I Went to Paris, and I Didn’t Go to the Louvre to Take a Photo of the Mona Lisa

I landed in Paris armed with an unlimited data e-SIM, three camera lenses, and a holy mission handed down by every travel-influencer feed I follow: Thou shalt photograph the Mona Lisa, post it to Stories, and bask in algorithmic glory.

What if I refused the rite of passage, ignored the world’s most famous smirk, and let Leonardo’s leading lady keep her privacy for once? Would the Internet revoke my tourist visa? Would history forget I was ever here? More importantly, would I forget that she doesn’t have eyebrows?

Across the city, strangers juggle selfie sticks like kendo swords, ready to battle for a five-second angle on a painting smaller than a MacBook screen. Everyone is a content creator these days. Livestreaming the mundane to no viewers. Are bloggers the supreme content creators? Are we better than the others? Yes.

1. FOMO as a Service

Social apps run on the Attention Economy’s premium fuel: Fear of Missing Out. The “Mona Lisa photo” is basically the “Hello World” of travel bragging. Algorithms reward the recognizable; the Louvre’s lady is the ultra-recognizable. Post her, and the feed lights up like an airport runway.

But FOMO is loss-aversion in skinny jeans: we obsess over the 0.1% we didn’t do and forget the 99.9% we did.

2. Cameras, Cognition & Schrödinger’s Memory

Cognitive studies suggest that when we outsource remembering to a device, the brain files the moment under “external storage, optional recall.” In other words, snapping a pic can make you remember less of what you’re seeing.

So while 5,000 tourists aim their sensors at La Gioconda, they may be trapping the moment inside glass, not their gray matter.

(Somewhere there’s a farm of servers holding millions of photos of the Mona Lisa. Who is looking at those photos? Can you imagine at a dinner party showing someone a picture of the Mona Lisa like a humble brag?)

3. The Philosophy of Presence

Skipping the Louvre photo op became a small act of rebellion against the checklist mentality. Philosophers from Kierkegaard to Camus argue that meaning is handcrafted, not mass-produced. My Paris didn’t need to match anyone else’s template to be “authentic.”

What’s your Paris?