There is a specific, modern brand of mental illness that compels a human being to fly halfway across the planet, trek through a humid jungle, and stand before a centuries-old monument of spiritual devotion only to think, ‘this would be a great place to show off my hamstring flexibility.’ Welcome to the logical conclusion of the influencer age, where the sacred is merely a high-contrast backdrop for the profane. The Wat Pha Lat temple in Chiang Mai, a site originally designed for the quiet contemplation of the void, has been forced to issue a public plea to the walking embodiments of the void: please stop using our ancient stones as your personal CrossFit box.

The temple’s social media account, which boasts a modest 11,000 followers—a number that ironically serves as the dinner bell for the very locusts it seeks to repel—published a warning regarding ‘inappropriate behavior.’ Apparently, the residents of the jungle temple are tired of watching tourists perform gymnastics and yoga poses on the rocks. This is the inevitable friction that occurs when the search for Enlightenment meets the search for ‘Engagement.’ To the monks, the temple is a place to transcend the self; to the modern tourist, the temple is a mechanism to amplify the self. One group wants to disappear into the cosmic whole; the other wants to ensure their 412 followers know they have a very firm posterior.

The tragedy of Wat Pha Lat is its designation as a ‘hidden gem.’ In the vernacular of the travel industry, a ‘hidden gem’ is simply a location that hasn't been completely ruined by a Starbucks yet, but is currently being dismantled by the vanguard of the ‘Wellness’ movement. These are the people who preach mindfulness while being entirely oblivious to their surroundings. They arrive in revealing clothing—presumably because the gods are particularly impressed by exposed midriffs—and proceed to treat a site of meditation like a set for a Lululemon catalog. It is a spectacular display of narcissism masked as ‘spirituality.’ You are not connecting with the ancient energy of the mountain; you are checking your angles to ensure the light hits your cheekbones while you disrespect a thousand years of tradition.

The temple’s plea is a masterclass in futility. Asking a modern tourist to respect a boundary is like asking a golden retriever not to bark at a squirrel; the instinct for self-documentation is too deeply hardcoded. The gymnastics on the rocks are particularly telling. It’s not enough to simply exist in a space; the modern barbarian must conquer it. By performing a handstand on a sacred structure, the tourist asserts dominance over the history they are too uneducated to understand. They aren't there to learn; they are there to harvest. They harvest the aesthetic of the ‘exotic’ to bolster their own boring identities, leaving behind nothing but the metaphorical trash of their presence and the literal offense of their ignorance.

Let’s look at the ‘revealing clothing’ aspect of this debacle. We are told to be culturally sensitive, yet the traveler’s entitlement always wins out. The heat of Northern Thailand is apparently an excuse to treat a monastery like a beach club in Ibiza. It is the peak of Western (and increasingly global) arrogance to assume that one’s comfort and ‘self-expression’ trump the basic protocols of a host culture. But then again, if you don't wear a sports bra to the temple, how will the internet know you’re a ‘wild soul’ who ‘travels to find herself’? You didn't find yourself, Jessica. You found a place where people were trying to be quiet, and you decided your workout routine was more important than their prayers.

This is why we can’t have nice things. The democratization of travel has not led to a more enlightened global citizenry; it has simply provided more opportunities for the mediocre to desecrate the magnificent. The monks of Wat Pha Lat want a peaceful place to meditate. Instead, they have a front-row seat to the collapse of human dignity. They watch as people who wouldn't know a Sutra from a smoothie recipe climb on their architecture to perform ‘gymnastics’ for a digital audience that doesn't actually care. We are witnessing the aesthetic colonization of the planet, where every mountain, every temple, and every ‘hidden gem’ is eventually ground down into a uniform, digestible pixel-paste for the consumption of the mindless. The temple says it’s ‘not a gym.’ They’re wrong. In the eyes of the modern world, everything is a gym, everything is a studio, and everything belongs to the person holding the camera.