In the 1980s, a friend of my father navigated through Europe in a camper van with his family using only the map in the back of a pocket diary. He crossed France believing “aujourd’hui” meant “please”; you can imagine the reception he got from Parisians asking for “coffee, today”.
I keep thinking about this as I try but fail to plan my own family trip, despite all the 2026 resources at my disposal. We’re going to Japan for a fortnight in September and preparations have stalled: I’m dithering and my husband is exasperated and panicking, insisting we “get organised” and “just book something”. If it were up to him, he’d Google “two weeks Japan” and go for what the internet disgorges with zero agonising (he chooses restaurants by searching Google Maps for wherever’s nearby with a score above 4).
Either you won’t see any problem with that or, like me, you’re convulsed with horror at his cavalier nonchalance. I think most relationships have one laid-back traveller, and one who overthinks to the nth degree, weighing up every option, annotating maps and meticulously curating itineraries only to hear their companion say: “This cafe looks nice – shall we go in?” NO, we shan’t: we’re going to a viral cafe where you whip your own eggs, then the open-air architectural museum, then the tempura place I booked six months ago!
Being the latter person, I have accumulated more information and options than I can handle and it has left me overwhelmed and filled with decision paralysis. My recently created “Japan” email folder contains 51 links I have forwarded to myself and hundreds more lurk in the chaos of my inbox. The Instagram and TikTok algorithms have clocked me lingering on Japan tourist content, so I’m also deluged with “must-sees”, “hidden gems” and “places I would tell a friend to visit” every time I open the apps. There are hacks to “beat the crowds” and “skip the generic recs”; places that desperately need tourists; tips and apps; restaurants, onsens and ryokans. It would take me more than two weeks just to watch this stuff, let alone visit. Then there’s the “everyone’s going to Japan” content: from earnest explainers on overtourism to sketches skewering how tediously predictable a trip to Tokyo and Kyoto is in 2026. It all makes me feel overprivileged, indecisive and basic.
I am, of course. And this is a luxury problem – booking my holiday is stressful! There are too many possibilities! – but it is a problem of sorts, whether you’re planning a day trip to Blackpool or a month in the Maldives. The attention economy is engineered to make us doubt ourselves, dither and keep watching, and content creators capitalise on generating the impression there’s a “right” way to travel and “right” places to go. I’ve had enough disappointing experiences with recommended hidden gems to know it’s mostly vacuous hype, and even if it’s not, I’ll feel weird, queueing sheepishly with people who watched the same reels as me.
The internet was supposed to make travel easier and it has – unrecognisably so; a whole world has opened up. But that also makes it harder. How are we supposed to trust our own taste and instincts when ravishing footage and persuasive voices urge us, hyperbolically, not to miss out on the best, the most beautiful, the brain-chemistry-changing? I don’t want to miss out, but I’ve ended up immobilised by fomo – what if I choose wrongly and waste my one precious life?
The dilemma is existential, really, just enabled and intensified by the internet. The world is vast, impossible to experience in its entirety – however minutely researched your to-do list, you won’t get to do everything before you die. And now I’m spiralling, when all I really wanted was to buy cool notebooks, see mountains and eat noodles.
In saner moments, I understand there’s no “must” or “best”. The “looks nice” cafe probably would be nice; so would the 4.1 Google review restaurant (or they’ll be bad; either way it’s a holiday memory). So should I lighten up and just enjoy Japan with nothing more than the 2026 equivalent of a pocket diary map? Ha, never; over my dead body. So I suppose I’m asking: any Japan recs?