All-Inclusive Resorts
are like AI Google search.
The thing that all-inclusive resorts predominantly include is alcohol.
Three or four days into our honeymoon, my husband and I had the original insight that drinking is much better after 5pm. If you start drinking at, say, 11am, you then have to drink for the rest of the day like the bronzed, wrinkled 60-somethings who spent their day in the pool—or, like us, have to retreat to the cold dark cave of the hotel room to sleep for two hours and wake up wondering what your name is. Overall, we discovered that if we limited our poolside drinks to virgin piña coladas and pineapple juice, then started drinking wine at the sit-down restaurants when we showed up there for a late dinner, we had much more enjoyable days.
From the moment we showed up at the resort, we were waited on hand and foot to an almost embarrassing degree—cold washcloths distributed in the foyer, luggage appearing and disappearing from our room on cue, room service at any time of day or night. Even apart from the alcohol, there’s a headiness to never having to be responsible for anything at all. After wringing its hands for a few days, your brain lets its usual chatter subside into a blissful silence.
In this way, staying at an all-inclusive resort is (predictably) the opposite of camping. The appeal of camping is that everything is like normal life, but harder; the appeal of an all-inclusive resort is that everything is easier, and honestly has very little to do with normal life. We spent our days going from pool to beach to themed restaurant (there were at least six, including French, Japanese, and Italian, each with themed interiors, soundtracks, and menus). Our last night at the resort we saw a pirate-themed show where acrobats sailed across the main pool in a listing pirate ship.
It was a decadent experience, and for that reason we felt very guilty admitting to ourselves that by day four or five, we didn’t like it all that much. Even writing it down feels silly. Staying at an all-inclusive resort is a tremendous privilege that I was and am thankful for. But by the last couple of days I just wanted to—I don’t know, organize something. Send a work email. Maybe that’s the point of vacations like this, that they make you appreciate the mundanities of your life.
But it’s more than that. The closed system of the resort was strange and inconvenient in its own way. We didn’t have to clean our own room, but if it wasn’t clean when we came back at the end of the day, we couldn’t really clean it—we had to call the front desk trying our hardest not to sound like Karens. You could have any drink you wanted, as long as it was on the menu of tiki drinks. You could have Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, or a $300 bottle from the fancy wine list. You could go to any show you wanted, as long as what you wanted to see on Tuesday night was the Tuesday night stripper show. All the fancy food was surrounded by flourishes that had very little to do with the food itself—raspberry puree spiraling a mushroom souffle, decorative greens spurting out of the top of the sushi.
All of this isn’t to complain—it’s obviously not complainable. It’s just an attempt to describe the surrealness of the whole thing. An all-inclusive resort is like nowhere else in the world. All the things that are inconvenient about life are relegated to other people, or other places—but no matter how perfect the system, or perhaps because the system is so perfect, little inconveniences or oddnesses come through.
When we got back, I valued, to a certain degree, the inconveniences of daily life. Our washing machine that regularly leaked water all over the floor. The clothes line that fell down and had to be put up again. The mountain of cardboard boxes from our registry gifts that had to be broken down and put out on the curb.
Recently, Google rolled out a feature intended, in their own words, to “do the Googling for you.” Google’s AI Summary feature now summarizes a variety of different web results for any given query, and in its first few weeks of operation made some viral missteps. Among other suggestions, Google’s AI recommended that users put glue in their pizza sauce to help the cheese stick, listed the health benefits of running with scissors, and recommended eating one small rock a day.
Google has really shaped up its act since then, taming the AI into something that makes mostly (seemingly) rational recommendations. But I’m sure there will be more, like the recent multicultural mixup by Gemini and ChatGPT unpredictably acting up. I even, despite all my reservations, take a glance at the Google AI summary before scrolling past it (though I got it to tell me recently that the best time to take my fish for a walk was in the early spring to late fall). It’s convenient. There’s a little bot that summarizes my emails that, if not helpful, is at least kind of interesting. I’m sure we will use all these tools. But I don’t want Google to google things for me.
At some point, we found ourselves “backstage” of the all-inclusive resort. Through a fence, we could see a long line of resort workers in their elevated yet practical tan uniforms, all waiting in a row. They check to make sure they haven’t stolen anything, my husband said. Before they leave on the bus. We felt strange.
It turns out that you can’t really eliminate all the inconveniences of life—you can only outsource them. But the more you outsource them, the stranger your life becomes. There comes a time in life when you need to break down your own cardboard boxes and clean your own room, even if it’s nice to have someone else do it every once in a while. If you want to live on an elevated plane where you don’t have to work and you don’t have to think and you don’t have to google, you can. But it seems to me that, sooner or later, it comes at the expense of something. It feels cliché to call that something our humanity, but maybe that’s what it is.
Come back next week: for a patron-only post on why Hamilton: The Musical is like a wedding.
The weirdest thing I saw on Facebook Marketplace this week:
Happy: summer.