What Doesn't Make the Highlights
On countries, the wrong metric, and places you can't stop thinking about
Somewhere in the last decade, or post Covid-19, travel got its own resume.
We had photo albums and they were honestly fine. This has been unceremoniously dethroned by flag counts on Instagram bios. I’ll confess that for someone who lurks on that platform once every few months, it’s an observation on profiles that neatly arrange travel in highlight reels, documenting pins dropped with flag colours (or other innovative ways to express travel experiences that I’m unaware of).
Stories was my last favourite feature. Even if it was copied from Snapchat, I liked the ephemeral nature of letting people into your life with a 24-hour countdown. But then Highlights came and just made everyone create portfolios on social media. The experience of being somewhere became, also, the production of content about being somewhere. The view from the hostel roof got photographed before you sat down to enjoy it. The meal got documented before you could have your first bite. I am not saying people are especially vain, most people I know aren’t, but the design of what the platform intended made the capture feel like the point more than the real moment.
The logic of it
There are 195 of them, if you go by international consensus. 206 if you’re the Olympics Committee. 211 if you’re FIFA. And somewhere along the way, you became considered well-travelled in proportion to how many the passport can hold.
It’s seductive to talk about, right? And actually, it’s a theory of what travel is for. If travel is for accumulation, i.e stamps, flags, scrollable Highlight reels, then countries is exactly the right unit. You collect them in the form of fridge magnets, postcards or even coins that become great conversation starters.
But is accumulation a sign of being well-travelled? Europe is the perfect cheat-code for a traveller. Get a single visa, travel for a few weeks, come back having visited six countries. Wow. Actually make that eight right? You have to count the layover in one, and the fact you straddled the Vatican while you were in Italy. Because, why not?
Here’s the thing though: this isn’t a new instinct. Your parents’ generation, or your grandparents’, did Europe in twenty-five days from India. A coach tour through France, Switzerland, Italy, a day in Austria if the schedule held. Thomas Cook had a brochure for it and that proliferated into custom packages. You moved in a group, saw the things, ate where the bus stopped. Seven countries in three weeks. The countries count was the natural output because the trip was literally organised by country. Back then, a trip to Europe was an event, not a lifestyle like it is now which is probably why squeezing in seven countries made sense. Instagram made your travel more personal, permanent, and on a scoreboard.
Somewhere Specific
Meanwhile, the infrastructure moved on without the metric catching up. Flights now connect Dubai to Iași, to Riga, to Vilnius. These are cities you’d visit because you actually want to be there, not because they’re the obvious entry point. The connective tissue of getting somewhere granular has been rebuilt to the point where you could stand at an airport flight board and genuinely not know where half those cities are on a map. The metric we use to talk about it hasn’t moved.
Cities is a better unit because at least a city gives you some texture, something to walk through, a meal that wasn’t chosen for the story. Maybe even a story on why you landed up there, what prompted you to visit this place. But you can rush through a city too. You can do Tangier in 36 hours and tick it, which is a different experience from doing Tangier in a week, and a different experience again from coming back three years later and noticing how much of it you missed the first time.
The problem isn’t the unit because what travel actually does to you doesn’t have a unit. And we decided to fill that gap with countries, because countries were quantifiable and the platform was waiting for your engagement.
How Did You End Up Here
The conversation you have with a fellow traveller in a non-obvious city is a different kind of conversation. Not where-have-you-been. More: how did you end up here? What made you consider this place at all? That question, why here, of all places, doesn’t really come up at a hostel bar. It comes up when you’re both somewhere nobody told you to go.
There’s a term for what this kind of travel is reaching toward - slow travel. Stay longer, go fewer places, let a city accumulate in you rather than pass through you. The term is right enough, but I think it undersells the thing. It makes it sound like a pace. Like the solution is just to book a longer Airbnb.
What I think it’s actually pointing at is something more like: travel as experiment.
The package tour from earlier was prescribed you knew what you’d see before you left. The Highlight reel is performed because you know what you’ll post before you arrive. What’s different now, for a certain kind of traveller, is something more genuinely open. You go without fully knowing what you’re testing for. You’re not following the brochure. You’re not building the reel. You’re running something, and the results come in later. Sometimes much later.
That Place
I have one. I was there for less than a week, years ago, and I'm still not sure I understand why it keeps coming back.
It wasn't even my most memorable trip. Nothing dramatic even happened. But something about the pace of it, or the quality of the light at a particular hour, or the version of myself I briefly was while I was there surfaces at odd moments. And it always makes me want to go back.
That pull is the longer experiment. The trip ends, but something in you keeps processing it. The place isn’t done with you yet or you aren’t done with it. And no number of new destinations fills that specific gap, because it isn’t a gap about travel. It’s a gap about that place.
There’s also a part of you that knows that you may never go back because there’s so much more of the world to see right? Will I ever go back? is a question you only ask about places that got inside you.
The Reading Life
There’s another version of this experiment nobody counts: the vicarious one. A lot of travel is lived through someone else’s account. It’s the documentary, the essay, or the Highlight you scroll through on someone’s profile. Some of the most formative travel happens in a living room. Globe Trekker at 11pm. Bourdain somewhere in Hanoi.
Which makes me think the better frame for all of this isn’t a metric. It's how you read.
Some people read many books and accumulate whereas some read fewer and return to the same ones, finding something different each time because they’ve changed.
Travel is the same. A return trip isn’t a failure of ambition. It’s sort of a re-read. The city hasn’t changed much but you have.
The count in the bio is like a library card. What you actually read meaning what carried, what came back, what made you ask will I ever go back? that’s a different record entirely.
Thanks for reading The Split Decision. If this landed, forward it to someone whose travel bio you’ve been meaning to interrogate.
Sidebar: I highly recommend reading No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram — a lot of the product decisions, and how users shaped the platform with their use, is masterful from a behavioural psychology lens.