development Archives - The Cracked Door

Why I Left NYC to Travel the World—and Why I Haven’t Stopped

In July 2024, I left my life in New York City and decided to travel the world. It has now been two years. So far, I have been to three continents on my way to travel the whole world. Why did I decide to do this, and what makes me keep going?

At the end of 2023, I had five months paid time off work, and I decided to travel throughout East Asia. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I decided to use it to see a new part of the world and its cultures, choosing East Asia more or less at random.

The trip was an eye-opening and transformative experience in so many ways. For example, getting out of my normal rhythm of life for an extended period and seeing the different ways others in other cultures chose to live their lives made me realize the extent to which my life at that point working as a data scientist in New York wasn’t working for me. I would excitedly start a new job at a new organization for a year or two only to then become frustrated and move on to another place. I was stuck in a cycle, moving between job after job. I was not fulfilled. My Asia trip showed me that something has got to give.

I concluded that I felt far more fulfilled while traveling. I really enjoyed both seeing new places and having relationships, but most importantly, I enjoyed meeting new people from different places and learning about their stories. There’s something about hearing the struggles people encounter in their lives and how different people navigate those struggles that helps center me. I wanted to continue talking to people.

I also saw how different people in different cultures experience the problems of life. In my experience, many of the struggles that people have to navigate in life are surprisingly similar in different social and cultural contexts around the world, but the strategies given to them for how to navigate them and the tools they have with which to navigate them vary widely. Over time, different people thus develop different habits and dispositions for how to respond to situations. Because of this, people experience similar patterns across cultures in the problems people experience throughout their lives, but the approaches people use to navigate these problems vary widely.

Another factor that I think contributes to the fact that I am traveling the world is that I have always had a leaning towards breadth over depth. I think I am an intellectual at heart. Some intellectuals have their single area of focus that they love. Academia, in particular, encourages this; for example, PhD programs tend to force people into a hyper-narrow specialization of a specialization of a subfield of the field they are interested in. This is an intellectual depth-focus. I am the type of person who is interested in many things, jumping around between interests and passions. At its worst, it spreads me too thin, preventing me from adequately exploring one endeavor long enough to bear useful fruit, but at its best, it allows me to notice new connections between different spaces.

This breadth has been what I have been pursuing as I travel the world: talking with more and more people from different parts of the world as I travel. Other travelers I have seen, for example, choose one part of the world to travel to for several years, but right now, I think I would get too bored doing that.

The Successes and Failures I’ve Had

As I travel, I talk with people about what it is like being them. I listen a lot and try to enjoy each place on its own terms. Or, that’s my ideal at least. I’m not always successful, but that is what I strive for. One of the biggest compliments I will get is when people tell me that I am not like a typical foreigner who visits their area because I show an interest in their lives and perspectives, asking about deeper questions. Such questions may not click with everyone, but for these specific individuals, they tell me that they appreciate how I want to know them as a person. Evidently, most foreign visitors do not.

At the same time, sustaining that kind of energy long-term is not easy, and I have found that pacing myself is crucial when traveling long-term. I have had to learn to pace myself. This is a constant struggle for me. Because I am highly motivated by my passion and curiosity, I can be the type of person who tries to do too much. I am well-known for getting swept into too many activities until I exhaust myself and need to pull back how much I try to do each day.

A one- or two-week vacation is like a sprint, and traveling for years is more like a marathon. In a week-long vacation, I can do activity after activity if I want, collapsing when I get home, but obviously every single day for months or years can’t be some grand adventure that expands my understanding of myself, humanity, or the universe. My mind would explode.

I have found developing some kind of consistency of one’s daily rhythm helps keep me grounded and centered, probably the single most important thing to do to pace myself. But how that consistency manifests will still vary widely depending on the environment. I constantly rework the details of your rhythm for your day in each new place you visit.

How I tend to work this out in practice is that I have different activities I do every single day (such as writing a haiku a day, journaling, a little bit of other writing, etc.) Having these consistent activities centers me, but how I do them each day varies at least a little, sometimes widely depending on where I am. As a morning person, I strongly prefer working on creative projects in the morning, when I first wake up. I may spend a half hour to an hour working on them before I go about my day. Then some other activities like journaling, I tend to do in the evening after my day has wrapped up. In each place, I work out different details of what incorporating them into the rhythm of the day looks like.

One thing I have learned is that I still desire to do, more specifically to create. Between this blog, my daily poetry, four YouTube channels, publishing a book, and a few other projects, I make quite a bit. I want to create and build ideas as part of my making a mark on the world.

This is a major difference with my first five-month trip throughout Asia: then I put life on hold, exclusively focusing on being in the moment. That was great for five months: a time to pause my life and figure out what I wanted to do. But, if I put everything on hold in life during this trip, it would simply mean I would not get to it. This is my life itself, not a break from it, so I feel a stronger desire (even pressure) to still incorporate the things I want to do with my life into it. And these creative projects are certainly a part of that.

Yet, they also take time and mental energy, pulling me out of the moment of traveling. Sometimes, I focus too much on them and find that I am no longer as in the moment. They can also exhaust me. The most important lesson in how to pace myself while traveling the world has been learning how to effectively navigate between being in the moment in the places I visit while also working on these projects.

The strategy I have found works for me is to split my time: time focused solely on where I am and time focused on my projects. Every week, I spend two days a week working on these creative projects, producing what I need to do to keep them going for that week. Then, the other five days, I spend going on adventures in the place I am visiting and meeting new people there. What kind of adventures I have will depend on where I am (for example, in cities, it may be visiting museums, historical sites, etc., and in a mountain village, it may be hiking or climbing a mountain, or diving if I am near a coral reef).

