Mimes of the Journey, All of Us

We rarely want what we want.
We want what we see others wanting.
René Girard called it mimetic desire: a hunger born not of the object, but of the eyes watching it.

In travel, this desire is not just a side effect, it is the main engine.
You don’t dream of Bali alone.
You dream of the Bali you saw through the perfect, shimmering filter of someone else’s feed.
A thousand sunsets later, the island stands exhausted under the weight of our identical dreams.

Mimes, all of us.
Copying copies of a place that once was quiet.
What began as a secret cove becomes a checklist.
What started as a whisper of adventure becomes a roar of expectation.
And soon, the place itself bends under the pressure of our borrowed desires.

We tell ourselves we seek authenticity, but we seek it precisely where others have already found it.
And so we crowd the same markets, take the same photos, write the same captions.
Originality collapses into cliché.
The unique becomes the uniform.
Every popular place slowly become the same.

Girard’s question is relevant:
Do we travel because we truly long for the world beyond our window,
or because we fear missing what everyone else already has?

There is a choice here.
A chance to step off the well-worn trail of imitation.
To let curiosity, not envy, draw the map.
To find a place, or a way of seeing a place, unburdened by someone else’s wanting.

Maybe we should not bother to much about the destination everyone posts about, but to discover what we alone were meant to find?