big decisions
I’m not going to make any promises about update frequency anymore, but I have a feeling I’ll get back into blogging more regularly. I assume most people have stopped reading by now, which is totally okay with me - in fact, I feel a bit freer now that blogging will really just be for me to collect my thoughts rather than to hold myself to any external expectations. I also have been stuck weighing between maintaining my own (and people close to me’s) privacy and being as transparent as possible. You never know what information you put out for the public to see will come back to bite you. But, there’s so much value in being fully transparent, and the main reason why being vulnerable can put you in a tough bind to begin with is, in my opinion, due to a lack of understanding and empathy from the public. While there are pockets of the internet where people do try to be more honest, I think people usually try to present themselves in a positive light and produce content that they want others to see. I think we could all use a bit more vulnerability, and I’d love to use blogging as a tool to bring that out and connect with people on deeper levels, especially with those who may have felt more alone in their thoughts and feelings. Once you put something out there though, there’s no backtracking, so the safe route would be to keep the sensitive details private at first. However, I’d love to be able to share as much as I can and will keep striving towards that goal.
A lot has happened since the last post of course, but also just in general that I haven’t talked about much yet. I’ve traveled a bit - went to China (which had this way-too-detailed post that I started and never finished), Taiwan (I didn’t bother even starting that post, but I have soooo much to talk about), climbed Mt. Fuji on a whim, went to Fuji Rock (music festival). Made some friends, mostly expats but also some Japanese folks. I also started getting involved in the tech community and have been working outside of language school. But the most important update is with regards to the big overarching question of this entire experience: keep staying in Japan or go back to the US?
It’s the end of August, exactly 8 months since we got here (I finally learned how to count months*). People warned me that summers are awful in Tokyo. I really hate hot weather, but I spent a summer in Seoul before, and though it was mostly in the high 80’s, the humidity was 99% every single day. I’d joke that I would wake up nearly drowning in my mattress, unsure if it was the humidity or my sweat (probably both). I’d take a shower, then go outside, and somehow feel like I was still inside the shower. But, I still had an incredible time, so, I figured Tokyo might be unpleasant but begrudgingly bearable at worst. I was wrong.
To be fair, I think there are factors outside of the actual weather that have been contributing to how I’ve been feeling. The “honeymoon phase” of my trip has finally been coming to an end. I’ve been feeling less motivated to spend time with people, finding my patience growing thinner and my desire to spend time alone increasing, yet still feeling lonely and missing my friends back at home. Language school has somehow become increasingly worse as time goes on, which I truly did not think was possible. I don’t think that one is just my imagination though - all my classmates agree. The beginning was very frustrating mostly because the language was difficult, but the teacher and curriculum quality has since taken a big dive, and now it feels like school is a big waste of time. Most of all, the classroom environment just isn’t great - my classmates can hardly speak Japanese even 3 semesters in, and when there is unstructured classroom time where we’re supposed to have conversations, people just resort to speaking to me in their native language or just stay silent. I’m still really grateful for the experience though - it’s definitely made me realize that the greatest value in an educational environment is actually having peers that are engaged and similarly-skilled, even more so than having quality teachers. Language school has probably been the truest melting pot experience I’ve ever had, with a sampling of people all over the world with hugely varying backgrounds and socioeconomic situations. Most people are younger than me too, so it’s pretty interesting having a window into what life for future generations will look like (and I’m not particularly optimistic about it…).
Back to the weather - it’s seriously no joke. It hasn’t felt nearly as humid as Seoul did where water droplets had literally condensed on my skin walking through the city, but with the baseline temperature in the 90’s and the humidity being high enough where your sweat doesn’t evaporate, it feels horrible to even step outside. My 10-minute walk to school ends in me drenched every day. I swear, I think I’ve become allergic to the heat - sometimes when I go outside it feels like a thousand needles are poking my skin (I suspect it’s this). It’s so bad that I’ve lost a lot of enthusiasm for doing things just because it’s not worth going outside. And even when I am outside, there isn’t a lot of dilly-dallying or motivation for further exploration - as soon as the utility curve flattens out, I’m going home. This is further exacerbated by the fact that I’m surely not the only one who feels this way. Many people leave Japan, or at least Tokyo, for the summer just to escape the heat, and events and other peoples’ motivation for hanging out goes down for the same reason. I never thought I’d be so emotionally susceptible to the weather, but somehow staying in on a sunny day just feels so much worse than staying in when it’s cold, dark, or rainy.
