I'm Not an Influencer. So Why Do I Feel Pressure to Post Holiday Photos?

I’ve always loved long-haul flights. As someone who struggles to relax, the forced idle time to do little else but stare out the window, wondering who in my life would be most devastated were the plane to go down, is a vanishingly rare opportunity for rest and reflection, and no opportunity to “better” spend my time.

That changed on a recent flight when I felt the all-too-familiar tug to be productive. Instead of flicking through the in-flight entertainment like any sensible person, I found myself hunched over my phone, sorting through holiday photos to post.

There were sunsets and street scenes. A heaving plate of garlicky prawns. A beach I’d snapped from every conceivable angle. Hundreds of photos that should stir wistful nostalgia for a trip I’d spent months anticipating and days promising myself I’d stay present for. Instead, scouring a gallery of images no one forced me to take, I felt overwhelmed. A flight that should have been an extension of the trip became the site of a small social media centre.

All of this feels—and is—ridiculous, because I’m not an influencer. I don’t make money from Instagram. Brands aren’t waiting for my content. Nobody is demanding a holiday recap. In fact, when I do post these holiday dumps, I often add an apologetic disclaimer of sorts: “You might want to mute me now, ha ha!” to signal I’m not completely mad and self-involved, that I do have some sense of humility.

And yet, every time I’m away, I find myself facing the same peculiar conundrum: do I post in real time and feel less present, or wait until I’m home when suddenly my memories become admin? Neither feels particularly satisfying. The obvious third option (to not post at all) doesn’t feel like an option at all.

There are photos to sort through, stories to catch up on, carousels to curate. An entirely self-imposed pressure to post before the moment somehow becomes stale. I’ve started thinking of it as the psychological admin of documenting joy.

All of this, and for a few thousand followers. If people like me, who don’t make a living online, feel obligated to narrativise their holidays, what does that say about how normalised this performance has become?

“Ourselves become shaped by public performance,” Sherry Turkle tells me. If anyone can explain why a holiday can feel unfinished until it’s posted online, it’s Turkle. For more than three decades, the MIT sociologist and author has explored how technology subtly alters our relationship with attention, memory and the self.

When I asked Turkle why so many of us feel compelled to document meaningful moments immediately, rather than trusting the experience itself to be enough, the response was hauntingly familiar: “We don’t feel we’ve had the experience until we share it.”

It tallies with writer Jia Tolentino’s observations. In “The I in the Internet”, one of the essays in Trick Mirror, she writes that as more people began to register their existence digitally, “a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist.”

Why do we feel pressure to post holiday photos?

I thought back to all of the moments that should have affirmed to me the majesty of the natural world—seeing an orca erupt from the ocean as the sun slipped into the Tofino harbour, say—but instead raced to pull out my phone, practically salivating over how well I expected this to ‘perform’ on social media.

Now, my memory of that night is inextricably bound to the 10-second reel I posted. In my mind, Rainy (that was the whale’s name) dove back into the deep sea just as quickly as he’d emerged, but when I recently backed up my phone and watched the unedited video, I realised he’d actually put on quite the performance, charting across the length of Vancouver Island harbour until the spray from his blowhole was all that was visible in the distance.

How social media shapes our memories

“There’s growing evidence that what we share on social media ends up being what we remember best,” explains Kathryn Jezer-Morton, author of The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. “This makes sense if you think about how we might revisit an image to see what people are commenting on it, or who’s liking it.” A single image, she says, can end up standing in for an entire evening in our minds.

Jezer-Morton argues that the more time we spend immersed in the visual language of social media, the more we search for opportunities to reproduce it in our own lives. We learn what an aspirational holiday or a beautiful moment looks like. “When an experience succeeds in this way, we think of it as fun,” she says. “But really, the ‘fun’ isn’t the experience itself … but rather the feeling of having stage-managed a momentary scene that will appeal to other people.”

Hearing this, my mind scanned through my own camera roll—and Instagram grid. Pet nat in glasses branded with the cool font of a local wine bar. Ballet flats posed on a cobbled street. Endless aesthetically pleasing details that say nary a thing about me as a person and aren’t, if I’m being honest, especially interesting to me save for the fact that I’m living out my own For You page. Truthfully, I’m not sure if I’m documenting my own life or just emulating the visuals I’ve absorbed from thousands of other people online.