I used to set goals where I did a little of my creative projects everyday in the morning and then went out and about having adventures, but I found this distracted me: my mind would be split throughout the day. When I went out and about visiting adventures, I would really think about the tasks I did not finish that morning. This left me exhausted. By splitting which days I focused on what, on any given day, I could focus on exactly one thing: on “adventure days,” focus entirely on having adventures, meeting people in the place where I am, and otherwise being in the moment, and on “work days”, focus entirely on my projects.

I also traveled in bursts of a few months with longer periods of rest in between. For example, I may spend one or two months constantly traveling to new places every week and having adventures, and then spend a week or two resting. Beyond that, I find that about every six months I need about one to two months of a longer rest.

I get on what I call an “experiential overload” where I feel exhausted having to navigate new types of experiences and new cultures, and need a few weeks of constancy. Usually during this time, I do not even leave my hotel much, except to buy food and other necessities. I need a break from new things.

When resting, I often work heavily on my creative projects. For whatever reason, these projects give me something to do while I am experientially exhausted. Each type of activity allows me to rest from the other: creative projects allow me to rest from physical and social adventures, and adventures allow me to rest from the mental drudgery of my projects. On longer rest periods, I often do the more complex work of evaluating how to improve or overhaul an aspect of my creative project. During adventure times, I usually simply deploy the plan I set in motion (posting a certain type of videos or articles every week or every other week), and it is during these rest periods that I have the mental pause to be able to reflect on whether that plan is working and what improvements I would like to make to that plan.

Thus, I find my adventures tend to clump. I may have several week- or a couple month-long periods where everyday is an adventure, followed by periods when I have no adventures for a while. Both are necessary parts of my rhythm, allowing me to pace myself. At the same time, I frequently worry that my many projects overextend myself, taking me out of the moment while traveling. I have to pace myself: traveling the world is a marathon, not a sprint.

As I travel, I also find that what I am looking for changes. I have periods when I naturally tend to focus on different things. For a few months, I may focus on meeting people, but then go through periods where time in nature is my main focus. I tend to internally segment my journey into “epochs” based on what I tended to crave more of over those several month intervals. During some periods, I am inherently more extroverted and during others more introverted. If during one period, I focus on my creative projects, that will pull me in a more introverted direction. If during another time I crave socializing and a sense of community, I will become more extraverted.

I have learned to accept these different circumstances: my needs will change over time, and that’s okay. For example, about a year ago, I went through a more introverted period after a breakup, where I preferred being by myself with my emotions rather than spending time with others, and I felt guilty that I was not “getting to know” people in the countries I happened to be visiting at that time. I had to realize that it’s okay to be more introverted for a time. It’s a part of the process of long-term travel.

If I feel especially irritated or crabby in a given circumstance, it is a warning sign that I am likely exhausted from overexerting myself. I most likely need to take a step back by resting and determining what need is not being met and go meet that need (whether that means withdrawing, going on an adventure somewhere else, talking with friends back home, etc.). After that, I can reengage with the context or activity that made me crabby with a fresh mind. In general, I find my internal psychological state is the most significant factor in how I vibe with a new culture: if I am frequently getting frustrated in a new environment, it’s usually because I am exhausted. It’s not usually about that culture or community in itself. My exhaustion is coloring the lens through which I engage the context. I need to rest, rejuvenate, and then go back out, and then suddenly the culture will seem much better. I will be much more attune with what the people, environment, or other things in that specific environment have to offer rather than how they irritate me.

Why I Keep Going

The short answer is that I feel like I am still learning and growing from traveling, and I suspect as long as that feels the case, then I will keep going. I don’t succeed at this every single day, but that may not be a realistic expectation for long-term travel anyways. Overall, I still am and there is promise to do so.

Another important lesson that I have had to come to terms with is that travel can be very consumptive, and any form of consumption is ultimately vacuous. When people think about traveling the world, their minds often go to Instagram stories of the magic of daily adventures in foreign places, which make them think long-term travel is simply one iconic adventure after another. Everything in life is ultimately vanity, maybe especially in our consumerist, capitalist world, and this definitely applies to travel.

When people idealize traveling the world, they really think about the magic of their vacation. Vacations are short breaks from people’s normal lives, often not long enough to really experience the vapidness of travel and tourism. This isn’t bad per se. People go, consume experiences for a few days, and come back home. The temporary trips help them reset themselves and often recontextualize their humanity as they reenter their normal lives, clearly a good thing. This makes sense as a counter to people’s regular lives. For example, they can be in the moment for a few days in contrast to their normal, hectic daily lives; they can relax instead of running around; have adventures they can’t do where they live; and so on.

But when you spend more time in touristic spots, you often realize how superficial they are. They often foster at best superficial relationships with people there with at worst troubling power dynamics. Also, many typical tourist activities in different countries all tend to feel the same over time. For me at least, these environments do not provide good long-term ways to live life or engage with others or other cultures.

I still enjoy visiting places with a lot of natural scenery and/or historical and cultural significance, and often these places become “tourist spots” for understandable reasons. Thus, I will visit such places anyways, if the scenery or history seem worth tolerating the tourism of it. My best solution is to try to ask about and listen to people’s stories in the places I am. By asking about their lives, I often learn what life is like for the people that live there. Even the most artificial tourist spots are regular life for those who live there, and that becomes a practical way to connect that moves past consumption and my own tailored experiences as a “visiting tourist customer” (to some extent at least, not always perfectly).

But I will tend to prefer quieter settings where foreigners do not visit as much. I find it easier to talk to regular people who live there outside the tourist spots. It’s not impossible to have regular conversations with normal people in tourist areas, but sometimes, the “tourist as client” relationship can become the main way people who live in tourist spots are used to engaging with foreigners.

