Another Day in Paradise
A blasphemous look at the Maldives.
Even at a five-star resort in one of the most gorgeous places on the planet, you may still find yourself on the vacation from hell. Mike White makes this point repeatedly in his hit HBO series White Lotus. Each season, amid a backdrop of otherworldly beauty and luxury, characters go to war with themselves and their demons, and somebody gets murdered.
Mike White is skilled at exposing people’s misguided attempts at living the dream. I had to laugh while watching this current season—set in Thailand—because it reminded me so much of a similar experience I’d had halfway around the world in 2022.
I was told we’d be going to the Maldives as, I guess, a sort of surprise. This stop had been tacked onto a larger, pre-planned vacation to the United Arab Emirates, and I had found out afterwards. This gave me a bad feeling, which I tried to push down by looking at photos of the Maldives online. The country truly did look stunningly beautiful.
Situated off the southwest coast of India, the Maldives are a sovereign group of islands and atolls located below Sri Lanka and right around the Equator. The Maldives are an aspirational vacation spot for honeymooners and social-media influencers. There you’ll find quiet, picture-perfect, crystal-blue waters, coral reefs, and colorful fish. Guests stay in huts built on stilts situated directly atop the lagoons. You know a place is opulent when no one knows how to pronounce it. I arrived saying “Mal-dives,” like diving into a pool, and left calling them the “Mal-deeves,” as in the archetypal butler “Jeeves.”
Speaking of butlers, you should have seen this place. There are many resorts in the Maldives but this one, I had been told, was next-level luxurious. In total, it took four flights from New York to arrive in Male, the main island. From Male, a large speed-boat with a ferociously loud engine brought us to Laamu, where the resort was located.
Once we arrived, the engine shut off. All I heard was the gentle lapping of the current against the side of the boat as it bobbed in the water. I stepped barefoot with the other guests onto the soft wooden planks of the resort.
The resort contained a sort of main area, with restaurants and a made-to-order ice cream stand where the boat had deposited us. Across a bridge of more planks sat a large stretch of atoll, with sandy, flat walkways and a central area of dense green jungle surrounded by beaches. Chains of luxury huts extended outward from the beach. Each guest received a retro beach bicycle. Hanging from rustic twine on the back of each bicycle was a name tag made out of local wood and carved with each guest’s initials.
That was what was so striking to me about the resort, and the Maldives in general. Here was this very rustic and truly gorgeous place, and people had come in and built fantastically lavish resorts on the land. Then they had doubled back, seemingly, and overimposed a fabricated-feeling rustic aesthetic as a sort of newly-created copy onto a place that had already been existing that way.
That first night, it was pitch-black. I felt overwhelmed by my own smallness. Honestly, I felt a little afraid. Even the constellations in the night sky sat in a foreign-looking arrangement. We were very, very far from home. I found myself thinking about the vanished MH 370 aircraft. Relatively speaking, that plane probably hadn’t crashed all that far from where I was standing.
The cool—if not frightening—part about being on the water at night is the disorienting way it shapes your field of vision. It was so dark that first evening, like a velvety black, that I could barely differentiate the water from the sky.
The next morning when I woke up, I had never seen so much blue. Azure skies with puffy, tiny white clouds sat atop turquoise lagoon waters. A thin bar of cerulean blue separated the sky and the lagoon. It marked the Indian Ocean beyond the reefs. “This is so fun,” I kept saying as I stared at all that blue. It really was so beautiful.
The vacation had been meant to celebrate the end of the many lockdowns and restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. People often said to me that relationships formed during the pandemic were built to last. If you could survive COVID-19 together, you could survive anything. Yet amid all the restrictions imposed by COVID-19, the pandemic had also prevented people from participating in the daily routines and activities that comprise the marrow of real life. What you do every day, not just on special or strange days, is what shows you and others who you really are. COVID-19 had delayed that process in many relationships, including my own.
That first morning, as I sat there staring at the blazing blue sky, I suddenly thought about the fact that I was here at this time, before starting a family. Suddenly I had this vision, this picture, of having a child and coming back here one day as a parent. I saw a kid who would have a life and career trajectory that would be easier than my own, with hopefully fewer hurdles. Maybe that child would want to do something conventional and demanding, like attend medical school. I would tell that child to take a year off beforehand and do something crazy, like get a job at one of these five-star resorts in the middle of the Indian Ocean. And I would encourage that child to have a fun, relaxing year and get a tan, maybe make some Maldivian friends. And then we would come visit. This child would be a hard worker, a good kid who probably wouldn’t even want a gap year, but I would be the lax mom pushing that child to slow down, enjoy life more. The coral reefs, I thought to myself, were already dying. By the time my own child got here, they may already be gone.
We think of gender identity as so important, and it is, but as I sat envisioning this child I could somehow feel this child’s essence without knowing a gender. Maybe I was already going crazy by that point, I don’t know.
Things kind of went downhill from there. I found myself spending a lot of time alone. I felt a rising sense of dread, and the time was passing really slowly. I suspected that I was the only religious guest at this resort, including my Jewish-but-secular-identifying companion.
