My life is marked by instability.
Let me explain. I was born in Flushing, New York on November 1, 1994, but moved to Southern California just a couple months later. We spent a couple short years in California, during which my mother passed away from heart complications. My father was unemployed during this time, so we moved to Anchorage, Alaska for a new job opportunity with Korean Air as a flight dispatcher. My father soon met my first stepmother, Sarah, but that marriage was rife with heated arguments. Several home changes, a lawsuit and a divorce later, I found myself back in Southern California when I was ten. My older sister, who I regarded as my true maternal figure, and my older brother had both gone off to college so I was living with just my father.
In California, I started taking piano lessons with Joann, who was also a recent divorcee like my father. Joann and my father began dating, leading to a marriage that just made sense financially and emotionally for them. I was thirteen when my family suddenly expanded with two new stepbrothers and a stepmother. I found myself in a strange new home living with these people. I spent all of high school bitter that I couldn’t have a normal childhood, feelings amplified by puberty during my emotionally charged teenage era.
When I was 18, I moved to Philadelphia to attend Swarthmore College. At 22, I moved to Shanghai to try living in a vastly different environment. At 24, I moved to the Bay Area to work at Google. At 25, I transferred teams to work in the New York office, and now at 29, I just moved to South Korea. So far, I’ve lived in 8 different cities and moved homes over 20 times. I’ve become accustomed to instability as change has become the only constant in my life.
Contributing to my identity is the amount I’ve traveled on my own. I’ve had the privilege to travel to more countries before I finished college than most do in their lifetime. My father wanted to work for an airline to enable his lifelong dream of traveling the world, so the desire to explore is deeply encoded in my genetics. One of his corporate benefits at Korean Air granted me access to purchase standby tickets. I was able to fly almost anywhere in the world for a couple hundred bucks as long as I was willing to take leftover seats, which often meant waiting long hours at the airport without certainty that I’ll get seated. This benefit, however, expired when I turned 26, so my father urged me to take full advantage before then. In college, I worked part-time at the cafeteria and gym and used that money to travel alone to Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America. I stayed in $10 hostel beds in a room shared with many others, skimping in every way I could to stretch every dollar of my meager student salary.
Change is deeply uncomfortable. I’ve switched schools a number of times - Bayshore Elementary, to Northern Lights ABC, to Morris Elementary, to Lexington Junior High, to Oxford Academy, and finally to Swarthmore College. Leaving behind those close friends and restarting my life each time was painful. Marrying into each stepfamily was deeply uncomfortable because I had to share a home with people whom I had a difficult time accepting as family. Home never truly felt like home. Moving to Shanghai and traveling alone were uncomfortable because I neither knew the native language nor had any friends.
The amount I gained from each change, however, was priceless. The quality of education I received increased progressively with each school change. My father’s happiness was noticeably higher after marrying into Joann’s family since he was no longer lonely and the labor of raising a family was split between two. By traveling and living alone in different countries, I developed a deeper appreciation for different cultures and became fiercely independent. I felt like I could be dropped off at any location in the world and figure my way out of any situation. I wouldn’t be who I am today if I wasn’t shoved out of my comfort zone during my impressionable years.
During the past few years, an internal conflict has been brewing.
On my right shoulder is the angel named Stability and on my left, the devil named Instability. In New York, I lived a stable life with a weekly routine for four years, but I craved novelty and another uprooting of my life as if the time for one was ripe yet again. I had a nine-to-five job, a close-knit group of friends, a consistent love life etc. I knew, however, that I wanted to eventually leave New York and move to Korea to study Korean and focus on personal goals. I exhausted all my vacation days and unpaid leave to experiment with this lifestyle during the summer of 2023. After that experience, I was confident in taking the leap to quit my job and move to Korea.
The decision to move to Korea, however, required a deeply uncomfortable step into the unknown. Moving meant leaving behind a network I worked hard to develop and the terrifying decision to quit my job. The move is technically within budget, but a job at Google still isn’t easy to give up. Quitting meant giving up a life of guaranteed financial security, top-notch healthcare, endless gourmet food, and many other benefits. What if a recession happens? What if I run out of money? What if I need a job again? Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people in impoverished nations labor for peanuts, yet I was lucky enough to work on the fortunate side of capitalism. Wouldn’t it be crazy to willingly kill my golden goose? I doubt I could even pass the interview again since so much of the interview process is dependent on luck. The tech job market has also become especially cut-throat after the number of roles in the industry was drastically cut.
