Pictured: an ice cold Ožujsko in Dubrovnik, circa 2018
Editor’s note: This post is very long and somewhat personal/vulnerable (my probe group may even go so far as to call it…sensitive?) and while it relates to MS and churning plenty, it isn’t about a specific play. If you liked my post on finding purpose in travel, you’ll probably enjoy it. If you didn’t, feel free to skip, no worries, I’m fully back on topic next week! And butterboy, if you’re reading this, it’s too long, it’s not too late to turn back!
For me, the start of a new year always means pensive reflection on the past year. Many of my favorite moments and biggest accomplishments of 2025 were directly driven by churning and MS, and it got me thinking about what the hobby means to me.
In a way, it’s a continuation of this post. I hope you enjoy this musing to start the year.
If I had to describe myself in black and white, I’d be a card-carrying type B personality. Nobody ever says that, of course, because talking about your personality type is for type A people.
But nobody’s personality is that simple (and interestingly, the whole type A/B thing was funded by Big Tobacco in an attempt to divert attention from smoking being a cause of heart disease).
Outside of my type B traits, I have two common hallmarks of type A people – the first is lifelong chronic anxiety, and the second is a need to find purpose in achieving a measurable result.
I can’t do much about the first one (although hey, therapy gave me the self-awareness to arrive at this thesis, so that’s good?), but I now recognize how important the second one is to me.
In a lot of my adult life, I’ve struggled with listlessness as it related to having something that I was both passionate about and could measure progress and success in. When I was trying to figure out how to fix it, I thought back to being a kid and how I didn’t struggle with it, even though I did with anxiety.
It was pretty clear – I had two things I found a lot of purpose in that were easily measurable. The first was school, and the second was the sport I competed in from ages 10-18.
I don’t know if I’d call myself smart, but I’m lucky that back then I had a somewhat eidetic memory that made things like standardized tests come naturally. But while I was acing tests, I was also doing things like tying my shoes together and proceeding to bust my ass falling down stairs, so you can decide for yourself if I’m smart.
In the sport that I played, it was more of the opposite. I had little natural talent for it (and had a form defect that often got me disqualified, even though it made me worse), but I was extremely passionate about it and gave 100% at all times.
I was one of those psycho kids that had College Board books listing colleges by 12, and I had a clear idea of the times I needed to achieve in my sport by memorizing what the cutoff pages looked like.
I ended up achieving some of the things I dreamed of as a kid – I got into some prestigious schools, performed well at my sport (with diminishing returns), and declared to compete D1 in college.
But along the way, I’d lost some of the competitive fire for the sport. My lack of natural talent caught up in the second half of high school, because everybody was working hard at that level in a way that not everybody was at 12 years old.
It was crushing to watch people pass me while knowing I was still giving it my all (although with the gift of more mature hindsight, I was also coming of age and priorities shifted towards skipping practice every once in awhile for football games, dating, concerts etc.)
In the end, I never competed in college, and I didn’t graduate from that prestigious school I initially attended. I ended up graduating from a mid-tier state school, and found some level of purpose in working hard for good grades in the hopes of getting a great job out of college, parlaying that into an MBA admission, and then getting some type of FAANG job afterwards.
I was lucky to find a fairly ideal job within a few months with great coworkers, many of whom I am still friends with years later. Having a job I was driven at made it easy to find purpose, but the measuring stick was a bit of an issue. Some positions can be quantified easily, but mine wasn’t one of them.
The only real way for me to evaluate myself on working towards a goal was via salary or promotion – two things that didn’t come around often, regardless of how much time I spent at the office and the worry and anxiety I devoted to it at home.
After a few years of that and experiencing unbridled corporate toxicity outside of my department, my views on work/life balance shifted quite a bit, and I stopped measuring myself on whether I got promoted every year. Any interest I had in getting an MBA and FAANG job fizzled out with it. However, I didn’t replace that old quantifiable goal with anything, and that was when the feeling of listlessness really exploded.
By this point in time, I was churning at a decent level. I hadn’t tried business class or been to the Maldives or anything like that, but I have some really fond memories of the first trips I took fueled by churning. My P2 and I had road tripped through Iceland and Croatia, attended Sziget in Budapest, fished the crystal clear flats of Belize and more.
As much as I loved having the ability to take trips like that, it still wasn’t scratching my itch to quantify progress that I was making on something I was passionate about.
Of course, there is a way to quantify travel, but I’d recommend against trying to measure success solely by country counting. While adding a new country to your list is a great feeling, focusing exclusively on it leads to racing through trips without enjoying the experience. I once met a couple on the Flixbus from Budapest to Prague that counted a 15 mins detour on the bus into Bosnia & Herzegovina as B&H being crossed off their list, no need to visit Mostar or Sarajevo anymore. They didn’t even have a ćevapi or burek!
Anyway, like many of us during the pandemic, I was bored, anxious, and depressed. I decided to dig much deeper into churning, and quickly realized my perception that living in NYC precluded me from MSing was incredibly false.
While it took a few years to get really deep, I was measuring myself on learning a little bit more each day and adding new tools, platforms and loops into my MS toolbelt. Once I was starting to earn significant cashback and more miles and points than I could hope to use in 10 years, I realized I was scratching the itch to quantify my efforts in a way that I hadn’t been able to do since I was in high school.
While you have to play within the frameworks of the bank, MS is one of the very few things in life where you have the agency to control how much you earn while also being infinitely more scalable than the average /r/beermoney activity.
You aren’t relying on an official, admissions board, or HR department to say that you deserve this accomplishment. If you want to go out and make $5,000 today, you have the ability to (although much like school or sports, legwork is required).
One thing I find really interesting is how people found churning, and why they stick around. We have diverse reasoning for ending up here and still being at it.
For me, it’s not FIRE or needing a bunch of award seats for a big family. I just enjoy playing a game where the relationship between effort and reward is pretty damn close to 1:1.
Granted, I spend about 5% of my hobby time probing things and actually running loops with the remaining 95% dedicated to bantering in Discord, but hey, I’m still a type B after all.
Lastly, being heavy into MS made me realize that it’s possible to quantify and measure travel in a way that isn’t likely to make people not want to talk to you. Instead of counting countries, use MS as a way to cross truly crazy things off of your bucket list. It’s a personal accomplishment that has meaning to you, your friends and family will love to hear about, and isn’t something you need to compete on.
Want to sit in the Paddock Club for a Formula 1 race? No big deal – just MS the hell out of your Amex Hilton. Want to see the total eclipse in Egypt? Any expensive arrangements you need to make aren’t bad when you aren’t paying for flights or hotels. Have an esoteric hobby that holds meetups on another continent? No problemo.
Personally, I spent close to seven figures of AA miles on 2026 World Cup tickets so that P2 and I can go with our soccer-rabid friends and make lifelong memories. Was that an irresponsible choice given we fly oneworld way more often than other alliances and I am likely to lose my source of easy generation in 2026? Probably. But looking back fondly on something like attending a hometown World Cup is exactly why we play this game, and scratching that itch is truly addicting.
As my P3 (my mom, lmao) likes to note, it’s exciting to see me have something that I’m so passionate about. And at least for me, it provides necessary dopamine that I wasn’t able to find in the past.
One of my resolutions this year is to streamline my time spent in the spirit of my friend mforch’s views of CPH. However, I’m sure I’ll end up spending some time in the weeds that could be better spent upskilling on something else or reading a book, but I can’t help myself. Just like some of you, I do it all for the love of the game.
Hope you had a good start to your new year, and let’s collaborate on killing it in 2026.
Ура!