Mofid experienced intensified OCD during the May 2020 lockdown in Miami, prompting obsessive loops and a need to escape his head. He began researching travel destinations and discovered that fewer people had visited all 195 countries than had been to space. Motivated by that fact, he aimed to become the youngest person to visit every country under Nomad Mania standards, which require leaving airports and spending days in each nation. He completed the 195-country odyssey on 6 April 2025 in Pyongyang, North Korea, shortly after his 25th birthday.
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 wanted to do something impossible: I decided to beat that record. The age of the holder of the Guinness World Record for the feat, at the time, was 21, but Mofid noticed that the Guinness World Records rules had allowed the use of airport transits to gain new border stamps, in lieu of actually spending time in each country.
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