Seeking: One authentic Camino experience, please

My steps thus far on the Camino de Santiago—39,057,* according to my knock-off Fitbit I’m starting to suspect isn’t as accurate as I’d previously thought—have been shaped by my ever-present anxiety about the question of authenticity. What makes a Camino experience more profound, authentic, or meaningful? Can we even try to deem one person’s Camino as more “real” than another’s?

For me, the allure of the Camino—and pilgrimage in general—is rooted in my growing suspicion of the apparatuses of modern technological society. I hate the twisted psychology of the elaborate performance of social media almost as much as I hate the fact that I’ve wasted hours of my days at times just staring at my phone. And yet I keep using social media, posting photos and consuming the lives of my friends in the tidy format of square photos.

Pilgrimage, at its most basic form, seems to resist the logic and sensibility of social networks and digital technology: you start walking at one point, walk for a really, really long time, get to another point, eat a lot of food, go to sleep, and do the same thing again the next day, until you reach your final destination (in our case, Santiago de Compostela). It’s about putting one foot in front of the other in the hopes that this external process, this moving of your body from one point to another, will provide some sort of internal clarity, a shift in your selfhood that accompanies the physical displacement of your body.

It asks you to be introspective and sit with yourself and your thoughts for a while—that is, if you aren’t talking to fellow pilgrims along the way—which is something social media hardly, if ever, asks of us. With this in mind, I promised to myself that I wouldn’t use social media for the duration of our walk from Sarria to Santiago de Compostela, except when it’s for a direct line of communication with someone (so, for example, I can send someone a direct Snapchat, but I’m not allowed to post to my story or look at anyone else's stories).

The metaphor of weight is important to pilgrimage: you should only carry what you absolutely need or what is personally significant to you. Otherwise, you’re carrying a heavier load than necessary, and on a metaphorical level, something that might be keeping you from finding what you’re looking for on the pilgrimage. Although phones don’t grow heavier with the addition of more apps, perhaps it is significant that I’m walking this journey with the Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter apps deleted from my phone. It is the absence of a kind of psychological weight, since every time I open my phone, I’m not tempted by the sight of the app icons.

Despite all this, I’m not anywhere near convinced that my break from social media during this trek will make my experience all that more “authentic,” even though the medieval pilgrims who first traveled to Santiago certainly didn’t have cell phones. The line between authenticity and inauthenticity is a fine one, and if we’re evaluating the authenticity of a pilgrimage experience by medieval standards, then I’ll take my inauthentic Camino experience, thank you very much, for the medieval pilgrimage road was a treacherous one, filled with thieves, questionable drinking water sources, and even bubonic plague. I don’t expect to encounter any of these things during my pilgrimage, but does that make my experience any less real? I think the answer is no. So if I slip up and scroll through Instagram during a lunch break one day, I won’t beat myself up too hard for it.


*After looking at this number, I realized that 39,057 steps means literally nothing to me. What’s the whole deal with the Fitbit-induced obsession over 10,000 steps a day, anyway, when that number is not something I’m capable of holding in my head and comprehending the gravity of it?