I've thought about doing this in the past, but decided against it. To pull it off, you have to focus on it so hard that it just becomes work, and you miss out on a lot of the reasons you travel in the first place.
Most obsessions are like this, I guess. Find anybody doing a "collect all the X", and you'll likely find a person who long ago stopped really enjoying X. It reminds me of the guys a few years back who were determined to completely max out some airline's "all you can fly in 30 days" ticket. Lots of suffering for suffering's sake [1].
Naturally, I can't claim that I've somehow had a better time travelling through my meager 65 countries than the subject of this article did with his 193. But I bet if his goal wasn't "every single one", but rather "as many as it takes", it would have been a lot more fun.
* To pull it off, you have to focus on it so hard that it just becomes work, and you miss out on a lot of the reasons you travel in the first place.*
I think the thing is to relax - you've got 60+ years to go see them all, so there's no time pressure, really. Sure, countries come and go, so you might miss some. But the cultures typically last beyond the containing country anyway.
60+ is potentially an overstatement depending on when you start.
More importantly, 193 countries in 60 years is less than four months per country. I'm not sure how much traveling you've done, but travel arrangements take planning; so does lodging, depending on where you're going (less-populated or less tourism-friendly countries can be an issue regarding where to stay if you haven't figured it out beforehand). Also, visa requirements can be very complex, and obtaining one can be both time-consuming and expensive, depending on how many fees or bribes (yes, in eastern Europe and some other places, this can be anywhere between helpful and necessary) are involved.
While you're right that relaxing would be the only way to handle this without going totally insane, that definitely won't make it a nice, leisurely trip. There is work involved, and a lot of it, much of it intellectually taxing.
Four months per country would be the average, but the distribution wouldn't be equal like that, especially because I doubt anyone trying to do this would plan a separate trip for each country. If you wanted to, you could fairly easily fly into somewhere in the Schengen zone, get a rail pass, and do all 26 countries in the zone in a couple of months' time, without any visas, and staying in hostels you booked along the way. The only planning you'd need to do would be to book airfare, and that would give you a fair bit more wiggle room for the rest of the world.
Also, planning & travel can go on concurrently, given cellphone coverage in an area.
So if you were a schoolteacher with summers off, you could spend 2-3 months traveling in closely-connected countries. Leaving you 9 months to de-stress with a room full of 14 year olds. :)
Yeah. I spent a month in Spain a couple of years ago, and met a backpacker who was visiting 25 European cities by himself in 2 months, or something like that. He was already about 40 days through it, and was complaining to me how he was completely exhausted, how it was more work than work -- his friends back home were so envious, but he was actually longing to be back in a cubicle! But it was a pride thing, he said -- all his friends thought it was so awesome of him, so he had to stick with it. I felt kind of bad for him, really.
> To pull it off, you have to focus on it so hard that it just becomes work, and you miss out on a lot of the reasons you travel in the first place.
Most obsessions are like this, I guess. Find anybody doing a "collect all the X", and you'll likely find a person who long ago stopped really enjoying X.
I think you have a good point, but at the same time, I think it's possible that for some combination of person and hobby, you really can avoid it becoming "work".
For instance, my primary hobby right now is cycling. The thing is, I train pretty hard and sprint up hills every day, and suffer through various aches and pains (the latest being a blister on my right palm of all things).
Many of my friends ask me, "Why are you making yourself suffer during your `hobby time`?" I get their point, and I even think that in a vacuum, they have a good point. But I genuinely enjoy the process of getting better at something like this, and even the suffering becomes part of the whole package that makes the pursuit rewarding and enjoyable for me.
So while it is true that "something that seems like play can become work if taken too far", the converse(?) is also true that something that seems like work can actually be play for some people :).
Most obsessions are like this, I guess. Find anybody doing a "collect all the X", and you'll likely find a person who long ago stopped really enjoying X. It reminds me of the guys a few years back who were determined to completely max out some airline's "all you can fly in 30 days" ticket. Lots of suffering for suffering's sake [1].
Naturally, I can't claim that I've somehow had a better time travelling through my meager 65 countries than the subject of this article did with his 193. But I bet if his goal wasn't "every single one", but rather "as many as it takes", it would have been a lot more fun.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782792