Ultra-processed Tourism

Modern travel drifted into ultra-processed tourism. No matter where you are, you can feel this odd sameness and a kind of dishonesty.

Not because the places are boring or inherently similar. Bangkok is not Vienna. Osaka is not São Paulo. The humans behind these cities have radically different histories, scars, jokes, and ways of moving through a day. The sadness is that you can fly across the planet and still run the same internal program. Same flow, different wallpaper. Often the exact same shops and restaurants. And the same archetypes of tourists. Maybe different temperature. Maybe different tidiness.

Ultra-processed tourism is what happens when I treat a city like a playlist I need to get through, and I mistake throughput for experience.

I come home tired. My camera roll looks like proof. My memory feels like fog. And I think that fog is the signal.

What did the place feel like?

It’s Monday. I am scrolling photos from the weekend. I see the temple gate, the museum façade, the view from the “must” lookout, the plated thing that was supposed to be the local thing. I remember fragments: heat, queue, a guide’s voice through a portable speaker, the gift shop I walked through on autopilot.

Then I hit the weird part: I cannot reconstruct the days.

I can tell you I was “there.” I cannot tell you what it felt like to be there.

Travel is supposed to be one of the few times I break routine and feel the world in higher resolution. If I come back with lower resolution, something is off.

The in-the-machine moment

You have lived it. I have lived it. I am in a line that moves in spasms. A staff member waves a barcode scanner like a traffic wand. The guide has a flag. We get twelve minutes for the highlight, then the crowd shuffles toward the next chokepoint, then the retail exit, then the next timed entry. I am part of an assembly line being processed.

At some point I open Instagram. Not to share joy. To file paperwork.

I pick the most legible photos, the ones that prove I did the approved things. I post, and I feel a small sense of completion, like I closed a ticket. Then I catch myself feeling proud of that. It is a ridiculous accomplishment, and it still scratches the brain.

The pipeline

A lot of tourism is now designed as a pipeline. Pipelines have priorities: manage crowds, increase throughput, reduce uncertainty, reduce costs, keep people moving, keep the reviews stable.

George Ritzer’s term for this kind of logic spreading is McDonaldization: efficiency, predictability, calculability, control over uncertainty 2 . Swap burgers for landmarks and you get the modern attraction stack. Although, to be fair, McDonald’s doesn’t overpromise like a travel brochure or make you wait that long.

Once I notice the interface, I see it everywhere: queue, scan, script, photo point, gift shop, transfer.

You can run that flow in Bangkok, Osaka, São Paulo, Vienna. Swap shrine for church. Swap palace for museum. Swap street food stall for “local wine bar.” The choreography is remarkably consistent.

This is why places start to feel the same even when they are not. The pipeline flattens difference into operations.

John Urry called the underlying phenomenon the tourist gaze: tourism structures particular ways of seeing that are socially shaped and circulated 1 . I do not arrive with neutral perception. I arrive with a preloaded template of what counts, and then I go looking for it. And if you watch closely, tourists also assume particular behavioral patterns they wouldn’t naturally assume.

Ultra-processed tourism is that template industrialized. The happy path of travel. And like most happy paths, it makes me feel competent while quietly narrowing the experience.

Staged authenticity

The pipeline also knows what I want. I want the back door. I want something that feels less staged.

Dean MacCannell gave this a clean name: staged authenticity. He argued that tourists often seek “back regions” because they associate them with intimacy and authenticity, and tourist settings get arranged to produce the impression that a back region has been entered even when it has not 3 .

This is not a scandal. It is product design.

The useful takeaway is internal: a scripted “authentic” moment can still feel like contact. My nervous system can light up. I can be sincere. And I can still be inside a template that routes around the deepest parts of the place.

Sincerity is not the same as accuracy.

Skimming as failure mode

Skimming is not a moral failure. It is a bandwidth mismatch.

If I do five “deep” places in a day, I did not experience five deep places. I touched five surfaces. Then I asked my brain to compress them into meaning on the flight home. The compression algorithm is not magical.