Riding a bicycle in New York City always seemed too dangerous, but in Laamu it was easy. Each day I would ride my bicycle in a big, flat circle around the circumference of the resort on a sandy path shaded by jungle. Aside from the creaking of my bicycle, all I could hear were the rustling noises of the big, shiny green tree leaves and the slithering of tiny lizards into the vegetation.
So there I was, scowling nonstop and miserably riding around Laamu like the little man on the tricycle in the Saw movies. Even in these ultra-expensive environments, there were still pecking orders indicating visitors’ varying levels of wealth. Some of the guest-huts were very large. Those huts had their own pools on their patios, right over the lagoon.
The huts were on my right side, and a mass of domesticated Laamu jungle lay on my left. On one of my rides, a tiny little hut caught my eye through the leaves. I stopped my bike and looked closer. It was a mosque. I was so moved to see it. It had charm—it looked rundown but loved, as if it had been used frequently by people at one point.
Islam, and spirituality in general, were threaded into the resort in subtle ways. I could hear faint muezzin calls from unknown locations throughout the day on the island. I found it grounding to know that there were religious people somewhere nearby who counted on hearing these calls as part of a daily practice. The resort’s extensive menu of massages came with disclaimers about energy healing. Ayurvedic foods and potions appeared everywhere.
Most of the other guests had seemingly traveled to the Maldives from Europe. One European guest asked me why we hadn’t just gone to the Caribbean (something similar happens in White Lotus Season 3). Frankly I thought it was a great question. Each day, I would see a young Scandinavian couple walking happily with their two small children from their family’s guest-hut to the resort’s main hub. They reminded me of the have-it-all Nordic characters in the pop-sociology book The Almost Nearly Perfect People. They seemed as if they were performing better at life than I was, and under easier conditions. The woman was toned and blonde and tan. They were constantly smiling. I felt a searing envy.
We met another perfectly perfect-looking European couple at the resort. A middle-aged pair traveling from France, they said they had lived all over the world. The husband was a lifestyle executive who said he’d just encountered some recent work drama, so they had taken refuge in Laamu for a few days. He was tall and handsome with long, wavy hair, and I didn’t like the way he looked at me. “Do you work?” he’d asked me when we met. When I searched him online that night I saw that sure enough, his recent work situation had made headlines. In photos, he was wearing suits at international galas and putting his arms around models and actresses.
His wife, on the other hand, was demure and academic-looking. She was very attractive, in an unassuming, wholesome way, and she wore glasses. Considering these two individuals who seemed so different, I wondered to myself: How were they possibly married?
Each day, I would wake up with the thought: How is this vacation not over yet? I checked my messages frequently. Why hadn’t I heard from any of my friends? Had they forgotten about me? In the wordless promotional video for the resort, a scene shot overhead had shown a man writing “out of the ordinary” in the Laamu sand. Why hadn’t he written “Help”? I didn’t know what to do with myself, and typical coping mechanisms were also of no use here. (If you ever want to quit drinking, go to the Equator and sit under that sun for hours. Tell me then if you want a poolside cocktail.)
The day of departure was the best day ever. The next stop was Abu Dhabi, and I could have literally kissed the pavement there upon arriving. Abu Dhabi was more obviously ostentatious and extravagant than the Maldives had been, but I felt far more comfortable there. In the lobby of an enormous converted palace, young women strode by in traditional abayas lying open over crop tops and low-rise jeans. These girls were in dialogue with a religious tradition—maybe a winking or contentious or even antagonistic one—but they were in a dialogue with it nonetheless, and that was something I could understand.
It’s not as if they sell t-shirts that say, “I survived my trip to the Maldives.” I figured I must have been the only person ever who hadn’t had fun at a wildly expensive island destination. It turns out, however, that I wasn’t alone. Shortly after returning, I saw my dentist, a lovely youngish Jewish man who was always updating me on all the things his daughter was learning in her religious preschool. He had visited the Seychelles—probably the closest analogue, along with Bora Bora, to the Maldives—with his wife, and he too had felt trapped and alone.
One person making these complaints is an ingrate. Two people? Well, now you’ve got yourself a minyan. We chuckled guiltily together about our mutual dislike of these vacations that we’d been told to love.
As humans, we don’t always know what is best for us. We think that luxury means a certain thing, when that very thing can make us feel even unhappier than we did before. We don’t realize that we bring our miseries with us everywhere we travel. Hell, sometimes they’re even sitting next to us on the plane. (Obviously I mean luggage.)
These resorts are exquisite and amazing. But I wonder if luxury should start with the fundamentals. Small moments of health and wellness in exotic locations mean nothing if you’re not already experiencing them at home. A few terrifically bad days in an exotic location can expose truths about our home lives that we were previously unwilling or unable to see.
We all—secular people, religious people—think that we know the best way to live. I am reminded of the last pasuk of Psalm 49: “A man who has riches, but no understanding, is like the beasts that perish.” The question is: Who has understanding?
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Selim Tlili (New York, NY), whose peer-reviewed research has been accepted for publication in the journal Science Scope.