Visiting a beach for a few days allows one to appreciate the beauty of the beach. For some at least, living on the beach everyday makes it seem normal, like the wallpaper of their lives. I constantly travel to new places rather different from settling in one place, so I do not have to see the same beach everyday. But likewise, I can still become overexposed to wonder and to itself new types of places.

Growing up in the Eastern US, I see huge mountains maybe once every couple years during trips “out West” to see the Rockies. I would feel enraptured by mountains. Now, I see a new mountain range every several months and climb at least one mountain a month. Each one is majestic; don’t get me wrong, but much of the magic I felt when mountains were a rare, special experience fades away after I have seen so many.

Now, what I see when I see a new mountain range is how it compares with the other mountains I have seen before in the Americas, Africa, Oceania, Asia, etc. All mountain ranges have certain patterns in common yet also differences, and I think overtime the different mountains form a type of grid in my mind of characteristics: this mountain range has A and B, and the next mountain range I see has X and Y, but a third combines A and Y but neither B nor C, maybe introducing D in a rather interesting way. This applies to wildlife, foods, and many other things I encounter while traveling. It’s different from simply marveling at a new thing I have never encountered before, but it adds a richer dimension that improves my understanding of the world.

The other side of this is that the tourist industry tends to foster a specific, superficial kind of relationship. It may seem welcoming, but that only lasts for a week. Often for me personally, I tend to get sick of it even after a day or two. A crucial part of finding fulfillment while traveling long-term is to move beyond the tourist interaction and cultivate other types of relationships. I tend to do that by listening to people’s stories and trying to be with people in a genuine way. It is possible to do this in highly touristic places, but sometimes, visiting non-heavily touristed areas of a country make this much easier.

At the same time, even if the pleasure-seeking aspects of travel fade, on a practical level, of all major forms of material consumption, experiences fade the slowest. If you compare it to buying luxury items like nice cars or nice clothes, for example, the benefits of an adventure experience last longer (for me at least, but I suspect this is the case for most humans). This is one reason why for someone who dreams of material affluence, of being able to buy a bunch of stuff, once they get enough wealth to afford those things and now own them, they end up wanting more.

Buying experiences are also less likely to saddle someone with debt that they will have to deal with decades later like big single expenses like nice homes or cars, or buying many small materials things often do. Someone who primarily consumes experiences can much more easily cut back if money becomes tight for unforeseen reasons at a later point in life. So, if one is to indulge a little in consumption, for me at least, experiences seem like the best strategy.

At the end of the day, meeting new people and learning new things in the places I visit are the main two factors keeping me going. I am not always the best at receiving and cultivating that, but I am trying my best. I think as long as these forces encouraging me to keep going continue to outweigh the forces that might encourage me to settle down in one place, I will keep traveling. At a later point in my life, this may switch: I may feel greater encouragement to settle down than to continue traveling. And if they do, I will probably stop. But for now, I keep going.

Fail, Pivot, Feed: Lessons Learned Hustling in Baguio, Philippines

This is about a local entrepreneur I met in Baguio, Philippines. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. If you want to read another story about a woman trying to start a restaurant business in a different part of Southeast Asia with very different prospects, see this.

She is one of eight children: four boys and four girls. She studied psychology in undergrad. One of her brothers, who was a professor I believe also in psychology, committed suicide at the age of 22. She said that she felt like the family did not ask him how he was doing enough or show him positive affection. She finished her degree but decided not to work in psychology because she associated that with her brother. She also said she has had to forgive herself and others and to heal from this, which has been a process.

She loves cooking and serving others food. She much prefers that, finding it very life giving. She currently runs a small, counter-serve restaurant. This is her fourth or fifth business. The others failed, and she finally learned how to be successful in it.

Her first business was a restaurant that she co-started with a friend. She and her friend had several disputes. In particular, her friend bought stuff without her permission, which caused the business to blow through its budget. She said the core problem was that they weren’t on the same page on who would run the business. Her friend wanted to have someone fund her to do her own business, and she wanted to be equals in the process of the business. She also said she had to learn the hard way value of first approaching the person positively instead of accusatorily.

Her friend offered to split the business 50-50 with each person controlling their portion to do their thing or cash out and cut her losses. She chose the second because the lack of an amicable partnership made continuing to work with her seem unrealistic. She said she had to learn to make sure that you and the person you are working with are on the same page before working together on a business.

She then set up an online clothes store with her sister, but she eventually gave this up because it was not generating enough revenue. She also started a food stand near Baguio’s main university, but this too failed because she was not prepared on how to run the ins and outs of making food in a cost-effective manner.

With this business, she finally has success, though. She started in February of last year. On her opening day, she made 3,000 Filipino pesos (about USD $32) and the next day 6,000 pesos (about $64). She broke even from her starting expenses 3-4 months in. She generally makes about 30,000 pesos (or $320) a month, which is good enough to get by on. She tends to sell out on her food everyday with a line of customers going around the corner of her block during peak hours, a clear sign of success.

She said she learned the lessons from her past businesses. She set this restaurant up by herself instead of getting anyone else involved. It’s next to a big grade school and gets a lot of business in weekday afternoons when the kids finish school. Her strategy is to sell significantly cheaper than other nearby restaurants so that she sells more of it, and it seems to be working.

Her restaurant is a single room that’s about a meter/yard wide and maybe 3 meters/yards long. That’s her kitchen full of her stove, cookingware, food, etc. In the front is a little wooden board facing the street where people come up and place their order. Once she makes it, she hands it to them, and they go on their way.

She works practically nonstop. She works six days a week except Sundays, her one day off. She wakes up at like 2:00 am or 3:00 am to buy her food for the day at the market. She then works until around 9:00 pm when she closes (but sometimes she closes earlier, closer to 8:00 or even 7:30 pm if she has already sold all her food).

