There's this girl. Not a friend, not a colleague, not anything close: someone I knew in high school, back when we clicked over both being edgy teenagers—though I eventually realized she was far more committed to it than I was. We grew up, our paths split, and then they crossed again the way paths do now, on Instagram, in the form of the occasional photo and the occasional like. The kind of like that means: oh, right, this person I used to know—I wonder how her life's going. Look, she went on holiday somewhere, she has a dog now. Like.

And one day, for reasons I'll never know, she decided to walk the Camino de Santiago.

The Camino is a network of pilgrimage routes—originally Christian, medieval in origin—that run across Spain, though some of them start much farther away. There's the Portuguese Way, the French Way; I've even seen the Camino's scallop shells, the ones that point pilgrims in the right direction, set into pavements in Belgium. Anyway: she walked it one year, she loved it, and now, seven years later, every summer my Instagram delivers a tradition I never signed up for. She sets off on one of the routes, and every evening she posts a carousel of photos with a diary entry about the day.

Part of me says it's none of my business, that I don't really know her life. But another part can't help being a little worn out by the performance—if that's what it is. Because after seven years, I find it genuinely remarkable that every single day, of every route, of every year, has apparently been rich enough to sustain a film from the Before trilogy. That's how it started, actually; how I started getting tired of it. But a few weeks ago I found myself wondering why Instagram is her diary, rather than a notebook. And from there, what struck me was the systematic absence of bad days.

After seven years of walking the Camino, it's statistically astonishing that there hasn't been a single day of thirty kilometres under the sun, blisters, exhaustion, boredom, or the plain urge to pack it all in. There are no days when, quite simply, nothing happens. Every stretch seems to arrive with its own small event: an extraordinary person, an unexpected conversation, an improbable coincidence, a revealing image. And when there's no event, there's catharsis. The day is never just a day: it always becomes a story, and every story needs its moral, its cathartic beat. It's not that something happens to her every day on the Camino; it's that, after seven years of telling it, every day seems to need something to happen.

That's what interests me about the performativity of the Camino. Not just the possibility that an experience gets transformed in the telling, but the possibility that, over time, the experience starts to organize itself around the conditions of its telling. If every day has to be narrated, every day needs something to narrate. The chance encounter becomes a meaningful one; the landscape becomes a revelation; the fatigue becomes a lesson; the anecdote becomes an epiphany. Even nothing happened is hard to admit once you've set the expectation that each day should contain its own little movie. And at the same time, I wonder why anyone needs to tell their life like this, every day, for seven years. Because maybe the point isn't simply that she's performing the Camino for Instagram. Maybe Instagram is by now one of the ways she actually lives the Camino: a kind of public diary in which everyday experience is selected, ordered, and turned into narrative as it happens.

This reminds me of the affliction that's been spreading ever since social media convinced us that we're all terribly important and need to broadcast every passing thought—which is, yes, ironic, given I'm writing this on a blog. Main character syndrome. A confident person thinks: I feel okay with who I am. A person with main character syndrome thinks: I need everyone to know how confident I am, and that I'm better than them. And lately that's the flavor I get.

I want to be fair here, because there's nothing wrong with using Instagram as a diary. It's actually a decent method, since it keeps your text and your photos in one place, ready to hand (right up until the day Instagram goes down and takes all your memories with it). But I land on her profile and feel—even in a life where she isn't remotely on my radar, where I know nothing about her except what I glimpse every six days or so—that I'm the NPC in a movie that isn't mine. And this year I felt it more, because she happened to reach the cathedral in Santiago on her birthday, and for days she's been posting photos and videos of pilgrims—people she presumably knows from other Caminos—throwing her parties, giving her gifts, and making those ChatGPT-generated tributes (ugh) about how wonderful she is and how much she gives to the groups she walks with.