Miles and I have been discussing our updated thoughts and plans more seriously recently. Our original plan was to stay here about a year and decide whether to stay longer or go back, conditional on finding satisfactory jobs (since we can’t really be students forever). Before diving into this trip, I thought a year off from work would be incredibly refreshing. I’d be able to go out and do whatever I wanted without the stress of work obligations. I will say, committing a year for a trip and also attending school where attendance is very strict is a very different experience than a normal vacation. While the attendance component is a little annoying, the primary issue I found has been, I don’t have enough money (or at least, willingness to spend) to burn money at the same rate I usually do on vacations (hotels, fancy restaurants, experiences, transportation) to sustain my usual vacation lifestyle for an entire year, especially with no income. And anyways, I don’t actually think I love vacation enough to want to do that, so this is not so much commentary about how having infinite money would solve my problems, but rather realizing the positive ways work has played a role in my life.
While I was in the thick of intense work life, it was easy to focus entirely on the negatives, and it was indeed a huge relief to stop working (a clear sign of burnout). But now that I’ve spent probably the first time in my life in a long, long time with no obligations, stress, or existential goal (other than the rather lofty one of raising a family one day), I’ve been forced to think about the “first principles” of my life and happiness. Now that I have pretty much no external pressure whatsoever, it seemed like life would’ve just solved itself. Admittedly, I’ve had some pretty low swings over the past few months, and while it’s hard to compare apples-to-apples, it felt even worse than the worst school or work stress I’ve ever experienced. The reality is, when there are no guardrails, any sadness you experience is completely on you. There’s no emotional scapegoat, nowhere to direct your complaints to. You bear the full responsibility of your emotional state. This was incredibly difficult for me to face at first, because I blamed myself for not feeling happier in this nearly perfect situation that people dream about. I have full agency over my life and I still can’t feel happy, what does that say about me as a person? Which is weird, because I am a person with a generally positive disposition (maybe). And I don’t want to make it sound like I’ve had a terrible time - I’d say most of my time here has been neutral to positive, but I would have small stretches of time of emotional crisis. And to be honest, I really believe it was getting myself out of these emotional crises that has been the most valuable part of this entire experience.
It’s of course not a heroic or even remotely interesting story, and I think most would say sitting at home in my apartment brooding is hardly something worth writing about. And I’m not a great philosopher either, so the conclusions I ended up drawing weren’t even profound, rather extremely obvious and mundane if anything. Ultimately, what I think it boiled down to is this conflict that existed in my mind between cultural, social, and personal values that are all part of me, but disagreed with each other. It has been this constant tug-of-war ever since I was a child, and I would say I received very strong doses of cultural values, mostly from my family, and social values, from media and my peers who also consumed said media. I’m very lucky in that I think they were mostly “good” values - ones that set me up for success later in life (where success is of course, also defined by the values). Not to get too in the weeds, but on the surface, I genuinely subscribed to those values and still do to this day. I think life could’ve been totally great if I lived my life entirely by the external values presented to me, of course still having the agency to pick and choose a subset that suited me best. But for some reason, I just couldn’t adopt the playbook as-is. Making money wasn’t enough to make me happy. Even making money with lots of time for side hobbies that I really loved still didn’t cut it for me. Not working (and still having money) also wasn’t making me happy. I have a loving partner and plenty of great, healthy friendships, so that probably isn’t the source of the issue (though there’s certainly more work to be done there). The only thing out of the “usual” playbook I hadn’t tried yet was having kids, which honestly has crossed my mind a lot. All that being said though, I somehow ended up in this situation because I was going about my life making decisions based on all of the values I had swirling around in my head, not being fully conscious about particular contexts where they conflicted. I’d have moments in my life where I’d be sad, but then there would always be something to quickly distract me (like work or social activities) and I’d be able to ignore it and blissfully move on.
