No Insta360, No Drone, No Post… So, Did You Even Go On a Trip?
How social media pressure turns motorcycle adventure enduro travel into a job you didn’t plan for.
We’ve been motorbike travelling long before social media became part of the ride.
Back then, if you were adventure riding through Africa or South America, for that matter, you’d buy a tiny SIM card with something like 256MB of data and a dongle. That was it. You guarded it like gold. Eventually, when you reached a bigger town, you’d try to find a signal, maybe a slow connection somewhere; sit down; edit a few photos, and send an email to friends or family or update a web forum thread. That was your update. Not even mentioning video, it was damn impossible.
There was no instant gratification. No daily posting. No pressure to show something every day. You couldn’t, even if you wanted to.
Data was expensive, slow, and limited. You either shared a few photos or you wrote something worth reading. Most of the story stayed with you until much later.
You rode first. The story came later.
Now it’s entirely different.
Everyone can post, all the time, from everywhere. The pressure isn’t just possible; it’s built in. You even see riders stressing about getting a local SIM the moment they cross a border, not because they need it to travel, but because they feel they need to stay visible. To stay connected. To keep the updates going.
Over time, something shifts.
What started as a simple idea, get on a bike and go, slowly turns into something heavier, more complicated, and more demanding.
You could call it burnout. You could call it pressure.
But it’s really just the enshittification of your own passion for motorcycle travel.
My take on why long-term overlanders drift from riding freely to creating content
This is my take on how a trip you chose for freedom can slowly turn into something you feel you have to keep feeding. It’s not a theory, just a pattern I’ve seen repeat itself and something we’ve gone through ourselves over time. You eventually get fed up with that constant little voice on your shoulder reminding you to get content, because “the Gram needs it”.
It’s a psychological thing. Unconsciously, you start believing your followers are hanging on your every move, waiting for the next update, living the trip through you and needing something from you every day. That thought creeps in quietly and starts shaping how you ride and what you do.
In reality, nobody cares that much.
And that’s not a bad thing. It just means you’re better off spending that time on yourself and your trip, instead of performing for people you’ve never met.
It doesn’t happen overnight. It unfolds slowly, usually over a few years. For some it moves quicker; a few months is enough. For others it takes longer, but the pattern is the same.
The Five Stages of the Overland Travel Pressure Trap
Euphoria (Year 1)
It starts with excitement. New bike, new kit, big plans. You share because you want to. Every border crossing, every breakdown, every dusty sunset feels like something worth showing.
People follow. Friends, then strangers. The feedback is positive, and it fuels the energy. It feels like you’ve tapped into something.
At this point, nothing is forced. You’re riding first and sharing second.
But even here, something small takes root. The idea that the moment becomes more real once it’s been posted.
Validation (Year 2)
The audience grows just enough to notice. Now there’s a rhythm. Ride, stop, take photos and or video, post. It becomes part of the day without feeling like work yet. This stage is usually where sponsorship starts entering the conversation. Sometimes it’s curiosity, sometimes chasing free gear, sometimes trying to make the trip sustainable.
Still nothing wrong with it.
But the shift continues. The trip is no longer just something you’re doing. It’s something you’re shaping. What you show starts to matter more than what you simply experience.
Obligation (Year 3)
This phase is where things tighten. You don’t need anyone to tell you to post. You feel it. There’s an unspoken expectation now. People are following along and you don’t want to disappear.
You arrive somewhere, and before you even sit down, there’s a thought in the background. This needs a photo. This needs a story.
Days start forming around what can be shared, not just where you want to go.
You’re still riding. But you’re also working.
Conflict (Year 4)
This is where the friction becomes obvious.
You roll into a place after a long day, and all you want is a shower and a beer. But instead you’re thinking about what you didn’t capture, what still needs to go out, and what’s missing.
You stop when you don’t feel like stopping. You redo things for a better shot. You think about captions while sitting in places that used to just be quiet. There are now two versions of you. The rider and the content creator.
And they don’t always get along.
This is where the fatigue sets in. Not from the road, but from the expectation around it.
