The Checklist
I typed “Fukuoka” into the search bar.
What came back felt less like information and more like a checklist I was supposed to complete.
Things you have to eat. Things you have to see. Things you have to buy. The same handful of names appeared again and again, shuffled into slightly different orders with every scroll.
It didn’t feel like information I could use to make my own choices. It felt more like a list of tasks I had never agreed to.
I hadn’t even decided what I wanted from the trip yet, but the search bar had already decided what it meant to have “done Fukuoka right.”
As I kept scrolling, I realized the feeling had a name.
Gamification.
A quest log disguised as travel advice. A progress bar I had never asked for.
Three out of nine completed. Four out of six completed.
And underneath that checklist was something more specific than boredom. A kind of restlessness, almost a tightness in my chest.
I hadn’t even decided whether I wanted to move yet, and somehow I already felt like I had been placed on a track and told which direction to run.
Efficiency, for Whom?
Everyone calls this efficiency.
But efficiency for whom?
It didn’t necessarily feel efficient for me, standing there without even knowing what I wanted from the trip.
That version of efficiency was built around things that could be measured: how quickly I could choose a place, how many places I could visit, how neatly I could complete an itinerary.
My pace, my detours, the preferences that hadn’t fully taken shape yet — those were much harder to account for.
The track was well organized.
Whether I actually wanted to run on it was a different question.
What I really wanted barely showed up.
Small galleries. Design studios. Local exhibitions worth taking a deliberate detour for.
It wasn’t that those things didn’t exist. They were simply harder to surface than the places that large numbers of people were already searching for and visiting.
That, after all, is what search and recommendation systems have become very good at: showing us what many people are already looking for and responding to.
And what many people want isn’t always what I want.
Popularity Isn’t Discovery
This wasn’t just a feeling I had about travel.
A few years ago, Spotify’s research team asked a similar question about music: what happens, over time, when people listen to music chosen by algorithms versus music they find and choose for themselves?
The researchers analyzed listening behavior across a huge number of users and compared the diversity of their music consumption.
They found that, for most users, music chosen by the users themselves tended to be more diverse than music provided through algorithmic recommendations. And among people whose musical tastes became more diverse over time, there was a tendency to move somewhat away from algorithmic listening and toward their own collections.
There is an important caveat here.
The study did not establish that algorithms caused people’s tastes to become narrower. The researchers themselves noted that the findings did not prove causality. It could also be that people who already had more diverse tastes were simply more likely to rely on their own choices rather than recommendations.
Still, something interesting remained.
At least in this data, “continuously giving me things I’m likely to enjoy” and “helping me discover something more diverse” did not necessarily move in the same direction.
There’s something slightly ironic about that.
The very platform that prides itself on knowing your taste better than you do had to look at its own data and discover that the recommendations it optimized for and the way people discovered music on their own were not quite the same thing.
Popularity and discovery don’t necessarily live on the same axis.
Neither do “something that fits my taste” and “something that expands it.”
Why should travel search be any different?
Getting Lost
I remember traveling differently once.
I would do just enough searching to understand the rough shape and atmosphere of a city. Then I would walk, and let the real list assemble itself along the way.
It wasn’t particularly efficient.
Once in Tokyo, I took the wrong exit from a station and spent twenty minutes retracing my steps through a maze of underground passages that all looked exactly the same.
That evening, I was on my way to a tonkatsu restaurant when I walked through the wrong door and ended up somewhere else entirely.
I didn’t realize my mistake until the ramen arrived.
So I just ate it.
It was good.
Maybe it was better than the tonkatsu I had originally planned to eat. I’ll never know.
None of this shows up as a “result” in a search.
And yet maybe it’s precisely these accumulated mistakes — the wrong exits, the wrong doors, the unplanned turns — that eventually draw a map that belongs only to me.
A checklist can’t give me that.
There is no box for “took the wrong turn.”
What the Map Misses
And somewhere in the middle of all that wandering, something else was always happening.
Music was flowing underneath it all.
Not music I had chosen for the trip, but things I happened to pass by.
A song spilling out of a shop with its doors left open.
A busker playing near the exit I had taken by mistake.
Once, I was crossing a university campus for no particular reason when I came across what looked like a student festival on a patch of grass.
And in the middle of walking, one song suddenly hit me.
Loud. Unfamiliar. Completely unplanned.
I stopped just long enough to Shazam it, then kept walking.
Laufey, “From the Start.”
I can’t tell you exactly what I was doing in Berkeley that day, or where I was going.
But I can tell you exactly what that patch of grass sounded like.
Even now, whenever I play that song, it takes me straight back there.
This is the part a checklist has a hard time recording.
Maybe it’s also the part a map can’t really record.
Not the place itself, but what that place sounded like at the exact moment I happened to be standing there.
An itinerary is very good at recording places, times, and routes.
But it was never really designed to record what you happened to see, what you smelled, or what song happened to be playing while you were there.
It wasn’t on the list.
And yet music remembers it without ever being asked to.
Leaving Room
Of course, I’m not saying every trip should work this way.
Sometimes efficiency matters.
You might have a short layover. A tightly scheduled business trip. Or you might be visiting an unfamiliar place for the first time, when having some guidance can make the whole experience easier.
The problem, I think, is that this way of traveling has gradually started to feel like the default.
Our tools are becoming remarkably good at predicting what we might like, telling us where to go, and suggesting what to do next.
But we talk much less about how to leave something undecided.
How to take the longer way.
How to notice what was playing in the background while we were lost.
So I keep coming back to a small, still-forming thought.
What if something didn’t help us “complete” a city, but simply helped us begin?
What if, instead of deciding what we would like in advance, it left enough room for us to wander in our own way?
And what if, along the way, it quietly kept the things we happened to catch — not by predicting them, but simply by listening?
I don’t know what that would look like yet.
But maybe it should begin not by adding more, but by taking something away.
No, that’s not it.
This isn’t the kind of travel record I was looking for.
Not a mountain of snacks that will be eaten, forgotten, and gone in a matter of days.
I want to remember the places I wandered into, the songs I heard along the way, the unexpected turns, the moments I lingered.
Not the haul.
The experience.