I suggested she may need to take some time off to rest by eventually hiring an assistant to work some of the time instead of her. She said that moments during the day when she doesn’t have customers is her rest. She took a week-long vacation to go to Manila a few months ago as well.

Her plan is to save money to retire by at least 48 (she’s currently 37), even if that means hustling now. For retirement, she wants to go to the rural province where part of her family is from.

Many of her siblings work abroad, since wages are low in the Philippines. One is in Saudi Arabia; another Japan. Others have traveled to other bigger cities in the Philippines where they can make more money. She had a job offer for a white collar job in Thailand, and she refused it. She prefers staying here in Baguio with her parents. (In Filipino culture, often one daughter – generally the youngest – is expected to stay back with her parents.)

She also said she helps others. She said that when a person asking for food walks by, she gives it to them, giving them whichever dish they want. Similarly, she gives her leftovers to the street cleaning lady who comes by with a broom to sweep the street or sidewalk in the evening. She believes in karma, and that if you help others, you help make the world around you (the community, nature, etc.) a better place for yourself.

What I Learned Developing a Long-Distance Relationship with a Woman from the Other Side of the World

I wanted to reflect on the lessons I learned from dating a woman living on the other side of the world. My ex-girlfriend is a Thai woman who was living in Cambodia, and we met when I took a trip there.

One major mistake we made is that we did not give enough time being together in the same place. For context, we went on a few dates while I was in Cambodia. Then after chatting for a month and a half by text, we met together for two weeks in Vietnam, before I went back to New York where I lived at the time, and she went back to her home in Cambodia. Then three months later, she came to New York for what turned out to be a month and a half trip visiting New York and also Washington state.

After this, we decided to travel the world together, which in effect involved living together on the road. That was too soon for such a step. To be clear, I don’t think touring Vietnam, New York, and Washington state were bad trips. They were very impactful experiences that deepened our relationship. Our problem was that we did not know enough about each other to decide to live together while traveling the world.

That was too big of a jump for where we were at, and it turned out to be the wrong call. Once we traveled together, we realized all sorts of incompatibilities and tensions that eventually destroyed our relationship.

Traveling with a significant other in itself can be difficult. One of my friends quibbed that traveling together is a relationship “on hard mode” as you constantly have to make complex decisions together while also being potentially tired and removed from a stable rhythm or sense of place. But I don’t think that primarily explains why we had the tension. We did not do enough work evaluating whether we were compatible in the first place.

Compatibility is difficult to evaluate when a relationship is long-distance. That’s one of the long-distance relationship’s biggest difficulties. Living in the same city (even if they live on the other side of town) allows you to see the person in your daily routine. You can feel out how you feel with them everyday, how your lifestyles’ overlap or conflict, and what to do about the latter.

Some in my generation insist that couples should move in together before getting married to evaluate whether they are compatible. I would go that far per se, but living in the same town is important. Seeing them as you go about your day and week and doing the many little things together that make up regular life helps you understand whether you fit.

Our long-distance relationship was stuck on the honeymoon phase, where we were head over heels with each other, perhaps naively so. Psychologists who have studied this phase of relationships report that people usually notice our partner’s flaws but do not consider them a big deal. Instead, we tend to minimize potential problems in favor of the positive aspects. It’s in later stages of the relationships that we truly process these flaws and any other tensions in the relationship and actively work through them. It’s necessary to do this to evaluate whether you two really are a good fit.

When a relationship is long-distance, you often communicate on your own terms. Whether it is texting or calling, you interact with the person according to your schedules. You may speak with your partner frequently – for example, at this time, I generally spoke with her twice a day – but there’s something about only texting, chatting, and video-calling that does not help move the relationship out of the honeymoon phase.

I believe the reason is that these virtual, long-distance communications are not a major disruptions to our day-to-day lives. It’s by incorporating the other person into our day-to-day lives that tends to move the relationship out of the infatuation stage and start to show the frictions inherent in the relationship. It both allows us to experience them enough to get under our skin, but it also requires more of a shift into our lives that causes friction.

I remember a priest in my home church growing up once reflecting in a sermon about his experience counseling new couples planning to get married. One of the first questions he asks the couples is, “During your fights, how do you two fight? What do you tend to do?” Some newly dating couples will respond that they have never had a fight before, and he’ll tell them to wait until they get through a major fight and then come back to get married. For him, having had a fight is a sign that they are close and not having had a major fight demonstrates that they are not intimate enough for marriage. Genuine intimacy requires getting under each other’s skin, which necessarily produces friction and tension.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that we never fought while our relationship was long-distance. It was not intimate enough to do so. Unsurprisingly, during our trips together traveling (both in Vietnam, New York, and Washington), we did fight. The longer we were together, the more significant our fights became, precisely because we were sharing more of our regular lives together, leading to greater opportunity for connection and friction. The long-distance phases, though, felt similar to freezing fruit to prevent it from ripening: typical reactions were suppressed, preventing the relationship from moving to the next stage.

What is the alternative for someone in a long-distance relationship? I don’t know. Ideally one should close the gap and move to the same place, but in many circumstances, that is not realistic. This is still what I have noticed at least, even if it can be a hard truth for two people considering dating who do not live in the same place.

When Advancing Seems Hopeless (Life Snippet from Battambang, Cambodia)

This woman’s story seems to be a story of doing all one can to beat the odds and rise above the cycle of poverty. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. For another snippet also from Cambodia but from someone with a very different position in life there, see this.

(Caveat: We spoke in 2023. I decided to maintain the present tense tone in this piece, but the present refers to the end of 2023.)

Chivy (not her real name) is from Battambang, Cambodia. Her dream is to start a restaurant, since she loves cooking and hospitality. She and her cousin recently co-founded a restaurant. It’s on the first floor of the same apartment building that her family (her mother, uncle, aunt, cousins, and her) rents the second floor of. But the business has been struggling.

