Rage Booking Is A New Emotion

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In the last few weeks of December, my Instagram feed became a fever dream on repeat. Sun-drenched crowds. Shirtless men on shoulders. Wide shots of hands in the air timed perfectly to bass drops. Text overlays: "nothing matters except this" and "healing fr."

It wasn’t one festival. It was all of them— Spain, Thailand, Belgium, and Goa.

And then, somewhere around 3 am on a Tuesday—tabs still open, WhatsApp notifications muted but not forgotten—I booked tickets to a music festival in Bangalore.

I didn’t plan the trip. I didn’t price-compare. I didn’t even fully register where I’d be staying. I clicked “Book Now” because staying where I was felt worse than spending money I hadn’t budgeted.

Only later did I realise this behaviour had a name: rage booking. And more importantly, I am not alone. 

According to a recent study, 52% of U.S. travellers are experiencing burnout, and nearly one in three are booking trips specifically to cope with it. Booking a vacation now ranks as the top stress reliever—alongside meditation, exercise, or even taking time off work.

The data gets more specific. 23% of travellers admit they booked a trip because of burnout, 21% because of job stress, and 20% confess to spending impulsively on travel because they "badly needed a vacation". Among those who rage-booked, 83% said it made them feel better, and 39% said it made things "much better". 

But here's the thing about rage booking (and rage shopping, rage quitting, rage subscribing, rage deleting): it works. Temporarily.

Most people who book trips out of burnout report feeling immediate relief. The brain gets a hit of control. A future date appears on the calendar. Something shifts. You are no longer stuck; you are going.

That's why this behaviour keeps repeating across categories. When life feels unmanageable, we don't slow down; we transact. We click. We commit. We introduce friction into an otherwise frictionless scroll.

In India, the numbers tell a similar story.

Mobile bookings now capture 66.67% of travel bookings and are growing at 12.8% annually. Travel-related searches for "tonight" and "today" have increased significantly. Late-night, last-minute bookings are increasingly common. The stats indicate the desperation.

The week before I booked my ticket, deadlines stacked like Jenga blocks, screen time hit seven hours, and every break was a scroll into someone else's better time. Research shows that 38% of Gen Zers and 28% of millennials admit that social media has made them overspend on travel after seeing other users' vacation photos.

I was a statistic before I even knew it.

Globally, 35% of consumers turn to social media for travel inspiration—for Gen Z, that number jumps to 53%. And it's not just inspiration—social media has the greatest influence on travel destination choices at 75%, ahead of TV/news/movies at 64% and family and friends at 47%.

But the real trick? Timing. The platforms know when you're tired. When you're scrolling at 2 am. When a reel of strangers dancing under strobe lights will hit differently than it would at 2 pm. For every carefully curated festival reel—edited, soundtracked, captioned "we needed this"—there's an algorithm calculating exactly when to show it to you.

In the week before I booked, I saw at least two-dozen festival-related posts. I didn’t search for them, but the feed had learned that I lingered.

And once the desire hits, it’s easy to hit the “Book Now” button. With UPI and digital wallets now commanding 46.74% of travel bookings in India, the checkout friction is almost eliminated, enabling impulse purchases. 

The same platforms that exhaust us are also the ones offering exits: bookable escapes, frictionless transactions, instant relief. The feed creates restlessness, and the platform economy monetises the urge to resolve it quickly.

When we interrupt the feed, we interrupt the routine, the version of ourselves that feels small, stagnant, over-observed. Rage actions aren't about indulgence as much as they're about agency. The decision matters as much as the destination.

But here’s the catch: the internet doesn’t just enable the exit. It follows you there.

When I got back from the festival, my feed filled up with Lollapalooza content from Mumbai. Linkin Park’s India debut. Yungblud going feral on stage. Someone climbing a pole. Orry cracking a joke that apparently ended a friendship. Three men sneaking shavers into the venue, forming a mosh pit during Playboi Carti and shaving their friend’s head mid-set. Whoever took out their phones to capture the chaos had the content destined to go viral.

The music festival wasn’t just happening. It was being produced.

In essence, experiences don’t end when they’re over; they begin again when they’re posted. Every escape comes with an implied second audience — your followers. So we take trips to escape the screen. And then return to measuring the experience against the life we curate online.

I may be tempted to book tickets to the next music festival, but really, this doesn’t mean rage booking is bad. Or that rage shopping is foolish. Or that we should all log off and breathe. That kind of conclusion would be lazy and unrealistic.

What this moment reveals instead is: we no longer trust slow fixes. We live in an internet culture that rewards immediacy, visibility, and decisiveness. So when something feels off, we don’t sit with it. We solve it loudly. Publicly. Often with a receipt.

Rage actions are the emotional language of the platform age. They are how burnout expresses itself when attention is constantly fragmented, and relief is always one click away. And maybe that’s why rage booking feels different from a normal holiday. It’s not about rest. It’s about movement. About choosing something — anything — over staying still inside the scroll.

And most of all, rage doing anything, is probably a response to a culture that keeps us hovering between desire and exhaustion. 

The Internet is not going to let us rest without selling us an escape. So we’ll keep booking, buying, quitting, subscribing — not because we’re impulsive, but because we’re looking for a way out that still feels like our choice.

On My Bookmarks

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