Perspectives

Why I stopped trusting the algorithm

By Thomas Osborne

For a long time, I believed the algorithm knew me, which is even stranger given I don’t really know what an ‘algorithm’ is! But like a rich, involving fantasy, it behaved as if it knew where I wanted to go, what I wanted to see, and how I wanted to feel. It served me powering rapids and waterfalls, perfectly cropped sunsets, aerial beaches, neon-lit alleyways, and smiling strangers with very expensive hiking kits who appeared, conveniently, in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment. It told me what was trending, what was unmissable, and what everyone else had already agreed was worth my time.

And for a while, I paid attention. I bookmarked, screen grabbed, saved, pinned, and liked. I started to consider possible adventures shaped not by curiosity and my usual appetite for adventure defined by adrenalin and risk, but by consensus. This obscure checklist began playing out in my head, measuring moments against images I’d already absorbed. Was this the hostel everyone talks about? Was this the trail? Was this the view?

Thankfully, somewhere along the way, this particular road started to feel strangely pointless. As a solo traveller, I go out of my way to not ‘follow in someone else’s footsteps’, and I have been known to avoid the well-worn path in favour of another way up or down … any other way.

The algorithm, for all its bloated self-confidence, has a habit of smoothing away the errors of judgement and the awkward assessments of the consequences … the missed turns, the small discoveries that don’t photograph well or trend quickly and widely. It favours the repeatable, the recognisable, and the places that already have a story attached to them. Someone else’s story. Someone else’s destination marketing budget.

But here’s the thing – the roads I dream of exploring do not work like that. My roads are stubbornly uninterested in what’s popular, why it’s popular, or who it’s popular with. My roads offer detours without explanation, conversations without context, moments that arrive unannounced and refuse to be summarised and hashtagged. They demand that I look up, not down, and to notice what’s in front of and well beyond me rather than what has been ‘experienced’ elsewhere.

I began to realise that the trips I remembered most clearly were rarely, if ever, the ones I’d planned. They were the days I explored without purpose, the towns I stopped in because I was tired or the place felt strangely deserving of my undivided attention … and often for days longer than I had anticipated staying. They were the meals I ate because I was hungry, not because someone online had recommended I go there.

The algorithm thrives on a performance that can be tested and measured, but my roads thrive on presence, which is not measured by any other form of ‘engagement’ but my own. An essential part of trusting the road means accepting uncertainty as part of the experience, not the opposite of that – a kind of hapless familiarity. It means allowing a day to be unproductive, a plan to fall apart, or a destination to disappoint. It means understanding that not every journey needs to be optimised, documented, or justified. And this is the freedom I crave, and the experiences I savour.

Without the constant pull of recommendations and rankings, you begin to listen to your energy and your instincts very differently. And while I am certainly not arguing for abandoning research altogether or pretending the digital world doesn’t exist, somewhere between preparation and arrival there are moments where it helps to let go of borrowed observation and pre-lived journeys. To stop asking what it is that you’re supposed to see and start exploring what’s actually there.