She worked at her restaurant from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm everyday, and to make ends meet, she had a second job working the evening shift at a local bar as a barista from 3:00 pm until midnight. Her cousin works at their restaurant during the evenings until 10:00 pm when Chivy is gone.

The rental for her restaurant business costs $200 a month (Cambodia uses the US dollar as one of its currencies, so she’s paid in dollars), and her barista job pays her about $400 a month. She uses her second job to pay the rent for the restaurant and keeps the rest to contribute to rent for her home expenses for her and her family.

Battambang has been an important tourist destination until the covid pandemic. Then tourism stopped, causing huge hardship as most people in the small city lost their jobs. People working in tourism, food and beverage, and other service sector industries were the worst hit, because there were now few customers to pay for these services. When I was there, the pandemic had ended. Tourists were starting to come back, but not to anywhere near the same numbers they were before in Battambang and Cambodia, so restaurants still struggled to find customers.

At the same time, she is exhausted. She works fifteen hours a day with only has nine hours in the day to split between relaxation, any chores she needs, and sleep. She has one day off a week on Wednesdays. She says everyday she feels exhausted. Her friends have told her that she is slowly killing herself by overworking, and she suspects she can’t sustain this forever.

At the same time, she really wants her restaurant business to succeed. Her dream is to start a restaurant. Her cousin wants to throw in the towel, saying they haven’t gotten enough business to keep them afloat much longer, but she wants to keep trying. She hopes she can make it.

Both her and her cousin have been strategizing the best way to beat the odds and rise economically from their initial position, but they have found this incredibly difficult.

Chivy would like to move to the US, where she would work for at least 10 years. The greater income in the US (even if she works a low-income job in the US where she is barely scraping by while there) would allow her to save far more money than she’ll ever earn here working as, say, a barista. She would use that money to buy a home for her mother. The family would then craft that home into a homestay where they could rent out a few rooms to tourists and through that, build wealth to allow them to advance to the middle class in Battambang. She told me that moving to the US is a dream, though, that she knows will never realistically happen.

Likewise, her cousin has been trying to find a job in South Korea. She applied for a program the Cambodian government hosts to work there. The program pairs Cambodians with companies in South Korea, where they tend to work in a few different types of low-wage blue collar or service sector industries like manufacturing, agriculture, or if their Korean is considered good enough to interact with regular customers, food and beverage.

She had to take a series of exams to demonstrate her competency. She studied Korean for three months in order to prepare for an exam. She needed a score of 110 out of 200 to pass, and she scored 125. She also had to take a dexterity test, placing blocks in holes and other physical activities, which she also passed.

She is waiting to see whether a Korean employer will choose her. She is pessimistic that she’ll get an offer, though. Korea’s program has 400 slots for Cambodians, and about 2,000-3,000 Cambodians apply for these 400 slots. She said they mostly select men in their twenties for factory work, the industry that would be most likely to hire her, so as a 33-year old woman, they may not pick her.

If she does get a job offer, most contracts are for two years, although some stay for as long as five years in total after renewing it a few times. The typical pay is $2,000 a month in Korea, which would also allow her to save to buy a home to use as a homestay. If this doesn’t work out, though, she may move to Siem Reap (a major tourist city next to the famous Angkor Wat) where tourist and food and beverage jobs are more plentiful.

Chivy’s and her cousin’s stories demonstrate the complexities of trying to advance economically in small cities and towns in Cambodia. Other residents in Battambang have told me the area can feel almost feudal with class mobility being very difficult and people becoming locked into their station in life. This shows how difficult it can be to change that.

Even the best entrepreneurial endeavors are likely to fail and options feeling limited, causing them to look to other parts of the world where they can work and save money, but these options are also limited. It’s easy to feel sad and stuck, and even working 15 hour days may not be enough to cut it to create one’s dreams.

The Tower of Hattan (A Short Story)

One day a man of Hattan said, “We should build a giant skyscraper up to the heavens. It would be the perfect city, heaven on earth, with everything we need all in one place: our homes, our businesses, our shopping, our schools, our worship, our recreation. We would be able to do everything inside without ever having to leave.”

Many people in Hattan liked this, so they elected him mayor. They began construction immediately in the city’s center.

God saw their desire to build a wondrous tower just like the heavens and decided to help them. As construction demands grew, they needed more and more workers, so God brought people from all corners of the world to help create, build, and dwell in this new heaven, and they settled in the areas surrounding the tower.

As these workers started to build, some became weary of how these foreigners were hurting the city. Even worse, they started to incorporate their own thinking, their own concepts into the building. As the building became larger, these became parts of the foundation of this skyscraper.
The mayor tried to counter with an even more ambitious, unified plan to build over and around the deviations, which had become too embedded into the tower’s structural integrity to remove.

This required even more people with even more language and ideas. They moved into the ever-expanding communities surrounding the tower. Eventually, these peoples became weary of constructing the tower for the ungrateful inhabitants. Instead, these communities elected a new mayor who cancelled its construction once and for all to focus on the economic development of the now sprawling city and its residents.

At a press conference after her inauguration, she announced, “We will preserve the remains of this site as a memorial to our attempt to build a tower over the heavens.”

“The past mayor promised to build a heavenly place for us to live. What do you say to criticism that you are stopping this attempt to construct this heaven?” A journalist inquired.

“We are still going to try to make this city into its own heaven,” she replied. “But God’s Heaven is just wide before it is high.”

The Principle of the Five Why’s and How Can You Use It Better Listen to Others

The Five Why’s is a common technique among UX researchers and other qualitative researchers that has personally transformed my approach to conversations. UX researchers interview people all the time, and to understand what they think about something, they always make sure to ask five “why” questions about their opinion in order to get to the heart of their opinion on the matter. Humans often rush into assumptions and judgements about what the other person thinks, and this forces us to slow down and get to the heart of how they view the world.

