Stop Setting Stupid “Completist” Travel Goals

By Robert McGarvey

Maybe it’s just whom I know but I am encountering more people who have set what I view as genuinely stupid travel goals.

I don’t mean goals such as spending at least a week abroad every year or seeing the big 5 animals on an African safari. Such goals are of course personal and they may be enriching. I’ve had such goals myself (e.g., doing two Caminos in two years or traveling to northern Ireland frequently enough to have some understanding of the Troubles).

What gets my blood pressure boiling is a goal such as visiting all 50 US states and this week that goal roared in front of my eyes because the Financial Times – an otherwise very credible British newspaper – ran a piece entitled “From Alabama to Wyoming: how I joined America’s 50-state club.”

The author, an FT staffer, noted: “though it is a strange, and admittedly arbitrary, endeavour, it is one that growing numbers of travellers are undertaking. The All Fifty Club was founded in 2006 to help ‘track, share, and celebrate the accomplishment of visiting all 50 states.’ It now counts more than 10,500 members, about 85 per cent of whom have completed the quest, with the remainder closing in on it.”

The author further noted that this is part of a trend called “completist travel.” Other such goals are visiting all 193 countries recognized by the UN – which would mean trips to North Korea, Somalia, Haiti, Russia, Burkina Faso and other, shall we say, off the beaten path destinations with little to commend them to visitors. I assure you my life would not be richer if I traveled to Burkina Faso and I doubt yours would be either.

And of course there is to my mind the lunatic obsession with going to Antarctica to be able to claim to have visited 7 continents.  I admit I know a lot of people who have done this or who insist they want to. If I still sent Christmas cards I’d cross them off the list but since I don’t anymore I will have to content myself with knowing I’ve crossed them off an imaginary list.

Who cares about going to all 7 continents? I don’t.  I’ve been to four, would gladly go to Africa and Australia if need or opportunity arose, but I wouldn’t go to Antarctica if an all expenses paid cruise landed in my inbox.  I couldn’t reconcile my damage to the planet in going to that ice cube at the bottom of the planet with whatever pleasure I might experience and, frankly, if I get a craving to go there I throw some ice cubes on my kitchen floor, put on heavy hiking shoes and walk on them for a while. I could complete the simulation of the experience by watching a few YouTube videos of penguins, although they now apparently are disappearing from Antarctica.  

But to my mind the most pointless completist mission is visiting all 50 states – and I see many acquaintances on Facebook celebrating their closing in on the magic number.

Not me. I have been to around 30 (I don’t count driving as fast as I could across Indiana as being there) and, you know, I am comfy with that number. I plain don’t want to visit most of the states I have never been in. Sorry about that North and South Dakota, but I don’t care. Ditto Mississippi. I find it unimaginable that I will ever visit them and I find it inexplicable that somebody would want to visit them just to get a few more notches on an imaginary belt.

OK, I get it. A harcore Elvis fan would want to go to Tupelo Miss.

And I know a motorcycle fan who loves the annual Sturgis ND event and that’s fine for him.  But I have never ridden a motorcycle and have no intention of picking it up now,

I am not opposed to going to states I haven’t been to, it’s just that I have never had a reason to go and doubt that will change.

And I’m flatly opposed to contributing to global pollution by traveling to places just to check a box to achieve a pointless “goal.”

Good goals are where we grow – emotionally, intellectually, somehow. A pointless completist goal is, well, pointless. Just don’t go.