I don’t want to be a list ticker.
I don’t want to hit 30 countries under 30.
I love travel, yes, and living abroad, but I refuse to be a part of making it the necessity-of-a-life-well-lived pedestal that it has risen to. Travel is a status symbol, a mark of privilege, an adventure you were lucky enough to have the money to do, or to be born in a country whose passport is allowed to pass easily beyond its own borders.
To tick off lists. To compile buckets of them. To rush hastily through a country and its culture returning with gigabytes of one shot memories. To seek out the most unique, most valid, most clickable adventure in this great world, full of fascinating, contradictory, obscure, obtuse, easily misunderstood, would-take-a-lifetime-of-study-to-understand cultures and people (that are sometimes even within our own country!)
What is that but a way to feel better about our short time of life by making it seem better, more exciting, more adventurous, than someone else’s. Maybe someone we left at home. Maybe someone who chose a different course in life, that we aren’t entirely sure wasn’t something we really wanted to do all along.
Be happy. Choose happily. What is your happy? Understand that first. Then go.
Where Next Japan 
I agree with you. All this talk of lists can sometimes create unrealistic expectations. I think we should just try to make goals to get out and do something. If that means visiting other countries, then okay. Good. You did something at least.
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Right! I feel it all becomes so competitive, and consumerist when it’s about how much you can do and see. Experiences are wonderful, but, I reckon, of equal worth whereever you are in the world.
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For me, interestingly, I feel travel is a type of addiction. I feel serious withdrawal symptoms if I haven’t been somewhere “else” in awhile, but that may be because that’s the type of life I have been fortunate to live in the past decade. However, I think with the explosion of social media, too many people are living out their experience more on-screen than off. I certainly am guilty of taking photos and blogging myself but I have learned the value of putting down the camera and actually being present. I think we often forget that part.
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