Let’s consider a classic UX research example. Say you just developed a great new app, and you wanted to see whether people actually find it useful. So, you observe several people using the app and ask them what they think. The first person says, “I find it frustrating.” This is really useful information, but obviously, more details would help even more. So, a natural response would be, “Why do you find it frustrating?”

Say the person gives a quick answer like, “I find the interface confusing, so I can’t do what I want to do” or whatever their frustration might be. This gives you a better understanding of their frustrations, but you can dig even more. According to the Principle of the Five Why’s you should ask at least five follow-up questions about why (or in some cases, how) they feel the way they do.

This allows you to hone in exactly what their underlying needs and expectations are and how well your product meets those needs for them. Now, technically, not all follow-up questions have to be “why”. The idea is that like, “why” questions, ask questions that nonjudgmentally help uncover the underlying reasons for the opinions. For example, in this scenario, I may next ask, “What about the interface do you find confusing?” or “What are you trying to do, and how is it preventing you from doing it?” Both of these are not “why” questions, but they help orient me to understand why the person feels frustrated. Sometimes you have to learn some basic data about what their experience was before you uncover the next level of detail about why they had that experience.

I often use this principle in regular conversations as well. Too often people assume they know what the person is thinking and make assessments based on their initial judgements. Asking follow-up questions forces us to slow down and consider in-depth what that person is trying to communicate. After listening, one can still disagree with a person’s conclusions, but at least you will know why. In almost every situation, I have found at least some points of agreement even when I thought we had opposing, conflictual perspectives.

It also calms you down. In tense conversations, we often simply react. Maybe we presume they meant something hostile and respond in turn. This helps us survive threats but clouds our ability to empathize with others and reason through their ideas. Asking questions allows us to pause and reflect for a few more moments on what else might be influencing where they are coming from.

Feel free to try it in regular conversations, especially potential arguments or other tense conversations. Pause and ask a few “why” questions to understand the layers behind their thoughts before launching into your perspective on the matter. It will change the course of the conversation. Worst case scenario, by the end of it, you will still disagree with them just as much as you did initially, but often you will learn something and will discover a way to carry on nonconfrontationally in a way that involves both of you getting what you want. If you disagree, you have lost little by hearing them out and gained the ability to disagree productively since you now know exactly where the other person is coming from.

Now in every interaction, you don’t have to literally ask five questions. That exact number may not fit every interaction. The spirit of the rule is to ask follow-up questions that force you to engage with the reasons underneath someone’s impressions. For me, I often ask follow-up questions until it feels uncomfortable, until I feel my thoughts well up so strongly within me that I am eager to jump in. Then, I ask just two more follow-up questions. In the unlikely event that I still think they are totally wrong by the end of those two questions, I can jump in with my perspective. This slows me down and forces me to practice more constraint and helps me see a path to empathize and/or disagree in a positive and productive manner.

What Can We Do to Be Satisfied in Life?

What leads to people feeling satisfied and fulfilled in life? This is a daunting question, but I have been thinking about it a lot recently. I have a potential answer. Based on when I talk with people around the world, some who are satisfied in life and some who are not – I have sensed that one thing seems again and again to be most significant in whether people feel satisfied and fulfilled in their life: feeling connected to others in life-giving relationships.

I don’t know whether generalizing to everyone across all cultures is useful or even possible, but this is a pattern I have been seeing on pretty much whatever continent I visit. Humans crave and find meaning in life-giving relationships.

By being connected in “life-giving relationships,” I mean ones where the person can give life to others and in turn, receive life in those relationships. We tend to be drawn to creating, cultivating, growing, enhancing, etc. of life in the world around us, and we tend to be most fulfilled when we can participate in that process. A sad aspect of contemporary society is that it can often seem to alienate us from these communities.

How to participate will vary widely given the person’s personality and the needs of their community. Some might lead an organization that is doing something beneficial to humanity, but in my experience, this form often gets overemphasized as if it is the primary way to make a difference. Some participate in life-giving relationships by doing something as down-to-earth as sewing clothes or building bricks. It really depends on the person and the community. Humans seem particularly adept at producing new, creative ways to foster life given a new set of circumstances and needs, so the possibilities seem truly endless.

I also mean giving “life” in the broadest sense possible: not just human life but also animals and other forms of life. Some people are drawn towards animals. Some might be drawn towards specific types of humans in specific types of circumstances, such as someone who had to work through a specific hard time in life and gravitates towards helping those who also have a similar experience. All of this will vary widely according to the individual, circumstance, and cultural context.

Literally every source of happiness fades, but in my experience, life-giving relationships seem to be the longest lasting. Some forms of happiness are primarily or exclusively consumptive, and in my experience, these often fade the fastest: material objects, drug highs, etc. Life-giving relationships, in contrast, are participatory for the person. We receive life when we give it, and being in a healthy system of relationships provides the most wholesome forms of satisfaction. When in those relationships, accruing specific material things that help attain that goal help, and some moments, we may just need to unwind some simple pleasures. Absolutely, but these do not form a good basis of satisfaction in one’s life as a whole.

Some potential forms of happiness involve building or refining ourselves: learning/education, self-improvement, even the quest for power, etc. In my experience, the happiness from these tend to last longer than purely consumptive forms, but when done in themselves, they too eventually become vacuous. If you are not plugged into a reason for learning that involves making the world around you better, in my experience at least, learning can lose its shine. Refining and improvements often needs a purpose to attach itself to, and in some way, helping to improve the world around you tends to, in the long run, both the most fulfilling long-term purpose.

