Do You Have Holiday Asshole Disorder?

Your friends are holed up at home but that doesn’t stop you from posting pics of your tropical vacay. Emma Markezic explains why you’re a holiday asshole

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I happened to have a couple of trips planned back-to-back. (Totally not my fault – everyone I know decided to get married in glorious locations within weeks of each other, just FYI.) This meant that, for months on end, my social media was filled with photos of Yorkshire’s dales, Tuscany’s vineyards, California’s boulevards … I probably shouldn’t go on. Instagram made it look as though I was on a never ending holiday. I wasn’t, of course – I was also madly working in airports and skipping touristy delights in order to meet deadlines. But I certainly wasn’t uploading photos of me eating Niknaks for dinner (cheese, not spicy beef; I’m not an animal) under the romantic glow of my laptop screen.

After a while, however, even my best friends stopped double-tapping. They simply tired of me posting pics from, well, everywhere but here. Each week that went by was a constant reminder that I was still travelling and they were still standing by the printer clearing paper jams. How we’ve managed to invent spray-on skin and not a printer that doesn’t have digestive problems is beyond me – but really, that’s another highly un-Instagrammable incident, so let’s move on.

Did the reality of my trips stop me from posting pics of palm trees and ski goggles? It did not. If anything, it made me even more determined to get the best shot of whatever vista or pasta or seaside I was experiencing at the time. I’d even have the timing worked out, to make sure that everyone back home was awake and could truly appreciate the majesty of my feed. And that’s about the time I realised that I’m a holiday douche-canoe. Which, by the way, is someone who exceeds the normal limits of douchery, and does so on holiday, no less. What a shambles.