Have you ever been on a vacation you did not enjoy? Did you tell friends and coworkers when you came back, or did you leave out the boring, the bad weather, spending too much money on useless stuff, stumbling from one tourist trap right into the next one?
From disappointment about supposedly iconic landmarks and places, such as London's Camden Town Markets tourist trap (apart from the old Stables, maybe) to the unbearably long lines at the Louvre museum in Paris, vacations have all sorts of predictable potential pitfalls if they involve very popular destinations.
If you haven't done this for a vacation, there is a good chance you have done it in other areas of life, maybe with regard to a date, or a job, or a car.
This post wants to separate the reasons for such behavior from any consequences it may have.
There are, as usual with human behavior, all sorts of reasons for this, one of which is the desire to not be seen as a failure, to not hurt or worry loved ones.
In an earlier post, we talked about a a middle-aged Egyptian shuttle driver on the East Coast who told the story of how he had come the U.S. as a young man from a well to do Egyptian family to escape the pressure to follow in his father's footsteps. For the shuttle driver, life in the U.S. had not turned out as grand as the family expected - a fact that he did not share. They didn't need to know that he spent his days shuttling people from the not so glorious motels of Newark to Manhattan and back.
You can go through this list of cognitive biases on Wikipedia for hours of entertainment in analyzing your vacation, shopping, or job stories, or try to figure out if this post might be an example of a fundamental attribution error.
The example of the shuttle driver was an individual experience, but German news site bento - a recent offshoot of Der Spiegel specifically for a young audience - ran an article on what they believe is a wider social impact.
Bento says that, on Facebook and Instagram, "many refugees present their lives as happier than they are in reality".
This should be expected. The article goes a lot further, though, citing a doctoral candidate from Berlin, who himself fled Syria in 2013, with the words: "many run to their deaths because of these photos".
He warns his fellow countrymen to give up the relative safety of refugee camps in, for example, Turkey or Lebanon for an often life threatening journey to Germany. Is not posting any more photos a solution? Some seem to think so and stopped sharing pictures. Others have tried to talk friends out of undertaking a risky sea voyage, even alienating friends.
Do the photos really justify the statement "many run to their deaths because of these photos"?
Not likely. A few, maybe.
Photos have been on Facebook and Instagram since long before the current spike in refugee numbers. Give refugees a little more credit in their difficult decision making process.
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