Then, finally, you have some forms of happiness that are unhealthy manifestations of the desire for life-giving relationships. Fame as a form of happiness is a good example of this, which are secretly relational states. For example, when one desires fame, most often they desire a relationship where many other people know them and give them adoration and accolades. For a small percentage of people, their way to produce life ends up leading to fame, but when someone pursues fame in itself, they are often pursuing a bastardized version of a healthy system of life-giving relationships.

In contrast to these three types of happiness, life-giving relationships tends to be ultimately the most fulfilling form of happiness, where we are plugged into a system where we both give life to others and in turn receive life ourselves.

The Affluence Trap: Why More Money Doesn’t Always Mean More Freedom

You would think that those who make more money would have less financial troubles, but in many cases, you would be wrong. In surveys, people with higher income often report living from paycheck to paycheck.

This is because many wealthier people succumb to income inflation. This is a common human phenomena where those who make more money spend more on more expensive items and thus feel the need to make even more money. The millionaire struggling to afford the payments to keep his private airplane fueled, if you will.

Why does this happen? In short, because when many people make more money, they get a sense that they should live it up, buying more and more things. This can creep slowly and before you know it, one is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on simple payments.

Whether you are wealthy or of modest means, these are three tricks to counteract this tendency:

The first is to think about what you really want in your life. Too often people assume that because they are wealthier, they should want and do the things that other wealthier people seem to want to and do: to buy a big house in whatever neighborhood is considered “nice,” buy expensive clothes, eat out at fancy restaurants, etc. But are these things you actually want?

It is reasonable to shell out more for better quality or for the things one truly desires in life, but most of the time, more expensive does not mean better quality. Many luxury brands are not better in quality; they are just more expensive, and to a point, many fancier restaurants similarly do not have a similar increase in quality. In situations where the more expensive product has a useful feature for you, it can be worth it to pay more for it, but most often, restaurants or stores that charge more do so because people think of more expensive products as better, not because they are actually better.

Similarly, buy only the specifications that you need. This can include durability: paying a little more for something that will last a long time costs less money in the long run than having to replace it down the line. If you only need a normal computer with normal processing, shelling out thousands of dollars for the latest high-end portable “supercomputer” does not make sense. Some people (like software engineers) may need those specifications, but if you are not one of those people, don’t worry about it. Marketers often convince us to buy products beyond what they actually need.

Second, don’t buy on credit. People should not do this unless they absolutely have to, and those who are making higher incomes do not have to. (The less well-off often get trapped into buying on credit, crippling them with debt, but that is a topic for another article.) Spend the money you have, nothing more and nothing less. I am even hesitant to get out a loan and pay for expensive purchases: purchase what you can afford right now. If you are buying something that takes years to pay back, consider whether that thing is worth being overworked in a crappy yet well-paid job with an obnoxious boss to complete your payments, because that is in effect what you are doing. For example, would you rather have a cheaper used car that still gets you around but retire early? I have a friend who bought a second home in the countryside, which he never visits. Was it really worth it to him to have to work several decades to own a place he doesn’t do much with? No. It was self-defeating: to pay for his new home, he had to work a job that never gave him the free time to enjoy the home in the first place. Many major expenses like cars and a new home may not be worth sacrificing the majority of one’s life to.

Buying experiences like traveling to new parts of the world or having adventures can be a fulfilling yet strategic use of one’s wealth. If you can afford a few thousand dollars, spending it on a trip to some new part of the world you have never been to is likely a far more spiritually enriching use of money than using it for the first month’s down payment on a bigger house in another part of town. If your circumstances change, you can always claw back on experiences, but a mortgage locks you in for decades.

Finally, think for yourself about what is important for you and what you value. Many wealthier people simply enact the narratives of what it means to be wealthy they see around them consciously or subconsciously. They think, “Oh being wealthier means, I get a big house and a fancy car, eat fine foods,” and so on. This traps them into a certain lifestyle where they must work a very selective number of positions that can pay for such a lifestyle. What do you truly find meaningful? It may not be wearing fancy jewelry, and it may not be living in the standard place every other wealthy person lives in.

Like many humans, many wealthy people live with a type of insecurity, as if they have to prove their value to others. This can lead to them showing off their wealth as a sign of their status. “Look at me; I made it.” For those like this, their problem is internal: they need to work on themselves and figure out why they don’t value who they are. If they did value who they are, they would realize how useless and fleeting the approval of others (especially strangers they don’t know) actually is.

For others, they buy the things other wealthy people seem to buy rather than think through what they value and actually want in life. Unsurprisingly, these social expectations are ever expanding: companies will always present us with another thing we need to get until we stop listening to them. Pausing and thinking for yourself about what you actually want knocks us off of that treadmill.

I hope this helps in thinking about how to deal with income inflation. Don’t follow others with means into this trap. Swim against the current of our society telling us to spend spend spend and figure out how to enjoy your life on your own terms.

A Warning from Death (A Short Story)

Hello,

I wanted to write a letter to clear things up. I am quite possibly the most misunderstood person you will meet. Most people fear me, but I’m not scary. I am the one who helps you pursue what is most important in life. I am the End, yes, but the end is what makes the journey a journey. Without it, you would no real reason to focus on what is most important, nor acceptance of what you have. By establishing finiteness, I establish value.

I know very well what it is like to be feared. This is the standard way humans misunderstand me. I have dealt with it for millennia. What I didn’t anticipate was your corporations. They drain bits and pieces of my essence for their profit, all in the effort to give others cheap profit. Momentary happiness or release to hook people into an addiction in which I slowly drain them into me. The endless machine of more and more is ever consuming. It will only expand to engulf your world and everything in it.

