When I moved to Sydney five years ago, I found out about a magical place called Gordons Bay from my friend’s boyfriend’s friend. I went to explore and found a stunning inlet with crystal-blue water and only a few people sitting on the rocks. I went most weekends that summer, enjoying swimming, snorkelling and general lazing at what felt like far from the enormous eastern suburbs crowds.

It wasn’t exactly a secret place. It’s along the Bondi-Coogee coastal walk, but the path passes above it and it doesn’t have any lifeguards. I assumed that’s what kept many people away.

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Last time I was there you could barely move on the rocks, and there was not one, but two, giant pink flamingoes in the water.

Did I mention how picturesque Gordons Bay is? Really picturesque. Instagram-worthy picturesque. So Instagram-worthy it’s become one of the photo-taking meccas of Sydney. I have no scientific evidence but the rise of Gordons Bay has coincided with the rise of the phenomenon of “going places for the ‘gram”. I suspect the bay’s popularity may have something to do with that.

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People also seem unable to visit the McIver Women’s Baths (as close to a spiritual place as I have ever experienced) or Icebergs in Bondi without declaring via Instagram they were there and it’s still as attractive as the last time someone visited. But Gordons Bay has got off lightly it seems.

Hyams beach village in Jervis Bay, which is said to have the world’s whitest sand, has had to employ traffic controllers and turn people away as up to 5,000 cars per day try to visit a village with 400 car spaces. Why so suddenly popular? It’s become a “social media phenomenon”.

In New Zealand people are queuing for up to an hour to create a photo that has the illusion of seclusion at one of the most spectacular spots in the photogenic country.

A barely-known beach in Japan had 50,000 visitors in July and August last year as they sought a “mirror-effect” shot with the fiery dusk.

TripAdvisor and Instagram may take some of the imagination out of travel but who has time to have imagination?

There’s an endless supply of articles bemoaning Instagram “ruining” photography and even “ruining” travel. Is the Instagram generation ruining these locales? The short answer is it’s a bit hysterical and, anyway, we’re ruining the entire planet so, as ever, there’s something more worthy to fret over.

But the longer answer: well, maybe Instagram is ruining some things.

It is easy to lament the sensation of visiting places just for the ‘gram as a sign of an increasingly self absorbed society at worst, and unoriginal at best. But we cannot just blame Instagram for these places being mauled by people. Instagram is just the natural progression of what was begun by Lonely Planet and then TripAdvisor – giving people a guaranteed AMAZING/ INCREDIBLE/ BEST EVER travel experience to brag to everyone at home about.

As people have become wealthier and air travel more accessible, the world has grown smaller. It’s not a a particularly revelatory observation to say we are travelling more but in the Instagram and TripAdvisor age what many people seem to have lost sight of is: travel can be a bit shit.

There’s the actual flight, the airline queues, paying $50 in your own currency for an incredibly ordinary breakfast, bad weather, boredom in art galleries, fatigue, sore feet, underwhelming iconic sites, enforced checkout times hours before you have to be somewhere, heavy luggage, dirty underwear, missing your bed; the list goes on.

So why risk a bad Schweinebraten in Berlin when you can go to Clubrestaurant am Wannsee? TripAdvisor and Instagram may take some of the imagination out of travel but who has time to have imagination? We have an expectation of ourselves to wring the productivity out of every moment, even in our down time.

People are hungry for social media to be evil, because if it’s bad then it must be the reason for a lot of bad in our world – such as the rise of Nazis, rigged elections and a bone deep malaise, and not, say, human nature and late-stage capitalism.

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I cannot say for sure whether Instagram, or social media for that matter, is a net good or a net bad because it probably isn’t either. Every morning many members of my family – my siblings, my parents, my cousins, my aunts and uncles – take a photo of wherever we are and send it to each other with GM written on it for “good morning”. My uncle said at Christmas that he feels like he has watched my son grow up over the year despite only actually getting to see him twice in that time.

Those are good things about social media. The bad things are potentially manipulated elections through collusion with Russia, hefty personal data breaches and beautiful beaches becoming overwhelmed with tourists.

It doesn’t seem a particularly balanced ledger upon close inspection but people are not going to stop using social media. Instagram could be ruining some beautiful places, but people have been ruining beautiful places on Earth since the beginning of time.