However, these fears can’t dictate my future. The point of life is to accumulate as many experiences as possible - what’s the point if most of life is spent in the office? In a stable life, the rate at which one accumulates new experiences is slow and steady. During the week, you sacrifice the prime hours of your day to the corporation and are left with the dregs at night. After work, gym, and dinner, it’s already 9pm! You hardly have enough time or energy for anything else unless you’re particularly diligent about filling every second in your schedule. Only the weekends are free for new experiences.
The biggest danger of a routine existence is that your perception of time hastens if your life is not punctuated by new experiences. We all remember how the quarantine robbed us of our ability to truly live life and how those years blended together into an incoherent blob. My New York life had too many repeat experiences, weeks barely discernible from each other. Most weekends were spent eating out, drinking and partying. After four years, New York had nothing left of interest to offer me. Living an enriching life filled with diverse experiences became my top priority, consequently slowing down my perception of time to live what I perceive to be a longer life.
Living in New York is also financially unjustified when the world has so much more to offer for a fraction of the cost. A nice one bedroom in the bougiest part of Seoul sets you back $1k a month compared to over $3k in Manhattan for a shitty shoebox studio without laundry on the fifth floor of a dilapidated, elevator-less building. You can live like a king/queen in a luxury one bedroom with every possible amenity in Southeast Asia for only $500 a month; a similar apartment in Manhattan will be north of $5k. In fact, almost every other part of the world is significantly cheaper than New York. In terms of food, I’ve dumped thousands of dollars at Michelin star restaurants to taste the supposed pinnacle of dining. Yes, the food is delicious, but so are fifty cent tacos in Mexico and dollar pho in Vietnam. New York is expensive for the sake of being expensive, a rhetorical “it’s New York - what do you expect?” to justify the costs. I couldn’t justify New York’s cost of living doing the same things every week when I had the means to consistently pursue novel and diverse experiences.
I also want to take more risks because I’ve taken the safe route my entire life. I studied hard in high school to attend a top college on a generous scholarship. In college, I majored in Physics, but also Computer Science only because I knew the tech job market was safe and lucrative. After college, I worked as a software engineer for six years, weaving my own financial safety net that many of my peers inherited from their family and used to take bigger risks in their twenties. Now that I have the means to deviate from the road well traveled, it’s now or never - I’m not getting any younger. No one on their death bed wishes they spent a couple more years in the office. I know I will regret not spending a couple years of my youth to live life on my own terms. I know I will wonder “what if?” if I don’t take the risk now. For all I know, I could die tomorrow, leaving behind a life filled mostly with meaningless work.
Uprooting your life can be lonely.
Unsurprisingly, the lack of stability makes romantic relationships difficult to develop. Few want to invest time and energy into a transient relationship, and frankly, neither do I. Breakups hurt, even from short-term relationships, and I’m also not the biggest fan of one night stands. My ideal lifestyle is one where I city hop every month with just a backpack and a suitcase, a lifestyle not conducive for long term relationships. Telling a date about my future plans is usually met with an unsurprising rejection. And when you’re constantly on the move, lasting friendships can also be difficult to make, especially when there’s a language barrier. You’re often at the mercy of serendipity.
Companionship is the main attraction of stability. Some days, it’s nice to just chill with your partner, order takeout, and watch Netflix. Some days, it sucks coming to an empty home, especially when you’re reminded of your single-ness at every corner (Jeju is a popular honeymoon destination). It’s also nice just having a close-knit group of friends you can hang out with at any time without having to constantly make new ones. And adopting cats has always been on my agenda, but I need some semblance of stability to be able to raise them.
Fortunately, I’m comfortable being single and my parents don’t pester me to get married (ty older siblings for doing that). Though it won’t happen for many years, if ever, I’m dating to marry in my next relationship, so to optimize for my definition of a life well-lived, I need to do everything only single people can do before I’m locked out of those experiences.
It’s been three months since I quit my job.
To be honest, tearing down my New York apartment and selling / giving away all my belongings was much more emotionally taxing than I expected. During that process, I uncovered many sentimental items and memories during my time in New York and a wave of nostalgia swept through me, maybe even a tinge of regret in my decision to leave. I wondered if I was making the right decision, but in retrospect the pain of moving made it difficult to fully make sense of my feelings. Now, I understand those weren’t feelings of regret, and I still have no regrets in my decision yet.
I’m not sure when this lifestyle will end. I put a soft deadline for two years, but a lot can change between now and then. In fact, I might never move back. All I know is that I’m incredibly fortunate to be in this position, endless possibilities with no commitments, and I’m excited to see what the future holds.