Matt Ortile: Gladly. Country counting is the practice of counting the countries you have “been to.” Very often, I see this in the bios of social media accounts, whether you're a travel influencer or a private citizen. People say something like, “59 countries and counting" with all the emoji flags for Japan and El Salvador and Australia. In my opinion, the idea that you're just gobbling up all of these countries clues me into how you travel and signifies an anti-slow travel mindset.

For me, I called it out in a recent video for the magazine because to me, country counting is about broadcasting where you've been, rather than sharing a story from an experience you had there or deeply engaging with what it means to be a visitor in a place. It's another sort of way of signaling status, of global citizenship. It just seems very shallow. I'm trying to sound very deep about it, but it just rubs me in such a weird way, very similar to the way that people say, “Oh, what's your body count?” You know, “What is your country count?”

I've had conversations with people, and they'll say, “Oh, yeah, I've been to Qatar,” for example. I was like, “Oh, what did you think of like the souqs?” and they were like, “Oh, I was just at the airport.” You're counting that when you had this very limited view, a very minute slice of what life in that place could be like. And I don't know, maybe that's travel to them, but it rubs up against my admittedly moralistic view of what travel can be.