The supposed satisfaction, Jezer-Morton argues, “has nothing to do with you, or even with the people you’re hanging out with. It has to do with people who aren’t present in the room.” The result, she says, is “fundamentally alienating.”

Are we turning our holidays into content?

And yet even when I know this to be true, the compulsion remains. “If I don’t post it now, I never will, and it’ll drive me mad,” one traveller told me on a recent press trip as she pulled out her phone to capture (and then quickly ignore) the verdant vista sprawling out in front of us.

And it’s not just those of us with content creator-adjacent jobs either. “I can’t explain it, I just need to get it posted,” one friend, with 331 followers, stressed to me. Another told me how she feels “guilty” about wasting good photos. This struck a noisy chord with me.

You don't have to be an influencer to feel this pressure

I wasn’t always cynical about this. In fact, I remember downloading Instagram for the first time with genuine excitement.

My uni flatmate had shown me a selection of photos on a new app I thought was the height of cool: a cupcake with a perfect swirl of frosting, a syrupy cocktail from a long-since shuttered Camden bar, and a new style of self-portraiture we didn’t yet have a name for. I’ve loved taking photographs for as long as I’ve lacked the technical skill to be particularly good at it, and I was instantly drawn to these ready-made filters with fun names like Valencia and X-Pro II.

I decided I needed Instagram for my upcoming holiday. By New Year’s Eve, I was posting from my then-boyfriend’s family home in Switzerland. I remember one especially “arty” image—snow-tipped fir trees flanking an icy clearing as though leading to Narnia—attracting a fistful of likes and feeling a new creative medium unfurling in front of me.

Armed with my new iPhone 5, I went off in search of Instagrammable moments with the zeal of Lee Miller documenting war-torn Europe. The aim wasn’t to make my meagre following jealous, or—heaven forbid—to build a brand. I simply enjoyed experimenting with a new creative outlet at a time when I was desperately trying to find my own creativity.

Early Instagram felt more playful than performative. It’s hard to imagine now, but it felt democratising. Suddenly, anyone could turn an ordinary photograph into something atmospheric, and it was fun finding things worth documenting. It made me seek out new experiences and, at that time, actually experience them rather than simply document.

But somewhere between the rise of influencers, creator culture and the relentless pressure to be visible online, holidays (and everything else) became content opportunities, and photos became inventory waiting to be processed.

According to Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, the behaviours once associated primarily with influencers have seeped into the rest of us.

“Like social media personalities, ordinary users may feel compelled to mine their lives for content,” she tells me, describing a culture in which people stage photographs, tag products and project themselves as personal brands. Platforms themselves encourage this behaviour, continually prompting us to “put ourselves out there.”

Duffy explains that many of us have also been socialised to see self-presentation through the lens of work. What we post online might get us fired, but it could also get us hired. The highly curated posts that dominate social media, she suggests, reflect wider economic uncertainty, while platforms and brands continue to encourage what she calls “aspirational labour”: the idea that freely sharing content and growing an audience might one day pay off.

It’s an observation that helps explain why people like me, with a few thousand followers rather than a management team, can feel oddly burdened by documenting our downtime.

The result is a strange contradiction. We talk more than ever about being present. Wellness culture encourages mindfulness. Travel writers (I, too, have been guilty of this) extol the virtues of slowing down. Yet many of us move through our holidays with one eye on an imaginary future audience who might eventually consume them.

On a recent trip, I spent half my time trying to stay present, and the other half mentally scheduling future Instagram posts complete with captions about being present.

The experience and its documentation become inseparable.

Can we enjoy a holiday without posting it?

The annoying part is that I genuinely enjoy sharing my travels. I like photography. I like storytelling. I like seeing what friends have been up to. The problem isn’t posting; it’s the sense that a holiday isn’t over until it’s been posted, and the feeling that there’s the holiday, and then there’s the documented second version of the holiday that has to be curated later. Sometimes the two are wildly different.

A few years ago, I tacked on a few days at my boyfriend’s aunt’s house after a group trip to Spain. We stayed on the sofa of her one-bedroom apartment in the middle of a golf resort up the coast from Alicante, packed to the rafters with sunburnt Brits, but you wouldn’t know it from the pictures I posted.

Ironically, the dearth of content opportunities made that stay one of the most relaxing, and in turn, memorable trips of recent years. Now, when I look at those photos, of which there are few, I don’t feel overwhelmed wondering what to do with them so long after the trip. I look at them to remember. After all, isn’t that what photos are for?