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“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, TikTok, and Facebook. 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 WaL 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 production 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.
“It’s changed me in ways that I can’t really articulate,” said Zervos in May, who by then had already filmed between 700 and 800 interviews.
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A human universal
All human beings are happy sometimes. Zervos wanted to know why.
In an exercise in cross-cultural sociology, he selected questions that are typically found on the sort of surveys from the UNDP or WHO that are administered in regions across low and middle-income countries when measuring development rates.
However, Zervos quickly found that asking the question “what makes you happy?” isn’t the best way to get an answer to that question.
“It doesn’t really elicit a story, so that’s why I changed it to ‘what’s the happiest moment of your life?'” Zervos explains. “I’ve gotten a lot of the same answers, but it’s amazing when you’re able to clarify the question and actually ask for a specific moment, it doesn’t necessarily fall in line with what makes them happy”.
“So if they’re saying ‘oh family makes me happy.’ Okay wonderful, but I want a specific moment in your life, then I’ll get like ‘oh well, when I bought a bell for my prized cow, and I was able to afford it, and everyone could see this bell and how beautiful it was on my black and white cow’”.
“So it seems like the highest highs aren’t always what makes you happy consistently. People between the ages of 18 and 25? Not many have said ‘when I got married,’ but many have said education, or when my first child was born, but as they’ve gotten older those responses have actually diminished”.
“Like a village chief near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe—85 years old but doesn’t look it—he said his happiest moment is when he hosted a cohort of international travelers and agents from all over the world. And he killed goats and oxen and chickens over three days and it was all late nights and dancing and harmony… the way he was describing, you could see the lights in his eyes he was getting so emotional”.
The hunt for happiness in humanity is a new exercise for Zervos, who is fueled by a love of travel and storytelling.
“Some of my favorite books and movies—they never wrap up the mystery. Maybe they wrap up the plot but they open up the theme at the very end to make you question more things than none, and there’s more than a little of that in travel and I think that’s why I keep coming back to certain locations. I really can’t get enough of that”.
North America, Europe, and South America remain. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: Several of Zervos’ interviewees. PC: Project Kosmos / Instagram.
