“It’s really just a publicity thing,” says Michael Zervos, a man who’s currently on course to set the Guinness World Record for the fewest number of days needed to visit every country in the world.
But as he told me, that’s just to bring eyes onto his real mission: to hear the happiest moments from the lives of people in every country in the world and to share them on social media, to help remind us we are all connected, if not by parentage, then by aspirations.
Dubbed Project Kosmos, he has more or less reached the halfway point of his journey, having already passed through 100 countries in under a year. Barring a few pariahs, his passport has been stamped in all of Asia, Oceania, Africa, and some parts of Europe.
His brilliantly shot videos are arrayed very cleverly on his Instagram. Areej, in Jordan, recalled the moment she bought her first bike and learned how to ride it—after she turned 30.
Sam, in Brunei, said it was the day she arrived at her tram stop, and a homeless man whom she had treated to a hot chocolate days before, was waiting there for her with a hot chocolate in return.
They’re curated and produced by Zervos who all the while is traveling at a breakneck pace across the face of the Earth.
“Amazingly, I’m still on schedule,” Zervos, a dual citizen of the US and Greece, told me in May during a stopover in Cyprus. “I had to make several adjustments about 30 countries in, and my intention wasn’t to come back to Greece at this time. But still, I visited all the countries I expected to go to save for a couple I had to kick down the line, like North Korea which still hasn’t opened.”
“I’m amazed I’m on schedule,” he admitted. “Occasionally it means maybe spending a day less in a certain place but I’ve tried to make the most out of those situations.”
If you couldn’t tell by the hair, Zervos was already an avid globe trekker before he concocted the idea for his “record-breaking journey of happiness,” but also a self-described fan of logistics and planning, having worked in documentary filmmaking before embarking on his trip.
Knowing that he only had a few days in each nation, he spent much of the planning phase seeking out personalities and “fixers,” as Anthony Bourdain would call them. Finding them through social media, he’d open a dialogue and see if they could give him a crash course on what it means to be happy in the Democratic Rep. of the Congo, Mongolia, Burundi, etc.
The world over, the emotion of happiness does remind us of our shared humanity and kindness somehow happens to be the portal through which happiness could be easily accessed. You’d never know how much happiness that little act of kindness would bring to the life of another.
Credit: World at Large.