Keeping busy takes a lot of manual effort, but honestly, I think it can be somewhat of an easy cop-out mentally. That being said, I can’t really speak for everyone, or really anyone but myself, but having so much unstructured, unguided time on my hands was so mentally exhausting. I was forced to think about how I wanted to spend my time, for real. And every time I wasn’t spending time doing that thing, asking myself, not in a critical or accusatory way (which is what I was doing in the beginning), but in an introspective way. “Well, I don’t seem to be doing x thing that I thought I really wanted to do, now that I have so much free time on my hands, it must not be that important to me.” Or if I was truly convinced it was important to me, digging deeper into the why’s, like, “I have a strong reluctance against spending money” (tiny voice: but why?) and realizing that any entrepreneurial ideas and desires I had would end up getting shut down by my extremely low risk appetite. I haven’t seen a proper therapist in a long time, but I imagine this was just an unnecessarily hard-mode, shittier therapy session (but for free! a huge win for my internal penny-pincher. don’t worry I will probably see a proper therapist soon).
Anyways, the boring conclusion was: I really miss work. Not the act of laboring or making money, but making things and producing something of value for and with people who also care. I find myself inevitably gravitating towards things that I tend to be uniquely good at, where the value provided is obvious, and as much as solo projects are enticing for me, I know that I work best when surrounded by other extremely dedicated individuals who aren’t there just to show that they’re a hard worker, but because they really love what they do. Looking back, my best times have been sharing the struggles and triumphs with my peers doing something really challenging and impressive. And I think what I am working on is really important at the end of the day. If I’m just providing value to my peers, but the thing we are working on together provides negative value to society, that still saps a lot of my motivation out (though, that’s just my hypothesis - admittedly I haven’t actually done this yet). I’ve found that it’s really important to me to feel like I’m contributing positively more than negatively to our world, which is also why I feel very resistant to overindulge even with all this free time. Since I have been in tech, my career prospects feel very tech-focused, but accomplishing this goal can come in many shapes and forms, I just have yet to discover other good fits. Lately I have been feeling pretty stifled because my skills are in tech, but, I’m getting increasingly more skeptical that any tech can provide positive value to the world. Many people who worked on technology in its infancy likely thought that what they were working on was for something great, just to lead to today where everyone is glued to their phones watching short-form content (which is even more apparent in Tokyo where people pretty much all live private lives in public). And to be clear, I don’t have TikTok or Instagram not because I am holier than thou, but because I get so easily addicted to things that I know I will become an immobile hermit raisin as soon as I open the app. (Anyways, I get my short-form dose through Youtube, so I’m really no better. I’m just an awful friend because I don’t want to know what anyone is up to.)
I digress - I’m still finding myself back in the tech world, since in a world of unfamiliarities, it’s good to keep a few things constant. Despite my skepticism towards technology in general, it’s very interesting comparing the tech and robotics scene in Tokyo to San Francisco, and curiosity can honestly sustain me pretty far. I joined an organization called Tokyo AI by meeting the founder, Ilya, through a friend of a friend (who I met through a friend of a friend…). I haven’t historically been into community for the sake of community, but Ilya’s vision for the org really inspired me. He’s a foreigner who fell in love with Japan (it’s really nice talking to people who love living regular life in Japan - it’s honestly a bit frustrating to be asked “why did you move to Japan?” with a tone of skepticism all the time and feel like I have to thoroughly explain and justify myself with what sounds like very stupid arguments (the streets are so clean and public transit is so convenient! which is like not even 100% true), but it’s so effortless when people just get it). And what I really appreciate about him, is that he recognized some of the downsides of living in Japan (tech sector is pretty weak relative to other global leaders) and decided to do something about it by creating this organization to address this issue. It’s not just casual get-togethers - he is actively trying to get people to start tech companies and attract talent, something that isn’t only good for people who want to live in Japan and need job opportunities, but it’s actually necessary for Japan to survive the coming decades (both in generating sufficient economic value and also to fight against the population decline, with immigration of highly-skilled professionals and automation). I’ve always been interested in very early-stage startups, so I’ve been shopping around over the past few months, contracting with teams where I’m pretty much the first or second software engineer.
