Why I travelled the world for 366 days straight (the answer lies in grade 5 math)

No, seriously. I'm going to talk about grade 5 math

Manoj Arachige

Feb 12, 2025

In case you haven’t already seen my eight hundred Instagram posts about this…

I backpacked around the world for a year, nonstop.

366 days to be exact.

Since returning to Australia, I’ve made it my mission to catch up with all my friends in Melbourne.

And when I say mission, I really mean mission.

I take friendships very seriously.

Here’s my Google Calendar from the week after I returned.

(Yes I put literally everything in Google Calendar and yes it runs my entire life - if your event isn’t in my GCal, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not happening)

So naturally at each of these catchups, the conversation inevitably gravitated to the topic of my travels.

And the question I was asked almost every time is:

“Why?”

Not simply “Why did you want to travel for a year?” Because to a certain extent, I guess that’s obvious - travelling is an almost universally loved activity.

Rather, I would be asked:

“Why did you leave everything behind to do it? Why would you give up a stable and well-paying job, plenty of opportunities, time with family and friends, your company, your relationship and literally every other good thing in your life to lug around a backpack while sweating your ass off and sleeping on airport floors in Mexico? What could possess you to be so reckless?”

(That’s not a direct quote from my family, but it could be)

While I could probably rattle off a list of 20 reasons why I chose to quit everything and travel for a year, I’ll narrow it down to the 4 most salient points:

Reason #1: I’d never done it before

My parents migrated from Sri Lanka to Australia before I was born. As with most migrant families, they moved from a developing to a developed country with the dream of a better life. And, as with most migrant families, that dream heavily involved me becoming well-educated and getting a good job one day.

So, from as early as I can remember, I was learning and studying and working.

A spoonful of Kumon, a few cups of tutoring and an entire pantry of basic maths and English textbooks later, I had completed the first step of the recipe - getting a scholarship to a good secondary college as I graduated from my small, local primary school.

The next step was getting into medicine.

And after that, studying medicine.

After that, being a doctor.

During that, running a company.

For the better part of 15 years, I’d been working and studying nonstop.

Had I been overseas? Yeah, briefly.

But I had never travelled.

I’d never been on an adventure overseas, I’d never truly seen the world or met people who led different lives on the other side of the planet.

I simply wanted to see the world as I’d never seen it before.

Reason #2: The world was changing fast

Venice is (apparently) sinking! I needed to see it ASAP!

Glaciers are melting, reefs are whitening, and trees are burning. I needed to go and see them before they disappeared.

Reason #3: The Order of Operations

Here’s where the connection to grade 5 math materialises.

Cast your mind back to high school. Or maybe primary school. Depends on how nerdy you were.

Either way, at some point in school, you would have learnt about “BODMAS”

BODMAS stands for B-Brackets, O-Orders (powers/indices or roots), D-Division, M-Multiplication, A-Addition, S-Subtraction

The mathematical acronym describes the “order of operations” used to approach simplifying a mathematical expression. In order to solve algebraic problems at school, one would need to follow the order of operations and start by solving for part of the expression contained within brackets, before progressing to orders, division, multiplication, etc. Deviating from this prescribed sequence would result in an incorrect answer.

To finally get to the point of this somewhat convoluted analogy, life has a certain order of operations to it as well. There are some actions or periods during your life that must simply precede others. While not as rigid as the rules of mathematics, it’s advised that one follows the order of operations of life for their own success, happiness and social well-being.

3.1 The BODMAS of life

As an example, most people’s lives look something like this:

Born → Pre-school → Primary School → High School → Tertiary Education → Move out of home → Find a partner → Start working full time → Get married → Buy a house → Have kids → Raise them → etc.

The most pertinent aspect of this sequence is not the items themselves, but rather the order they are in.

Everyone’s lives and desires will obviously be different. Maybe you definitely don’t want kids but you definitely do want 4 golden retrievers. Maybe you don’t want to go to university but you do want to start a company.

Regardless of what the items in the sequence may be (comprising your bucket list items and longer-term life goals), there are some actions that should simply come before others:

While it may be possible to have kids while you’re in high school, it is generally not advised.
While it may be possible to buy a house before starting full-time work, this is usually exceedingly difficult or will land you in mountains of debt.
While it may be possible to go to university for the first time and have a crazy freshers’ party phase, it’s probably not the best thing to do after you’ve married (I can’t imagine your wife/husband being too happy about that).

Hereby we see the order of operations of life. There are some activities that should ideally be done at specific stages of your life, and should ideally precede others.

Now this order of operations is definitely a social construct (Who’s to say I can’t have a child in high school??!), but I’d postulate that it is also biological to a certain degree. We grow and develop from children to teenagers to young adults to adults to elderly and during this process, we understandably change both mentally and physically. I doubt I’ll be able to go surfing or climb mountains when I’m 80. I definitely didn’t want kids or marriage when I was 16. Quitting my job to work on a startup will be much more difficult when I have to worry about providing for my family later in life.

