Paris Syndrome is the phenomenon where you feel extremely disappointed when you visit any overhyped destination.
To put it bluntly, your expectations are so h**h that there is no way that you can end up content.
You end up incredibly disappointed when you see what reality—with all of its noise and messiness, grit and grime—is truly like.
Looking at photos and videos of your dream destinations on social media can be a ton of fun.
However, you shouldn’t forget that they’re heavily curated, edited, and editorialized snapshots of reality. Just like you shouldn’t make assumptions about the lives of influencers and celebrities as shared online, so too you shouldn’t mistake the glitz and glamor of tourist spots for 100% reality.
In short, what you see isn’t quite what you get. People tend to want to show the best version of themselves online.
That’s a natural instinct. We want to be liked, adored, respected, and looked up to. However, if that desire for love and admiration gets out of hand, it can lead to a person taking their online persona too far.
Those influencers might be driven to create the illusion of the perfect life they live, when they might, in fact, be nowhere near perfection.
So, they hype their activities and trips up. They present every location they visit as something that is beyond awesome. Wow! 11 out of 10! Must see!
And, sure, those tourist spots might genuinely be great. But when you hype yourself up too much, you increase the chance of disappointing yourself because you expect something even grander. All because ‘great’ isn’t ‘perfect.’
Keeping your expectations in check is one of the best pieces of travel advice that we’d give anyone. It’s good to have standards. It’s good to want to have a quality experience. But one of the main pros and cons of travel is that there’s a lot of unpredictability and nuance involved.
Things aren’t black or white. There are lots of shades of gray. Good experiences that are a bit rough and chaotic. Bad experiences that, nonetheless, are pleasurable in small ways.
It’s always advisable to keep an open mind and be flexible. And it’s healthier to keep your expectations low(er) instead of h**h(er). Again: wanting quality is good. Being enthusiastic about your trip is good (travel is cool!).
But hype is the careless destroyer of otherwise quality experiences. In short, you have to remember that many influencers can use timing and angles (and Photoshop!) to their advantage. They can make tourist destinations look far better than they are.