And that's where a small contradiction opens up. The Camino she sells you is solitary, cathartic, improvised, introspective. And then it turns out her Camino is really big group meetups and drinking in hostels booked well in advance—when the whole origin of the thing was to end up wherever you ended up and trust the kindness of whatever village and whatever hostel owner you happened to find—plus the occasional anyway, this is Wonderwall singalong, because of course there's always a guitar somewhere within reach for her to play. And this loops me back to performativity, because something happened the other day. She posted a story—a photo taken on the sly of a couple walking the Camino, supposedly, with no backpacks, nothing—and she criticized the way they were doing it. Camino posers, she called them: they start a few kilometres before Santiago, take a little stroll, arrive, collect their medal (I think you get a certificate or something), and that's not how you do the Camino; you do it the way she does. And I doubt that, in its Christian, medieval origins, the Camino was ever walked with Spotify in your pocket.

Which was the other thing that caught my eye. In the ChatGPT-made profile card someone put together for her, there was a can't-live-without section—backpack, sunglasses, the usual—and one of the items was: "phone always within reach for photos, music, chats, and organizing the best plans." And that reminded me of when I asked my girlfriend's brother what Elon Musk's Starlinks actually do, beyond littering the stratosphere, and he told me they give you internet where there's no coverage. "For example," he said, "when we take the camper out to disconnect from the city and from modern life, and we head deep into the countryside, off in the middle of nowhere, to get some peace and quiet, with Starlink we can put on Netflix." Very a day with my analog bag, honestly.

And it makes me a little sad, because I don't want to be that person—the one who says you don't know how to disconnect, this is how you disconnect properly. But there's something genuinely paradoxical in the contemporary way of walking the Camino. The medieval pilgrimage wasn't born as an experience of disconnection, of personal growth, of finding yourself; those are categories we've projected onto it in hindsight. It was a fundamentally religious, penitential practice. But walking for days inevitably involved things we now associate with introspection: leaving your daily life behind, subjecting your body to exhaustion, crossing long hours of monotony, being alone, praying, thinking, talking, or simply doing nothing. And maybe that last part is what matters. Walking thirty kilometres offers an amount of time that's hard to imagine in ordinary life: hours in which nothing necessarily happens. No notification, no song, no video, no podcast, no conversation to fill every gap in your attention. Boredom wasn't a flaw in the experience, but part of it. And in this era of internet enshittification, algorithms, and endless doomscrolling through five-second videos, we can't overstate the importance of being bored again—of reactivating our brains and our imagination, and, with them, our creativity.

The contemporary Camino, by contrast, seems to have taken on an extra duty: the duty to produce meaning. It's not enough to walk; you have to discover something while you walk. It's not enough to meet someone; the meeting has to have been special. It's not enough to look at a landscape; it has to have transformed you somehow. And if nothing happens, there's always the option of finding a revelation in that nothing. And maybe that's why the absence of ordinary days in certain contemporary Camino stories stands out to me so much. There don't seem to be any thirty-kilometre days under the sun where you're just tired, your feet hurt, and you think walking was a terrible idea. There are no days when nothing simply happens. Every stretch has its encounter, its coincidence, its landscape, its conversation, its little catharsis.

And here's the crucial difference: it's one thing to live an experience, and another to live an experience that also has to be tellable. When every day ends up as an Instagram carousel and a diary entry, the day starts to bend to the conditions of the story. The encounter becomes an event; the fatigue becomes a lesson; the coincidence becomes a sign; the landscape becomes a revelation. Even boredom can become a catharsis about the importance of learning to be bored.

I don't know if that makes those experiences false. Probably not. What's interesting is precisely the opposite: they can be completely true and, at the same time, shaped by the need to be told. Maybe, after seven years of narrating the Camino, it's no longer just about walking and then recounting what happened, but about walking while also scanning for whatever will, by the end of the day, be worth recounting.

The paradox is that one of the hardest experiences to hold onto on the contemporary Camino might be the one that produces absolutely nothing: walking, being bored, getting tired, thinking about anything or nothing at all, looking at the landscape and letting the hours pass. Not turning it into a lesson, or into content, or into a story—just being there, present, aware, and that's it. Because what's left of the Camino when even boredom has to be converted into content? When you have to get online to make content about switching off?