Overall, this order of operations is based on two things:

Desires - things that you want to do throughout your life, both big milestones and trivial wants (buy a house, summit a Himalayan mountain, have 3 kids, write and publish a book, etc.)
Sequence - the optimal order in which you can complete your desires (you won’t be able to summit that Himalayan mountain when you’re 73 and have a metal hip, but you will be able to write that book)

3.2 So what do you desire?

To arrange the items of your life, you’ll first need to know what they are.

One of the hardest parts of optimising your life around this order of operations is knowing what you want. Especially in your teens and early twenties, it’s extremely difficult to decide on what you want to pursue and achieve in life - what you want those items in a sequence to be.

Do you want to have kids? Do you want to travel? Do you want to get married?

What makes these questions all the more difficult is that what you desire can change a lot over time.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to figure out what you want from life other than deep introspection and brutal honesty towards yourself.

One simple technique that might help is Jeff Bezos’ regret minimisation framework. It’s been extensively discussed, so I won’t repeat the gazillion other articles, but you can learn more about it here.

This is an excellent decision-making framework for deciding whether or not to pursue a desire among all the other competing priorities in your life.

Once you’ve spent some time mapping out those desires, you can start arranging them in sequence according to the order of operations.

3.3 Arranging your desires in order of operations

Honestly, this is the easy part.

The order of operations is quite logical, and organising events in sequence will be relatively intuitive depending on what your wants are.

The hard part is the next step.

Acting on this plan.

3.4 Why you need to take this seriously

Once you know what you want and you’ve arranged these in sequence, I highly recommend you enact this plan unyieldingly.

Sorry, I take that back.

I don’t just highly recommend,

I insist.

I plead…

that you use every fibre of your being to do something, anything, to follow your order of operations.

I know many people living their lives afraid of agency:

Friends who let the winds of life usher them along the well-worn path, directionless.

Friends who’ve always wanted to travel the world, but then buy a puppy with their partner and can’t leave their new pet at home.

Friends who’ve settled into a stable career when, in actuality, all they’ve been passionate about their whole lives is playing music.

Decisions like taking time off to travel or ending a relationship to take a new job overseas are big, scary decisions. As humans, we tend to avoid making these decisions, which only worsens our anxieties.

But you need to.

Because the difficulty of taking risks and making big decisions only compounds the longer you wait.

Time, by default, entrenches. That is the sunk cost fallacy.

The longer you’ve been at a job, the higher the pay and promotions get, the more difficult it is to quit
The longer you’ve been in a relationship, the more dependent and comfortable you feel, the more difficult it is to break up
The longer you’ve lived in one place, the more roots and relationships you’ve made, the harder it is to move

I’m not saying you should never do any of these things! But when mapping out the order of operations for your life, it is vital to make hard decisions like quitting, breaking up, or moving, for the grander scheme of things.

Failure to do so will only result in regret later on in life, and that’s something you should always strive to avoid.

3.4 My own order of operations

In my case, taking a gap year to travel was a very specific opportunity that I would unlikely be able to take unless I could find a time in life when responsibilities were low, freedom was high, and I had at least enough money to survive the year. At the end of 2023 when I was planning my trip, I found myself in these unique circumstances:

I had completed a year of full-time work and had spent the last 7 years saving so I had some spending money
I had only completed a year of work. This meant I wasn’t so far along the employment treadmill that jumping off would be career suicide
I was in my mid-twenties and at the height of my physical fitness at the time
I had never travelled before in my life
I really wanted to see the world

You might say the stars aligned.

However, I had some very good reasons not to travel:

I would have to quit my job as a doctor, for which I had studied for 6 years
I would have to end my 2-year relationship
I would have to find someone to run my company which I had built across 4 years

Had I a little less agency and a smaller risk appetite, I would have accepted these 3 factors and continued living as usual. None of these decisions were easy. In fact, they were probably some of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever made in my life. But:

I knew what I wanted
I knew that if I didn’t pursue it, I’d regret it one day
I knew that this was likely the only time in my life, as per my desires in order of operations, that I’d be able to do such a thing

If there was ever a time for me to take a leap of faith and travel the world, it was now.

The stars never align unless you move them around yourself.

I quit my job, ended my relationship and hired a new CEO.

Then I travelled.

3.4 There are always exceptions

Now, I want to make this clear:

You have free will.

The order of operations, unlike BODMAS in maths, is not a rigid rule for life.

Over the last year, I met 70-year-olds who were solo-travelling and hadn’t been home in years. I met middle-aged women who had absconded from their families and homes to move overseas. I met countless people who hadn’t followed the optimal sequence of events that I describe.

But in almost all these cases, these large life decisions were mostly unplanned.

Rather than being initiated by a change in sequence, they were prompted by a change in wants.

The 70-year-old solo traveller had recently been widowed. The middle-aged woman had become sick of her domestic responsibilities.

As such, the order of operations of their lives hadn’t changed, but because their wants changed, they decided to act outside of the optimal sequence of events.

While it’s definitely possible to deviate from the order of operations (as I said, they are definitely a social construct to some extent) I wouldn’t advise on planning for this.

Reason #4: This Sandwich

Look at this sandwich. How could you not want to travel after seeing this sandwich?

So, those are the four most important reasons why I took an entire year out of my life to travel.

If you’ve made it to the end of this post, thanks for reading. I appreciate you!

If you learned something new, let me know.

Manoj