Living in South Korea During the Pandemic: A Different Work-Life Balance

I wish I could feasibly be self-employed here. Whilst I’m still far less consistent than the average person, I am more consistent than ever. Even after breaks and burnout, something about this environment just naturally inspires me to return to what I was working on and what I care about every time. I’m more consistent in staying in contact with my loved ones, with industry work, with streaming, improving my health in a myriad of ways, studying, cleaning. Even just going outside! It’s not so obvious at surface level, but if you look a little deeper there is proof of patterns. With food, vitamins, exercise, spending. I have a snap-streak of over 200 days with one of my friends. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything for 200 days in a row before in my adult life… I have over 60 hours streamed this month whilst working, having physical health complications, exploring, exercising, socialising… and without even trying! I didn’t make any push for it whatsoever. I will commit to this year, and I might commit to an E6 visa extension beyond this year, but it honestly might be time to build up dat self-employed life. If I can’t swing it here, I can swing it in Japan or several European countries. The major thing that would make it difficult about swinging it here would be the fact I’ve already been here for a year on a different visa. But I’m still young. If I must go away and come back, t’is no matter! Plenty of time. I can tell there is underlying stress with these large looming life decisions, but logically I feel happy about it all, and my prospects generally. What a change from the turbulent years that predated the pandemic. Korea, we may have some big things we disagree on, but with your principally community-centric attitudes, I have faith we can work on them together in the coming years.

You know when you think you weren’t improving or progressing, get burned out, take a break, but then your former roommate and current roommate are spam-texting in your group chat in your third language at a rate of 3 messages per second and whilst you don’t understand all of it you can somewhat keep up and contribute whereas a few months ago you probably wouldn’t have even tried to read it without the help of Papago? Yeah. You know that ubiquitous experience we’ve all had? Going through that right now. Fried my brain within an hour but we doi- Oh, wait. Now they’re speaking about going over to Jenny’s place to watch a movie. I was supposed to go the gym after writing this but…

OKAY BYEEEE PRETEND I ENDED ON SOMETHING NICE AND MOTIVATIONAL.