White Lotus is the luxury resort chain that doesn’t exist—but could. Maui, Taormina, and Koh Samui are among its most exclusive destinations. The clientele is wealthy, high-profile, mostly American. None of this happens in our world, but in the world of White Lotus, the HBO series (aired on Sky in Italy) that, from a small phenomenon, has become one of the most defining shows of recent years—alongside Squid Game, Succession, and very few others.

The genius of White Lotus lies in setting a TV series at a vacation resort. No one had done it before. There are Simpsons episodes that play with the idea (the one at Ned Flanders’ beach house is unforgettable), and there’s the Lost shipwreck… and yet, the TV generation—the one raised on the myth of The Beach—has completely upended the vacation narrative, making it a permanent center of gravity in their lives.

Once upon a time, there was the seaside house and the mountain house, optimistically owned. Friday night departures, Sunday traffic jams on the way back. A solid, ritualistic idea of a holiday. Then came the new myth: North Face duffle bags, endless layovers in Arabian Peninsula airports, Instagram stories featuring Asian street food, and an overwhelming amount of palm trees.

For millennials—the traveler generation—vacation is an uprooted experience, an intercontinental plane ticket. Hours spent in an economy seat, trying to sleep, headphones on, watching a movie you’re not really watching. A rite of passage toward something that must happen far away. It’s an entire year of work sacrificed for an experience that justifies the rest. It’s the world of WeRoad, Avventure nel Mondo, and all those agencies that gather strangers and send them to “exotic” destinations in search of “authentic” experiences.

Vacation is an ephemeral dream, often more exhausting than it should be. And in this new era of mass tourism, the most coveted experience—the only one that justifies the sacrifice—is the resort: a global non-place, identical everywhere like airports, where the only variable is the price, the range of services, the quality of architecture, and the standard of food.
 

White Lotus is a series teetering between dark comedy and satire, filled with characters that are both incredibly clichéd and eerily believable. The cast resets every season, with a few exceptions (Jennifer Coolidge as Tanya McQuoid, a role that won her an Emmy and a Golden Globe). The red thread tying everything together only becomes fully apparent in the third season.

The protagonists are almost always affluent Americans—families, couples, groups of friends—self-absorbed, obsessed with their own anxieties, and convinced that civilization is a concept enclosed between California and New York. In the second season, set in Taormina, Italian media criticized how locals were portrayed. But the truth is that in White Lotus, no one is spared: Americans are just as ridiculous as everyone else. And that’s exactly what makes it brilliant.

With the first season set in Hawaii, the second in Italy, and the third in Thailand, Mike White has taken his series further and further from home, deeper into the exotic. A perfect path for dissecting the myth of the vacation.

In The Last Resort, Sarah Stodola dissects the resort cliché: palm trees, the pool, the pristine beach. Thatched-roof villas. More palm trees, and more palm trees, and even more palm trees. A lucid dream crafted in the 20th century and then serialized. Once upon a time, people didn’t even go to the beach.

The myth of luxury vacations began in Hawaii, where hotels like the Moana (which incorporated Art Deco and Bauhaus elements between the ’30s and ’50s to stay trendy), the Royal Hawaiian, and the Halekulani became the heart of America’s jet set. It was an era when the rich took rich vacations, leaving a permanent mark on the collective imagination—just like everything that happened between the ’30s and ’60s, from the Beatles to the Kennedy myth.

“I really need to go to Thailand.” You’ve definitely heard a friend say this recently.

Every era has its myths, and Southeast Asia is the myth of the new millennium. Not just a vacation, but an idea of a different life—a reversal of everything wrong back home. The illusion that a change in time zone is enough to solve one’s problems.

Travel as catharsis, squeezed in between meetings. To the Hawaiian palm trees, we now add a search for spirituality, the dream of an alternative. Just ask Piper Ratliff, the teenager in season three who convinces her parents to take her to Koh Samui to visit a Buddhist monk’s temple.

Bali, Vietnam—places transformed by tourism—and Thailand form the golden triangle of this new vacation aspiration. A trend deeply intertwined with another modern myth: the digital nomad, a person who works while on vacation. For some, an unbearable idea; for others, the ultimate life goal. One wonders if Vietnamese workers dream of working from Versilia. Probably.

Thailand as seen from the West—exotic, fantastic, a land of islands and alleyways at the edge of the imagination—was portrayed long before White Lotus. The Beach, Danny Boyle’s film based on Alex Garland’s novel, painted backpacker adventure as something that quickly turns dystopian. Bangkok, the capital, has often represented the dark side of this supposedly paradisiacal Asian kingdom. Only God Forgives, Nicolas Winding Refn’s ultra-violent neon-lit thriller starring Ryan Gosling, captured it perfectly. Then came the wildly popular The Hangover Part II.

British writer Lawrence Osborne is a modern-day Graham Greene. His memoir Bangkok Days, chronicling years spent in a city that no longer exists, is almost sacred among lovers of the Orient. That old, chaotic, and untamed Bangkok—balancing hedonism and spirituality—was, for one generation, what Tangier was to Burroughs and the Beat Generation. The promise of a free city, where everything was cheap and one could get by, where there was still time to be amazed—the kind of time that feels increasingly scarce in Europe and the United States.

But even Bangkok is changing, becoming more polished, more ordinary. Today, it’s a spotless, beautiful global capital.

The final twist of Southeast Asia lies in its soaring GDP growth rates, while Europe struggles to keep up. And it seems that, before long, the only way to realize that the reality we live in is not the only possible one will be through resorts. And their palm trees.

Until the roles are reversed—just as Michel Houellebecq predicted in The Map and the Territory, with the Old Continent turning into a giant open-air museum. At that point, we who once dreamed of becoming digital nomads will discover that we have, in fact, become the resort.