The dictatorship of desire: traveling to stop looking for oneself

If, as Proust said, reality lives within our desires, the challenge is to defend them from the echo of everyone else's.

The desire to travel is one of my very few constants and—couch potatoes, forgive me—a drive shared by many. The excitement is palpable on my skin when I begin to envision a departure. It’s an enthusiasm I feel for few things, an almost childlike impatience. And yet, if I imagine an exotic trip to Thailand, something begins to jar.

The reason? The destination no longer feels new or exciting enough. A mad inner dialogue has taken hold, dictated by the feeling that it isn't really worth it. It’s been so overdone in everyone else's itineraries that seeing it for myself feels pointless. Perhaps changing the destination would suffice, but that’s not the point. I realize that something intimate has been influenced from the outside. The algorithm within me has become so perfected and fast that, in record time, I find myself having desired to go there and, almost simultaneously, having written it off as "cliché and predictable." All without even searching for a flight.

The ghost in my head—the one that appears every time I start overthinking—clears its throat, prepares its monologue, and then, in a condescending tone, begins:

"My dear, there was a time when digital platforms merely recorded you. They were imperfect, clumsy mirrors that reflected your tastes with a delay, as if waiting for instructions. Then something changed. They matured into complex systems and began to anticipate: no longer simple observers, but silent architects. And so, quietly, the power dynamic shifted. While you boast about your critical thinking, they have taken something more personal: the direction of your imagination. Like underground currents, they flow beneath your days: they don't jerk you; they tilt you. They shift the axis of what attracts you by just a few degrees, and you, like sensitive compasses, follow that variation without noticing. This is where it gets serious: they have reached deep enough to touch your desires—the very fabric of who you are. Tweak after tweak, your dreams have begun to look alike, and with them, your travels have ended up painted in the same colors."

As much as I hate to admit it—despite a few catastrophic and conspiratorial flourishes—it’s hard to prove him wrong. The ghost is right. Even the urge to travel, which always felt deeply authentic, now seems polluted on too many fronts, like a desire that is more induced than my own. Feeding the fire is social anxiety. The stepmother of my generation, social anxiety devastates by pigeonholing everything, imprisoning us in defined role-plays, labeling even what should be the quintessential act of excitement and liberation.

When did traveling "go viral"? Precisely when it became a new synonym for success: having the money for improbable destinations to visit at improbable times. A "dream life" is one that allows you, financially and in terms of time, to roam the world. The perfect job is the one you can do remotely from a remote island, alternating intense calls with a swim in the ocean. What a powerful image. Too bad for the layer of anxiety that tends to cover it. Hyper-connectivity allows us to give up nothing (or so we think!): work hard, stay ambitious in ideas and revenue, without missing out on exploring distant landscapes. The flexibility to always be elsewhere is not an option; it’s as if, implicitly, those who don't reach that standard have somehow settled or haven't dreamed enough. We travel so we don't have to justify a life that doesn't move enough. What could have been a niche fantasy has grown exponentially and overwhelmed us. Thus, travel has fit perfectly into the success-failure paradigm, becoming another yardstick to measure who "makes it" and who stays behind; not for what the journey itself gives back to us, but for what it says about us. Obsessed with these thoughts, we have ended up traveling just to avoid feeling excluded. We line up in single file, ready to have identical prototypes of dreams and desires glued onto us—which, deep down, make us feel safe.

This phenomenon has a name: normative internalization. It isn't superficiality; it’s a documented cognitive effect. The constant observation of others' lives doesn't just change our mood; it reprograms our internal parameters of what we consider a "worthy" life. This is how the overexposure of travel has warped its meaning. It is a cruel mechanism that stuffs us with stimuli, and we—hungry and bulimic, anxious to do everything and waste no time—swallow without assimilating anything, only to vomit it up seconds later. The famous FOMO—fear of missing out—now has so much power that it bends our deepest desires, leaving us confused about what we actually want.

What percentage of our desire to travel is genuine, and how much of it is to show we have a "good life"? Are we seeking nourishment or consensus? Do I really want to go to the other side of the world, or just appear stunning? What is our list of priorities? What do we think makes us serene, happy, satisfied?

Having been fed the answers from the outside, we’ve stopped asking the questions from within. Our inner voice has grown thinner and thinner, impossible to trace; and with it, our identity as well.

The paradox is that we often decide to leave with that very intent: to "look for ourselves," to "find ourselves." In moments of lostness and frustration, one must go thousands of miles away, far from habits and certainties, to question everything and understand "who one is"—so says the Bible of our generation.

How clever we are: we never miss a beat. Olympic champions of problem-solving, incredibly hasty in giving ourselves solutions. The algorithm has served us another saving interpretation of travel, and we devoured it. Yes, because it all makes sense, as long as we don't convince ourselves that there is an actual answer to be found: a deity to consult, like Oedipus before the Oracle of Delphi. How can we truly think that the pieces of our puzzle are scattered around us, waiting to be recovered so we can finally feel "solved"? It is a project destined to fail, a defeat foretold. Chasing a fixed idea of "who we are" is not only useless but ineffective, because it fails to capture the complexity of our identities. It’s reassuring to think so, because what is static feels manageable. It’s an illusion of calm in an adrenaline-fueled life. A mother's caress. But there is no definitive version of ourselves, and continuing to chase it makes us slaves to a perverse and tireless circuit that immobilizes us far more than staying physically still. Applying ready-made instruction manuals to fill such intimate doubts is the best way to stop dealing with ourselves.

We are, and always will be, in evolution, whether we like it or not. We can make a virtue of this or build a cage. We are mobile, provisional, adaptive identities. Our self is relational, redefining itself in relation to others and the outside world, and as such, it is in constant motion.

"It should be much scarier to be so barren as to demand a single version of yourself, and to claim you've already found it," the ghost grumbles, as always out of time, but never out of place.

The point is to abandon the idea of ourselves as equations to be solved or projects to be completed, and to reclaim our mutability. The only way not to succumb to external pressures is to accept instability as an act of freedom, and to direct it toward reasoned routes that truly belong to us. From this perspective, travel is not the problem, but it’s not the solution either. We don't travel to find ourselves, but to remind ourselves that changing is the only thing we truly know how to do: to let go into uncertainty and abandon this crushing rationality. Choosing day by day who to be and what to do with one's time means enduring, at every crossroads, the sacrifice of the road not taken. But, I argue, it is also the only way to feel in touch with the life we are creating. On the other hand, if there must be a director for our desires, it’s better if the script is in our hands.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see him gloating, like an accomplice: "Maybe it’ll turn out to be a dramedy, rather than an Indiana Jones flick."

Yes, we carry this burden: being neck-deep in the insidious ecosystem of social media. And perhaps, precisely because this narrative has finally exhausted us, we should reduce the space we grant it. Every generation has had its monsters, and ours—however invisible—deserves our best effort to dodge the contagion.

And for God’s sake, let's not let it crawl inside our skin.

---

The dictatorship of desire: traveling to stop looking for oneself