a pale inconvenience in the face of so much grief. Another house was found. As so many of us have discovered this summer — from Cap Ferret to Spokane and the Cairngorms — the scorching reality of global warming will incinerate the best-laid plans.

What was more peculiar was the feeling of personal failure that preoccupied my thoughts. In my meticulously organised holiday, I had already curated the experience in my mind. I had trawled social-media feeds to find the best beach spots, cabanes and perches, booked restaurants and memorised the tides. For weeks, I had casually scrolled “for you” pages primed with “creator-produced” Cap Ferret content. Not only was I primed to have The Perfect Holiday, I had largely art-directed what it would look like in my subsequent social-media posts.

That “for you” page was now transformed into an environmental horror. The only tags for Arcachon and its environs showed firefighters doing battle with vast towers of flames. My feed became a scroll of pictures showing charred homes and empty beaches, or tourists sitting under amber-coloured, smoke-filled skies.

I went away and switched off social media: what content creators like to call a digital detox so that they can focus on nurturing their “authentic selves”. In truth, I felt slightly disgusted. I felt sick and guilty for being so devastated about my minor holiday disruption, and even sicker that the world was going up in smoke.

As the editor of a luxury lifestyle magazine, it is my job to curate things. Our editorial mantra is “visuals first”. Professionally, it has been ingrained in me that a story lives or dies by the images alongside which it runs. But I think my curatorial obsession runs deeper. As a child, my favourite thing to do when visiting friends’ houses would be to pull out all their family albums and pore over pictures of their birthdays, Christmases and holidays. Doing so elicited a delicious mix of envy, aspiration and judgment: I would scrutinise every detail of their outfits, the quality of their beach villas, the effort of their birthday cakes.

How very proto-Pinterest. Social media had me at hello. The idea that we would one day be able to pull out anybody’s family album and scrutinise their stories would have been beyond my wildest dreams.

In her new book The Story of Your Life, New York Magazine columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton looks at “how social media shapes the way we experience everything”. In the course of her research, and interviews with hundreds of everyday social-media users, she argues that our relationship with social media has become so entwined with our self-worth that it now shapes everything we do.

Not only was I primed for The Perfect Holiday, I had largely art-directed what it would look like in my social media posts

Not only was I primed for The Perfect Holiday, I had largely art-directed what it would look like in my social media posts

“Most of us are accustomed to the notion that social platforms are built for maximisation of profit, and that our idle moments of scrolling are ruled by algorithms that serve the market,” she writes. “What we’re perhaps less aware of is the extent to which we’ve internalised the algorithm’s rules in our own posting habits . . . we seek out popular narrative arcs to imitate the popular stories we see in our feeds.”

Jezer-Morton’s book divides our life experiences into different chapters to show how social media has ameliorated the rubble of human experience and turned us into generic avatars. She looks at reproduction (and the cult of the gender reveal), the home and its atomisation (thanks to the rise of “back kitchens” and “man caves” that preserve the curated sanctity of the Pinterest-friendly space). She writes about celebrations, and the Insta-party with its exaggerated sets. And she writes about “struggle”, in which life must be presented as a series of challenges and personal milestones that one must smash.

One chapter is dedicated to vacations, which seems especially pertinent this month. Travel has always been perceived as spiritually or intellectually improving and it remains the domain of those who can afford to take breaks from “the bonds of work”. By sharing our pictures online, Jezer-Morton says, we are following in the great tradition of the 19th-century aristocrat, seeking self-enlightenment, showcasing our cultural values and proving that we “do shit” with our lives.

Our social-media avatars are self-obsessive, self-aggrandising, neutered of real nuance (the algorithm doesn’t reward “vague” or complicated) and mostly lies, concludes Jezer-Morton. And yet we still use it anyway. Gen Z may be more judicious with their sharing habits, but for those older generations, the curated feed has become a way of life.

I didn’t use social media at all for the first week of my newly convened holiday because I didn’t want to get into conversations about why I wasn’t where I should be, and also because I realised I had been clinging too dearly to the aspiration of a holiday and “the quality of its documentation”, rather than whether we would actually have fun. So I tried not to think about how to frame it and focused on doing it instead.

Naturally, it didn’t last long. The sunsets were too good. As I whipped out the phone to capture the ten millionth trip to the ice cream store on Île de Ré, I had already started planning the final carousel.

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