Withdrawal (Year 5)
For most people, this is where it ends quietly.
It’s not a big decision. There’s no announcement. No dramatic post. It just creeps up on you. One day you’re riding, same as always. Helmet on, thoughts drifting, enjoying the surroundings. And your mind makes the decision for you.
You’re tired of this bullshit. Tired of thinking about posts and chasing photos or videos, or worse, both. Tired of that constant voice in your head telling you to capture something, share something, prove something.
You argue with yourself for a bit. Maybe it’s just a phase or you need a break. Maybe you should push through.
And then at some point, you just go, “De hell with this”. And that’s it.
Posting slows down. Then it stops. No explanation. No farewell. Just silence.
The riding usually carries on. The travel carries on. But the need to share everything falls away. Things get simple again. Closer to what they were at the start.
And that’s where most people quietly find their way back to the reason they left in the first place.
Then there’s the other path…..
The ones who don’t stop are usually the ones who can’t.
The audience is too big, the machine too demanding. Content has to keep coming; the Gram and YouTube algorithms demand a constant feed, otherwise their ranking tanks. What started as a trip quietly turns into a full production. Cameras, edits, uploads, sometimes even teams behind the scenes helping push it all forward.
From the outside, it looks like success. From the inside, it’s pressure.
Because the moment it stops, everything slows down. The views drop. The money dries up. The relevance fades. So you have to keep feeding the damn bastard.
It becomes this thing that needs constant attention, like a fire you can’t let go out. Always stoking it, always adding more, even when you’re tired of it.
And this is where it starts getting uncomfortable to watch.
You see people breaking down on camera, crying into a lens, sharing every low in real time. Not because they’re weak, but because they’ve built something that doesn’t allow them to switch off. The system rewards drama. It rewards exposure. It rewards turning private moments into public content. Shitty slop content gets made just to stay relevant.
And once you’re in that cycle, it’s very hard to step away without everything else collapsing around it.
And here’s the strange part. After a while, you stop looking at that and thinking, “that looks amazing”.
You start thinking, “That looks bloody exhausting.”
No jealousy. No envy. Just a quiet little moment of, “ja… good luck with that”.
You’ll usually find the older dirty-face overlanders sitting somewhere with a beer, watching it all play out. Half entertained, half sympathetic. Like watching someone proudly light a fire… knowing full well they’re the one who’s going to have to keep feeding it all night.
They’ve been there. They just chose to let the fire die.
A simple reality check:
This is your trip. Your money. Your time. Your life.
You chose to leave. You chose the route. It is your holiday, not something someone forced you to do. Your drama and enjoyment are your own making. You chose how you travel and how you share it. You don’t need validation from people you’ve never met. You don’t live off likes. You don’t ride better because someone is watching.
The memories you’re making are yours. Not the audience’s.
So the question is simple. Are you doing this for yourself… or for people scrolling past it while sitting on a couch?
How to stay on your own path
There’s no rulebook, but a few things tend to keep people grounded. Give yourself a gap between living and posting. Even a day or two, or a week, changes the way you experience things.
Allow certain moments to remain private. Not everything needs to be shared. In fact, the best ones usually aren’t. Be honest about what you’re building. If it’s a channel, treat it like work. If it’s a trip, protect it from becoming work.
Where it settles
If you stick around long enough, things tend to quiet down. Posting becomes occasional. Riding becomes simple again. Conversations matter more than captions. No performance. No pressure. Just bikes, dust, and a couple of honest conversations over a beer. And when you sit there long enough, you realise something.
The best stories were never the ones posted in real time.
Brilliantly said, thank you!
Very true Michnus, there’s always a fine line between Riding and Filming , like you said the best moments are normally the ones off camera. The other day someone was giving me advice on getting more views. I replied by saying I’m not a YouTuber, I only store my footage there for family and friends and convenience.
Yep, I like this and very true.
All the best to you both and hopefully I’ll meet you guys again somewhere. 🤙
And then were the olden times, pre-anything digital, when you wrote a postcard or letter home from the middle of nowhere. And the recipient never REALLY expected you to send anything from the middle of nowhere. (And back then, it really WAS the middle of nowhere!)
