This originally appeared as a post on my FaceBook page. I have since modified it to be a blog to capture it as part of my RTW experiences:

A friend posted an article on FaceBook titled “Be Happier by Settling for Good Enough“.

As it spurred a few discussions among friends, I realized how true it had been for me, in traveling. I started out with my ‘perfection’ mentality. In every city I got to, I needed to get the ‘best’ experience. See the best things. Eat the best food. Out came the laptop and on went Tripadvisor, Wikitravel, Google, and myriad other web pages. I started creating excel spreadsheets of the attractions in each place, on how many websites they were recommended, what the intensity level of the recommendation was, etc. The tabs grew. From there it went on to cities. The perfect cities to go to get the best experience of the country. Then the best countries to go to. The spreadsheets grew in number….

And then I popped. Exhausted. Loaded with data. A spinning head. And extremely frustrated. A few very obvious facts then hit. Hit not at the cortex, but beneath. At the part which actually moves me.

• The world is too big a place to experience fully in one life time…
• The striving for perfection was having me constantly living in the future. When in any place, I was constantly thinking and planning about the next place. The place I was at receded to ambient noise amidst the clamor of self pontification.

It didn’t matter what I did. How efficiently I planned, how quickly I moved, there are just too many wonders in this world to take in. Whether it be the madness of the Carnaval in Rio, or the gentle fluttering of a Monarch Butterfly in Myanmar.

I had to resign myself to that one simple fact:

…We are always missing out

Anytime we take in one experience, we miss out on countless others. In fact, there is only one experience that we have the power to not miss out on. And that is the one we are experiencing right now. In any given moment. By worrying out missing out on the other experiences, I was missing out on the one experience that I could have had- the one I was at! The present moment.

I also realized that our level of enjoyment of, and satisfaction with, an experience is sort of like our enjoyment with money. Sure we need a certain base level to have us be happy. Above that, it doesn’t play a big role in increasing our enjoyment level. If anything, it brings fleeting changes when there is an upward change in the amount of money we have. That fleeting change vanishes as quickly as it came.
Experiences are like that. They need to have a certain base level for the fulfillment of base needs, for us to enjoy them. Simple things like, say a working toilet nearby or moderate weather. If you sincerely look at your base criteria, it’s just that- quite basic. It’s subjective to every experience. Beyond that it’s a dance between what is and our expectation of what should be.

And that is the case with trying to experience all that life as to offer. There are a million experiences that are above our base criteria of what can make an experience enjoyable. Beyond that, the power to have it be an enjoyable experience depends on our expectation of what should be. It is no longer tied to the experience.

The problem I see with researching and reviewing is that, while it can assure us that the experience meets the basic requirements, it also raises our expectations of what it should be. So it takes away the ‘blown away by surprise’ factor. The most you can expect is a middling ‘pleasantly surprised’.

After that, I tossed away all the research. Deleted the gratuitous amounts of neatly labeled bookmarks, and just moved from city to city. Travel recommendations came from the mouths of strangers, random chats with fellow travelers, and random walks down unknown streets. If an experience met my base criteria, I chose to ensconce myself in it. Am I getting the ‘best’ every city has to offer? I’m pretty sure not. Am I missing out on things. Always.

But am I enjoying myself more? So much more. I take in what’s around me so much fully by choosing not to know the whole spreadsheet of what else could be around me. The count of my experiences have decreased ten-fold. But my enjoyment of those few ones have increased a hundred-fold. That’s good enough for me.