Everyone knows that Instagram serves no purpose other than a way to make your life seem much cooler than it actually is to all your friends and/or followers, the deeper intention, of course, being to simultaneously make them jealous and bolster your own image.

Normally I’m the jealous one, procrastinating some writing work by festering on my iPhone, peeping Instagram and “liking” my friends’ photos, when by “like” I really mean hate. Which really means I wish I was doing that and not this.

I just returned from a couple of weeks of tourist-climbing in the Grampians, Australia, with my friends Chris Sharma and Said Belhaj. It felt like a pilgrimage of sorts, to a type of vertical, agnostic Mecca just to “touch the stone”—the fabled sandstone of the Grampians and Arapiles, which might just be the world’s best.

We live in truly weird, fast times. No time to think about or make sense of it. … All I can do, on this jetlagged hazy Monday, is offer some observations:

• Instagram somehow becomes integral to the climbing/travel experience itself. It’s no longer just about posting snapshots of your life; the snapshots are your life. The content creation becomes the raison.
• It’s like when you go to concerts and you see young people watching the actual show through the video that’s recording on their phones … What do you make of that?
• In today’s world of social media, we satisfy our emotional needs decreasingly through real experience and increasingly through the experience of making the media that glamorizes the original, real experience—the satisfaction that derives from affirmational likes/comments becomes the point. In other words: Are we going climbing or are we going to Instagram about going climbing?
• Travel, constant climbing, cool people, dope places, “high fives and Redbull,” etc., isn’t “normal life” despite what social media channels normally present and suggest. The effect is we forget that our normal lives are, in fact, quite good.
• The “quiet psychic intercourse”—as David Foster Wallace put it in a 1990 essay discussing television (which I recently read and which spurred these thoughts)—between the fantastic Instagram images we carefully choose to represent (one side of) our personal lives to the world and those who view and “like” those images begins a cycle that both glamorizes the climber life and erodes our own perceptions of how good our normal lives may actually be and most likely are.
• Is it weird to feel like Instagram has turned me, all of us, into corporate entities and our own private advertising departments. What are we hawking about ourselves to the world at large, and why?
• I write all this not to say anything new or enlightening but to acknowledge, if ironically, that life isn’t always a 1×1 square of sweetness.

Anyway … enough of that.

It took me almost no relative time to get to Australia, if you don’t count the plane breaking down and stranding me in L.A. for an easy and enjoyable 24 hours. But it threw me for a bit of a spin to travel all the way across the world, step out of the plane, and meet a bunch of white English-speaking people living in cities and structures and landscapes entirely reminiscent of America. Except for a few differences—driving on the wrong side of the road, and the use of cute-sounding words, descriptors and nicknames for the most anodyne objects—Australia may as well be the U.S.

The climbing itself (I think) lives up to the number of likes and new followers I got on Instagram during my trip, which is to say that the climbing is quite good.

I highly recommend going to the Grampians to experience it yourself.

And though I didn’t redpoint this route and only tried it, in a quite cowardly fashion, once, I will wager that Serpentine is among the top 3 single pitches of climbing in the world. When I go back to Australia, it will be for that one!