Last winter, I did the noble thing and got off social media. I lacked the inner strength to delete my accounts fully, so I settled for removing apps from my phone and enlisting my husband to change my Facebook password. It worked. I stopped scrolling and liking and generally monitoring the lives of people I do not actually know. I felt better — less inadequate, more present, vaguely morally superior.
The problem is it’s July now, and I just returned from a really great vacation.
If you take a summer vacation and don’t post about it, did it even happen? I have a visceral urge to pull up my Instagram — the app is gone, but I’ve figured out a workaround that involves Googling a dog influencer’s account, then toggling over to my own profile — and curate a perfect vacation carousel.
You know the one. Blurry selfie with husband, beaming faces close together. Posed photo of children against scenic backdrop. Overhead shot of colorful local food.
When I was on social media, I monitored and digested such posts as though they were required reading on a college syllabus. I liked feeling as though I knew what everyone in my orbit — co-workers, friends, some mom in Raleigh I found on the Explore tab — was up to, and how my days might compare. I shared my own photos on my children’s birthdays, my wedding anniversary and, always, vacations.
I know that craving the high of posting, of all those comments and hearts, is lame, and likely indicative of low self-esteem. And yet there’s something I desperately miss about sharing travel photos. Here is the person I want to be: carefree, adventurous, global. The fun mom who lets her kids climb on dangerous play structures overseas. (They’re fine!) The together mom who did not forget to buy Harry Potter Warner Bros. Studio Tour tickets five months in advance. (By the grace of two calendar reminders and two alarms.)
Sharing makes it so, somehow. It freezes time, too. If I don’t post, the photos are still there, swirling in the jumble that is my iCloud account. But when I winnow them down to just what I want to remember, when I can tap on my profile and see them lined up there, it feels sturdy, like some unimpeachable record of my life.
Of course, one person’s vacation photos are another person’s existential crisis. I used to follow an heiress in Texas — she seemed really nice! — but three years of watching her sail on yachts to various European destinations did something to my brain. I forgot that I am prone to seasickness and homesickness and, most crucially, that I do not have a trust fund. Why was I not on a yacht? Where was my Aperol spritz?
“You should write the next ‘Harry Potter,’” my husband suggested, surely thinking of the total revenue generated by all those studio tour tickets. If I wanted to see the Amalfi Coast by sea — or really, by any method other than my phone screen — a significant licensing deal would have to be involved.
Bombarded with images, who among us can look away? Jain Edwards, a British comedian, has a bit on Instagram where she explains what 2025 is like to someone from the ’90s. (I only saw it because my best friend texted it to me, I swear.)
“You know how like nowadays looking at people’s holiday photos is like a big chore that like you don’t really want to do but you do it just to be polite?” she says, to this hypothetical naïve person from the past. “Well, in the future, in 2025, that’s what you’ll spend most of your time doing.”
It’ll ruin your life, she adds. But “you just gotta spend hours watching videos of other people’s meals.”
I don’t pin all of this on TikTok and Instagram Reels and smartphones; I, for one, have long had an intrinsic proclivity for upward comparisons and being easily influenced. Back in the golden days of blogs, I read a series of beautiful posts about a young couple’s trip to Bali. I decided this would be our first international adventure when my husband and I married. We saved and we went, and it was cool, but it did not feel like how it looked on my desktop computer — of course it didn’t. Images don’t translate to some analogous emotion. Plus, the couple had a really nice camera.
A dozen years on, and internet-fueled tourism has marred so many places. Kyoto is swamped with tourists; Barcelona residents are priced out and protesting. I met my husband in the latter city in 2007, and while it’s possible we were part of the problem, there was a limit to the damage you could do then. Airbnb did not exist; I carried not an iPhone but a little silver digital camera. We hung out in our hostel common room, then ventured out to eat tomato bread on Las Ramblas and drink a beer outdoors. I didn’t take a single photo with my little camera that night — because I was too shy to ask him to pose with me, because I wanted to look cool and nonchalant, because I was having too much fun. So many of my best days come with no photos.
I try to be in the moment with our children now, to keep my eyes locked on the ballet recital instead of on a tiny screen recording the ballet recital. Eventually, though, my eyes will drift to all the other parents snapping away — they’re often crouched down in front of me, contorting themselves for the perfect shot — and I worry that I’m doing something wrong, missing some parental duty, like how I never sign up to volunteer on Field Day. I pick up my phone and open the camera app. I want the memories, too.
On our recent summer vacation, I decided I was going to err on the side of the photos. We were in London for a week, and I spent high tea and tube rides and walks through Hyde Park wrestling with portrait mode, beseeching the children to smile.
My effort was rewarded. Each night as they slept in the next room, their two twin beds pushed together, I scrolled through photos from the day and marveled at the best of my son and daughter. How grown-up he looked, holding a striped mug of green tea to his lips. How joyful she was, flinging a Frisbee, daisy sunglasses perched on her nose.
Armed with 187 keepers, I tried making a private album on my phone. I tried siphoning my Instagram energy into the digital frame we got my in-laws last year, entering into an unspoken competition with my sisters-in-law over who could upload more adorable grandchild photos. Nothing felt the same as sharing on the socials.
And then it came to me, the most obvious throwback of an answer: I needed an actual, physical photo album.
I laid out the book online, and it arrived in the mail a few days ago. It’s wrapped in linen, the pages thick. Something I can hold in my hands. Something to hold on to.
I’m putting it on my coffee table, where my friends are sure to see it.
Rachel Feintzeig is a journalist at work on a book about staring down 40.
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