What is truly shocking to me is how these humans who drain the life of others for their own profit don’t really gain much of anything in the process. These vampires are too wasting their life. They just spend their life trying to make more instead of enjoying what they have. Addicted to money and the gain for more more more each quarter, they remake their consumers into their own vampiric image. They also leave their employees husks of their former selves, only able to consume with the little energy and money they have. Take me as a purist, but this bends the very foundation of what I am.

So take this my warning. Embrace death so that you can embrace life, but if you embrace this, you are embracing nothing but a shadowy existence that is neither.

Yours truly,
Death

What The Good Place’s Ending Leaves Out about Ethics (Reflection #9 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

Eleanor helps comfort Tahinni through her family trauma.

This is my final article reflecting on the Good place (see the previous article and my whole series). It’s been an insightful ride. To be clear, the Good Place is one of my favorite sitcoms, both for breaking new ground in what is possible in a sitcom and for encouraging people to think through what it might look like to truly heal from wrongs in an afterlife. Yet I think its ending leaves something crucial out: only individuals receive resolution and improvement in the afterlife itself, denying any kind of collective rectification of the moral problems facing our world.

In the show, the main group of characters manage to reconfigure the afterlife from a punitive system where literally every human in the last 500 years gets eternally tortured in the Bad Place to a refining system where each individual must work through their moral failings so they are able to join all other perfected individuals in the Good Place. This changes the thinking around justice in itself from one of punishment to self-improvement for all.

One could analyze this shift in itself, but here, I will focus on a crucial aspect of justice that this leaves out: any discussion of rectification of the world to resolve the problems we have created. Broadly speaking, this rectification could look like seeking to fix or repair what an individual has destroyed through one’s immoral acts and more broadly like trying to resolve the structural issues built on the accumulation of immoral and destructive decisions by multiple humans. They get let out entirely in the show’s resolution. Instead, the show’s new afterlife implicitly encourages individuals to focus on themselves as the exclusive or primary focus of what it means to develop morally. Let’s break them down further through some examples.

One day when I was a little boy, I did not want to eat whatever my mom served me for dinner that day, so what did I do? When she went to the kitchen for a second, I threw it all on the floor. When my mom returned, not only did she scold me for throwing my dinner on the floor, but she made me clean it up. As part of rectifying what I did, I had to clean up the mess I made. There could be many situations where fully rebuilding what was destroyed due to the immoral life is impossible (arguably full rectification is never possible), but a person who has done something wrong and feels guilty for it will often try to do the best they can to repair things for whoever they hurt through their actions.

Now this also applies at a larger scale. Humans have collectively built systems that destroy the environment and impoverish many through stifling inequality, and to fully make up for these, we also need to collectively repair their damage. But in The Good Place, all individuals no longer have to fix the problems they create once they die from that when they die. Once they die, they get to go through their own inner perfection and go to the Good Place, even if the systems they were a part of while alive remain just as destructive on earth. As a matter of fact, they would have to undergo an internal transformation after they die whether they do anything to fix the damage they have caused, meaning that the damage they caused does not end up mattering to their existence anyways.

Any positive reformation of anything in this world does not matter in the reformed afterlife system they created at the end of the series. Take, for example, an individual who commits some kind of atrocity, ranging in severity from a parent abusing one’s children or an orchestrator of a mass genocide. That person dies, enters their purgatory, which presumably teaches them the error of their ways and makes them into a better person, and then they go to heaven. That’s great for them, but they do not need to take any concrete action in the world itself to deal with or fix the intense suffering their actions have caused. Genocides and even abusive parents unleash cascading suffering into the world (both to humans and nonhumans) that can take several generations to heal. The show makes clear that the victims of atrocities from others will experience a healing during the afterlife, but that is long after the fact. Why must they suffer in the first place?

Healing occurs only by literally removing people from their environment into a make-believe world. For example, both Tahani and her sister experience healing from the trauma of their parents’ constant abuse, which allows them to overcome their lifelong competition between each other. They then get to experience positive relationships with each other and their parents all as healed people. Instead of fixing their relationship dynamics together, their reformation seemed to occur in their individual purgatories, where they presumably learned the error of their ways and grew as people (with the entire show being Tahani’s transforming state). In the show, they did not know what the others would be like after getting through their purgatories demonstrating that they were not together in any of it. This is innovative in many ways, but its portrayal of healing is entirely individualistic. Each human goes through purgatory in isolation outside of the social systems in which they existed and both created their virtues and vices. For example, for a familial conflict like this, I would love to see them go through purgatory together, probably in a way that changed some of the unfair power dynamics latent in the abuse and resolved everything together.

Also, what about non-human entities that suffered? For example, there is no reformation or healing in this system to animals that humans caused to suffer. A dog abused or neglected by its owner presumably was left on earth to die with no redemption. It also ignores any healing to the suffering of more collective entities like human communities and the environment. Instead of the humans experiencing renewal in a make-believe purgatory, I would love to see humans have to come back to the earth (maybe as some kind of ghost or other supernatural spirit) to reform the suffering their actions have caused in this world to mitigate how much suffering future humans and the environment in this world have to suffer. For example, if someone led a genocide, they would have to spend the next part of their afterlife healing all the damage this caused the world since. As a child, if I spilled something on the floor, my parents, as part of me having to learn my lesson, usually made me help clean it up, instead of whisking me into another room for a lesson, and then sending me on my way.

All of this points to its human-centered individualistic view that does not consider any systematic change to society or the ecological world and ignores the plight of animals and other nonhumans in this world as inferior and cosmically irrelevant. All that is necessary for “moral” perfection is a change in the characters of individual humans, which ignores the calls for systematic justice in both the social and environmental contexts. Even though The Good Place takes a courageous step in the right direction in helping people rethink justice, I think if we were to reimagine the afterlife to better address the injustices of humans, it would need to include the entire world and involve a fuller rectification of what humans have destroyed in this world.