“Museum fatigue” is a real research topic: predictable decreases in attention and selectivity as load increases 6 . My mind is not an infinite buffer. Neither is yours.

The pipeline does not care. It will gladly feed me more.

Proof is the silent product

In ultra-processed tourism, the city is not the product. The product is proof.

Instagram rewards legibility. It rewards the canonical shot. It does not reward sitting on a curb for twenty minutes and noticing how a neighborhood breathes.

The loop is simple: do the “must,” capture evidence, publish evidence, receive acknowledgment, call the cost “worth it,” repeat.

If my trip needs witnesses to feel real, I was not fully there.

Effort justification and the post-hoc mind

Ultra-processed tourism pairs perfectly with post-hoc rationalization.

Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory starts with a simple discomfort: inconsistency between beliefs and actions creates tension, and people try to reduce it 4 . One common way is to reframe the outcome.

Aronson and Mills’ 1959 initiation study is the classic demo: people who endured a more severe initiation rated the group more favorably, consistent with effort justification 5 . If I pay more, wait longer, sweat harder, it becomes harder to admit the thing was mediocre.

Tourism is full of high-effort investments: money, crowds, heat, logistics, stress. The more it costs, the more motivated I am to declare it meaningful.

This is the part that makes the pattern sticky. I can be tired and call it “unwinding.” I can be overwhelmed and call it “culture.” I can be chasing proof and experience it as self-development. The feelings are real. The story I tell about them can still be wrong.

Self-deception is not a character flaw. It is a runtime behavior. Assume you are affected until you have evidence otherwise.

Tourism vs Guestism

If Bangkok, Osaka, São Paulo, and Vienna feel broadly similar to me, there are two possibilities.

One: I have transcended novelty.

Two: I am consuming cities through the same template: landmarks, queues, scripts, gift shops, photos, next.

The second is more common. The second is more fixable.

The fix is to separate two modes I keep mixing.

Tourism is throughput. Guestism is relationship.

Tourism centers me. Guestism centers the relationship—with myself and with the place.

Tourism asks: what are the sights? Guestism asks: how do people live here?

Tourism is a route. Guestism is a posture.

If I only tour, I meet the city as a product. If I guest, even briefly, I meet the city as a host.

Guestism in practice

Guestism does not require a rural pilgrimage or secret knowledge. It mostly requires slack.

I stop trying to “cover” the city. I stop treating every hour as a slot that must be filled. I pick one anchor per day, if that, and I let the rest be local and a little boring.

I eat where I am hungry, not where a feed told me to be hungry. I return to the same café twice. I walk without a destination until the neighborhood stops being scenery and starts being infrastructure. Groceries. School pickups. Commuters. The city’s metabolism. Try finding littered trash in Tokyo—it’s quite hard.

The goal is not authenticity as a trophy. The goal is contact. Contact is what makes Bangkok not Vienna. The difference is not the temple vs the cathedral. The difference is the people and the local physics of a day.

Two reframes that change behavior

Name the actual goal of the trip in one sentence.

Not “Japan.” Not “Brazil.” A goal like: rest, learn, wander, reset, eat, walk, be alone, be with someone, get oriented.

If I cannot name the goal, I default to the pipeline. The pipeline has a goal, and it is not mine.

Run the no-proof test.

If I could not post a single photo, would I still choose this plan?

A camera roll can be a memory aid, or it can be a receipt. Receipts change what you buy.

The honest itinerary

Use tourism as a tool, not as an identity. Balance it with guestism. Treat your attention like a finite resource.

You do not need a more impressive itinerary. You need a more honest reason.

And honesty is harder than it sounds. The template is comfortable. The proof loop is rewarding. The rationalizations come easy and feel true. The hardest part of travel is not the logistics. It is admitting when the template is running you.

But that admission is where the trip starts to become yours again. Stop collecting proof. Start collecting contact.