Which leads us to where we are today. I think Miles and I share the value of working on interesting and meaningful projects, though we have different flavors of it that are important to us. Unfortunately, what Miles is looking for isn’t really offered here, and the salary is an order of magnitude different between San Francisco and Tokyo (for reference: what I was getting paid as a part-time contractor at the first two startups I worked for here was less than minimum wage at McDonalds in California. And while both companies acknowledged that they didn’t have a lot to pay at the moment, the contrast is stark). It is hard to justify living here given that we care more about work than nearly everything else in life (at least for now). So, Miles has actually decided to go back to the US, especially given that he is not having a good time at language school (which we both knew coming into this experience). I think he gave it a good run, and the doors certainly aren’t closed - I think we learned a ton from this experience and can come back well-equipped in the future.
As for me, I’m having enough of my work itches scratched with my part-time startup gigs for now, but I have noticed that the startup world is very different between San Francisco and Tokyo. San Francisco probably has the highest density of tech startups in the world, which means competition is incredibly fierce. If you aren’t 100% in the game, you will get knocked out immediately. Tokyo doesn’t yet have that kind of pressure, which makes recreating the environment I really loved at my previous job pretty difficult. I haven’t been blown away by anything I’ve seen or anyone I’ve met yet, which I think did happen to me constantly back in San Francisco. I’m a bit more patient though, and as much as I complain about language school, I am still learning Japanese (yesterday we watched an entire movie without subtitles and I understood like 80% fairly effortlessly, which is insane to think about). So, the current plan is for me to stick around until end of December (which is what I paid my language school tuition up until), and at that point consider going for the Permanent Residency application or returning back to the US.
*So uh, I definitely thought that January -> June was 6 months. This came up in a conversation I had with a friend, I messed this up in my previous blog post that was actually the 5-month update, and worst of all… I have a bank account with Japan Post Bank (Japan Post, essentially Japan’s USPS, also has its own bank, and it is the easiest bank to open an account with especially as a foreigner). However, if you’ve resided in Japan for less than 6 months, your bank account still has “foreigner” status, and I believe this is Japan’s way of making the lives of people who aren’t serious about living in Japan and just want to exploit the country for whatever reason (e.g. business or tourism purposes and such) harder. Honestly, immigrating here is kind of like hazing - you go through all these uncomfortable hoops and rituals, and if you can’t make it through you can leave, and if you do make it through, welcome aboard (but the hazing doesn’t quite ever go away). Anyways, I was trying to transfer 3,000 yen ($20) to someone in Japan, but my bank imposed a 3,000 yen “foreign bank transfer” fee, so given that I was pretty close to reaching the 6 month mark, I decided to wait a few days and then get my bank account upgraded. I showed up to the bank and had to do the classic combo of very basic Japanese + miming + translator app to get my request across.
I finally got to the staff window and she asked me if I had a part-time job. I said no. She asked me again. I said no a different way, maybe she didn’t understand me the first time. She looked confused and pulled out a special translator device and I looked at it, and it said in English, “do you have a part-time job?” and I was like wtf, yes I understand, the answer is still no! Her expression turned into a slight frown and she said, “then, being in Japan for 6 months is your only qualification?” and I was like “yes…” and I started mentally preparing myself to have to explain my situation in Japanese. Then, trying her best to give me the benefit of doubt, she started carefully counting on her fingers and said, “…January to June is only 5 months.” Welllllll I don’t think I’ve been that embarrassed in a while, and it wasn’t even a language barrier issue this time.