The man who walks around the world but never loses weight

The man walking around the world has no dramatic stunts, sensational incidents or food-tour spectacle to offer. In a faded Adidas shirt, he simply walks through seemingly endless landscapes, and viewers cannot seem to look away.

The traveler, known through the YouTube channel “Jjangbaljjang,” quit his job last year with an eight-year goal of drawing a circle around the Earth on foot. He began a year ago at Buyongsan in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, completed journeys across Japan and Alaska, and is now walking through Canada’s Yukon. As of the 6th, the channel had 70,000 subscribers, and its daily subscriber growth was approaching 10,000.

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Let them help you.

The scenery may first attract curiosity, but repeated landscapes soon fade into the background. The people he meets make the road feel new. A coffee-shop owner in Asan placed a cooling neck band around his neck after giving him coffee. A rest-stop owner supplied cold water for immediate use and more for later. A shop gave him two bottles of makgeolli for the price of one, while a roadside fruit seller handed him a peach.

The kindness continued overseas. During seven months walking across Japan, an elderly man gave him travel money and disappeared. An elderly woman at a senbei shop in Miyagi carefully packed some of her best crackers, saying she wanted to give him more but did not want to add too much weight to his luggage. In Alaska, a cafe owner replaced a drink he had spilled and made him an oversized eight-inch panini packed with too many ingredients. Drivers stopping on highways in the United States and Canada handed over food.

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I dislike people, so I try to live without harming others or being harmed, but watching these videos feels as if the generosity and kindness of the people he meets recharge and heal my sense of humanity.

He has uploaded 62 videos, filled with brief encounters and unexpected generosity. The food keeps coming even as he walks about 20 kilometers a day, which explains the title’s joke that he never loses weight. Bob, a manager at an Alaska state campground, gave him a different kind of advice: “Let them help you.”

The columnist sees those encounters as a quiet challenge to the fear that makes people wary of strangers. The traveler does not claim that the world is an entirely livable place. He walks, meets unfamiliar neighbors, accepts their kindness, asks their names, says thank you and moves on. The water, peach or sandwich offered along the road may matter more than even the grandest landscape, giving him the strength to keep walking.

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There is nothing.