2025-02-12 Journal Entry

Another day, another half-baked journal entry. I finally actually did get my debit cards to my mailbox, so now begins the other half of this harrowing journey to see if the mail guy can actually get them to poste restante in Seoul. I’m not optimistic, but I’m not entirely pessimistic either. I trust the full-time mail guy and the Korean post system more than I trust Fidelity, which is probably an unfortunate thing to say.

I want to document here a somewhat interesting discovery, which is something that I knew before. The discovery is that actively doing the bad thing makes the bad thing go away.

I started feeling generally pretty crummy yesterday. I always get into this thought spiral about going out alone in a foreign country, so I did what I traditionally do on nights like that and sat on my shitty hostel bed, the ones with the sketchy-feeling mattress topper and no sheets because this place only costs single-digits United States dollars each night to stay in, and so I’m sitting there feeling like I should go out and live a little like a single twenty-something guy should be, especially after one of the other roommates suggested doing exactly that and I objected for essentially no reason at all, and but so you’re just sort of sitting their going well I really should go out, wouldn’t it be fun etc. and thinking of that really lovely feeling of sipping whiskey after a nice big meal while you listen to old jazz in some dimly-lit room run by an affable elderly gentleman with too many records on his hands, but then these mysterious hands start to tug and pull on your mind-strings and ask you to put yourself in their shoes – what if some random guy came into your bar not speaking your language and just sitting around all silent or something, wouldn’t that be annoying, and how you would judge him so harshly for traveling all the way to some foreign country just to drink and not speak at all; these all being the Very Real thoughts that one would obviously have if you were the bartender – and you quickly do a U-turn on whatever your ambitions were for that night. Instead, you become a negative feedback loop, one side gnagging you to go out and live a little and the other gnagging you to not be a nuisance.

But when has following rules really gotten you what you wanted? Most of the people whose lives end up in some kind of mid-life crisis end up getting there because they largely followed the rules too well, which is to say they believed that following the rules is how one wins a game, when instead one generally wins by actually morphing the game around themselves, either by having a sufficient amount of sway over the game’s definition or by breaking the rules in tiny ways that go generally unnoticed or are too small to quibble about until they amass enough forward momentum to do the former. Rules exist primarily as a means of enforcing the present order, but your goal is to break apart that order.

All of this is to say, the current rules of the game were making me sad and lonely, but safe; that is the merits of those rules. And as time goes on, safety tends to matter less and less than being rewarded anyways, so you might as well opt to go for the thing that’s a net improvement. To see through the thing that’s making you sad, try to be more sad. Odds are, the thing that makes you sad is some aversion to that sadness, some concern about change or newness. Be bold.

One unfortunate paradox that I’m suffering from at the moment is that I’m annoyed by the constant bombardment of sound that seems to happen in Korea – coffee shops blaring incessant pop music, advertisements playing over the streets and so on – yet at the same time I suffer a bit from the modern condition of being incapable of sitting with silence for longer than a few minutes without some intentional effort. I put in headphones just to pipe in another sound through my headphones, maybe the sound of rain or just some white noise that could drown out the Bad Sounds outside. At the very least, these are sounds that are in my control, predictable.

Sometimes during moments like this I sit still and shut my eyes. In the dark it’s as if my mind tries to focus on something, and even with the sound outside I can feel my thoughts physically pulsating between the front and back of my skull. There’s a light show in the darkness behind my eyes. Even just stepping outside, if outside is a rare oasis of quiet in the city, doesn’t particularly help. It doesn’t help because the problem, it turns out, isn’t really the noise in the coffee shop but rather some deep-seated insatiability inside my stomach. Once my ears stop ringing, I can feel the rest of my body again, everything tense and tight as if to hold it all together. It’s not tight like clenching a fist or flexing a muscle, but that low-level buzz that’s been present so long you forget that there are alternatives. Like a peach, there’s a pit that lives in my stomach, or really rather almost inside my hips, an inch or two inside and below my belly button – right around the hara or dantian – that never settles quite right.

There’s a yearning deep down in there. It’s not really for anything in particular, and in fact that’s probably it’s root – craving itself is a craving for the end of craving. It’s why we so easily give ourselves away, because we hope that in the giving we’ll turn, we’ll free ourselves.