As old dogs looking back I think it is easy look at social media today and think dang it is a lot of work, adapting at mid life to this lifestyle becomes a drag after a while.
In the 80’s and 90’s we had a handful of choices
1.) Work our butt off for a few years, save up, sell up, and go on that long overland tour returning penniless and maybe end up writing a book.
2.) Work until we are financially independent and throw caution to the wind travel until we are bored.
3.) Set off penniless with a practical skill set that can be traded for income to travel.
4.) Born with the golden spoon.
Today we have
All the above plus
1.) Digital Nomads
2.) Social Media
These two options alone opens up a whole new world and done right can allow you travel in relative comfort plus help you build a relatively sizable fund one could argue allow you to retire at an early age just depends on how much effort you put into it.
Slight caveat If you are a relatively attractive woman you can make a great success as long as the content goes with it , the guys have to work extra hard on it, a bear bellied middle aged biker is less likely to make it big on social media.
If you fall in the latter category you just do it for fun, unless you are willing to start riding like Toby Price on inappropriate machines to feed adrenalin seeking masses.
Very well Georgie, and being able to flaunt sex appeal, as they say in marketing, sex sells 😀
Exactly, and they were good times; people back home love it when they get a card. 🙂
Thanks, and seriously hope we hook up again Aaron! 😀
Netso Gerrit! 😀
Michnus, this is one of the most honest things I’ve read about long-term overland travel in years.
And you’re right: it slowly becomes work. Worse, it becomes performance. Somewhere along the road, the ride risks turning into something I refuse to call “content production.”
Because I hate that word: content.
It reduces stories, encounters, mistakes, wonder, discomfort, and human connection into something that sounds like packing peanuts in a shipping container. Fill the feed. Feed the algorithm. Produce more content. Ugh. I’m tired.
Here’s the thing about that word: content is what goes inside something else. A shipping container has content. A folder has content. A database has content.
Which raises the question: what’s the container?
The platform? The algorithm? The feed?
Because if that’s the case, the work no longer stands on its own. It exists only to fill space. And that’s not why any of us picked up a camera, or a pen, in the first place.
What you describe isn’t just social media fatigue. It’s the creeping pressure of feeling like life only counts once it’s been documented, edited, captioned, uploaded, optimized, and approved by strangers scrolling while half-watching Netflix.
I’ve fallen into my own version of it. Not so much the pressure to post constantly, but the guilt of not posting.
“Damn… I shot all this footage and still haven’t done anything with it.”
Suddenly the ride becomes a backlog. A to-do list. Homework waiting on hard drives. And sometimes I simply don’t want to work. That is the whole reason I hopped on my bike in the first place.
Here’s what’s funny, though. During the earliest years of my WorldRider journey, before Instagram, drones, doom-scrolling and the rest of this endless churn, I wrote. Every day. Long-form stories, reflections, conversations, moments. Not optimized snippets designed to stop thumbs mid-scroll. Just honest writing.
Somewhere between YouTube, cameras, editing software, thumbnails, metrics, and “the algorithm,” that writing quietly faded into the background.
Recently, I’ve rediscovered how much I love it.
My WorldRider blog alone sits at more than 900 posts — north of a million words when you add the book, journals, newsletters, and Substack essays. And sitting down to write again feels more connected to the original spirit of travel than chasing another cinematic drone reveal ever did.
Words slow the brain down in a way video often doesn’t. They ask you to reflect instead of react.
Which brings me to what I quietly appreciate most about this post:
You didn’t film a dramatic YouTube confessional with sad music and jump cuts of burnout. You picked up the pen. Alright, maybe the keyboard. 😄 But you wrote. And that choice itself says something.
Because in the end, you nailed the central truth:
The best moments on the road happen when nobody’s filming, nobody’s posting, and nobody’s trying to prove anything.
Just dust, distance, bad roads, good people, and maybe a cold beer—or a killer bottle of wine—at the end of the day.
Thanks for writing this.
Allan, excellently said! In the end it is for ourselves and our own memories and old age 😀