Cameron Mofid was 20 when his mental health worsened during Covid. In need of a distraction, he began scrolling travel sites, and realised there was an extraordinary record he could potentially break. His journey would change everything
In May 2020, a month into the first Covid lockdown in Miami, Florida, 20-year-old student Cameron Mofid found his obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) beginning to spiral out of control. “I was first diagnosed with the condition when I was 12. It produces obsessive thoughts that drive compulsions like washing hands, tapping or endlessly replaying conversations. When I was alone in the apartment with nowhere to go during Covid, those intrusive thoughts got much worse,” he says. “It can become paralysing being stuck in a mental loop. It was worrying and I felt like I really needed to get out of my head and that space.”
With nothing else to do, Mofid began searching through travel destinations on his laptop, hoping for a near future where borders would reopen and he could leave. As he scrolled, he came across a fact that would change his life. “I saw that more people had been to space than had visited all 195 countries in the world,” he says. “I was shocked that so few people – about 300 – had seen the world, and I also learned that, according to the travel platform and community, Nomad Mania, the age of the youngest person to visit every country at that time was 27. I wanted to do something impossible: I decided to beat that record.”
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