The Performance Trap

Anyone who’s been to the Hollywood Walk of Fame will tell you it’s nothing glamorous. If you’ve spent time in London, it’s like paving stars down the budget end of Oxford Street, flanked by shops selling mass-produced merch stamped with the London Underground logo. Only this time, it says Hollywood.

Why do all mass tourist destinations end up this way? Perhaps it’s because you’re so busy looking at the famous thing (in this case, the stars beneath your feet) that any stores you pass will only receive a sliver of your attention. At any rate, it’s a universal truth: tourist honeypots attract cookie-cutter souvenir shops.

The thing is, the more iconic the destination, the more likely it is to feel hollow when you arrive. Think battling your way through an army of Eiffel tower keyring-sellers to see the real thing, or queuing to catch a glimpse of a disappointingly mini Mona Lisa.

This is usually framed as a problem of overtourism. Too many people. Too many phones held aloft, capturing the same angles. Travel content on TikTok is up 410% since 2021, according to Anaïs Devaux, travel sector lead at TikTok France, so the overcrowding is not set to improve.

But it’s not the whole story. It implies that if we simply took the people away, it would magically restore whatever was lost.

What’s actually happening is a subtle shift towards performance optimisation.

As places become desirable, incentives change. What once existed to serve a local community begins to serve a transient one. Souvenir shops realise the same stuff sells the world over, and buy carbon copies in bulk. Businesses optimise for speed, familiarity, and margins. Risk is removed. Originality and fresh ideas hold little value, because visitors aren’t staying long enough to see them change.

And so, the same shops appear in different cities. The same fonts. The same signs promising “authentic” experiences that feel eerily interchangeable. The place doesn’t become bad. It becomes generic. Sanded down into something smooth enough for mass consumption.

As communications specialist Dr. Lohitnavy-Frick puts it, “the soul of these places, the reason we came, is slipping away.”

The Real Cost

Travel isn’t the only place where we’re subject to a gradual flattening, but it’s where this trend towards the predictable is easiest to spot.

Long before you arrive, you already know what the moment is supposed to look like. You’ve seen the photos. You know where to stand, what to order (animal fries, please) and when to take the picture. The experience arrives pre-imagined, ready to be slotted into a story other people recognise.

You don’t arrive curious. You arrive comparing.

Once you notice this in travel, it’s hard not to see it everywhere else.

Restaurants start to blur together. Careers follow suspiciously similar trajectories. Entire lifestyles are assembled from the same components. And before you arrive, you know what each of those components, moments and milestones are supposed to look like. The wedding, the kids, the dream job.

We like to think we’re making independent choices, but often we’re just selecting from a menu that’s already been filtered by popularity and visibility.

The real cost of all this performance optimisation? Losing ourselves in the process. Following the crowds to do the things life expects of us, rather than defining what we expect from life.

We’re diluting all the best bits and it’s taking the edge off our lust for life.

Who to blame?

Famous sociologist Jean Baudrillard wrote:

In 1981. And the information at our fingertips has exploded in the past 45 years. The more information we’re exposed to, the more we smooth the corners.

It’s tempting to make social media the culprit. The algorithms, the virality, the endless loop of recommendations. But blaming our tools lets us off the hook. The system only works because we keep rewarding it.

Each time we choose something relatable rather than resonant, we reinforce the same dynamics. We chase the places we’re meant to see, the lives we’re meant to want, the paths that look impressive from the outside.

This isn’t a moral failure. It’s a very human shortcut. Outsourcing taste is efficient. Letting the crowd decide saves effort. Following a well-trodden path reduces uncertainty. But over time, it dulls our ability to recognise what actually feels meaningful to us.

And the hardest part? The meaningful things aren’t sexy or shiny and they rarely stand out.

It’s the café that doesn’t photograph well.

The decision that doesn’t quite make sense when you try to explain it.

The experience you enjoy when nobody’s watching.

I write Read the Room as a weekly email for people who like noticing these patterns, in travel and in life. You can join it here.

Where to From Here?

Meaning tends to hide where no one is looking for it.

Travel, in this way, becomes a mirror for how we live. The moments that stay with us are often unspectacular on paper. They don’t scale. They don’t translate neatly into stories or status. They’re specific, slightly inconvenient, and deeply personal.

This makes them hard to replicate. And therefore hard to sand down to mimic everything else.

The answer, if there is one, isn’t to stop travelling or to seek out ever more obscure places. It’s to notice when we’re choosing from habit rather than intention. When we mistake popularity for depth. When we follow scripts we never consciously agreed to.

Not everything needs to be shared, optimised, or scaled.

Some things only survive if we let them stay small. And allow ourselves to experience them without turning them into proof.

I write Read the Room for people who don’t feel fully represented by the loudest ideas online. If that’s you, you can subscribe here.