A very merry existential crisis

This year I’m a little later than usual getting my ~annual reflection~ out, but 1) this is based on my own arbitrary self-imposed timelines that no one else notices or asks for, and 2) over the course of the past year, I have determined that time is not in fact real. Also this year, I’m fresh out of fucks for any kind of sugar coating of my thoughts and opinions to make them more palatable for the general public. You’re getting pure, unfiltered, 100% organic ranting and rambling straight from the source with minimal logic or organization.  If you know me personally, this shouldn’t be a far cry from any of our IRL interactions. If you know me professionally, sorry lol, I guess you’ll know me a little better after this. So buckle up, kids, and enjoy my belated hot takes on whatever the fuck those last 365 days were; there’s a lot to unpack.

I’ve never in my life had my privilege thrown into such sharp relief. I mean, I’ve witnessed poverty – locally in Vancouver’s low income neighbourhoods, as well as in all the corners of the world I’ve travelled to. In high school, I constantly organized (well-intentioned but ultimately misguided, bless my lil heart) efforts to raise money to Build Schools in Africa, solicit donations for Kids in Need, and other initiatives that in my mind surely cemented my status as a Good Person Who Cares™. Even my own experiences (being raised by a single mother on a less than living wage) taught me gratitude for the times when we did have enough, reverence for the times we had excess (✨rare✨), and empathy for those who never had either.

In later years, I learned about things like oppression and systemic discrimination and where a wealth gap comes from and how it perpetuates through an academic lens. New and improved Educated Yuna understood intersectionality and could describe to you exactly how she, a Chinese-Canadian Woman, would face more barriers in life than the average White Man ceteris paribus, but far fewer than say, a Black Trans Woman. I engaged in more activism, I donated what I had to spare, and I tried at every turn to embody that Good Person Who Cares™. But this year, with all its shitstorms (definitely plural), has provided a brand new frame of reference for me. 

My life is not hard 

I’ll start with work, because last year 80% of my readers came from LinkedIn and also because despite my therapist’s best efforts I’ve still not managed to decouple my self worth with external markers like “career success” (whatever the fuck that means – spoiler alert, it’s a fake and made up construct). That I am incredibly lucky to have a stable desk job that I have been enabled to perform from anywhere (aka home) through the duration of an entire pandemic is absolutely not lost on me. But man, WFH has been extra challenging. By that, I mean I hate it.  

My job requires lots of cross-functional meetings that run best when everyone’s in a room together. I get things done quicker when I can pop over to so-and-so’s desk, or catch them in the kitchen for a question. I’ve even been known to give impromptu status updates running into stakeholders in the bathroom (not that I recommend this). And, on the spectrum of introversion to extroversion, I’m an extroverted as it gets. My energy (and therefore, my productivity; my mood; my general mental wellbeing) is, for better or for worse, largely reliant on being surrounded by lots of people all the time. I intentionally chose a career based on just that. Then… pandemic. Fuck me right? 

Wrong. By all accounts, I have it pretty great. I kept my job, have a great apartment I’m in no danger of losing, am generally healthy, and have no kids or other real responsibilities to be stressed about. On the real, I have so so so much to be grateful for. So one question I’ve been grappling with during my frequent mental breakdowns this year is: to what extent can I feel sorry about myself for my personal struggles, when they’re largely insignificant compared to the objectively worse suffering of pretty much everyone else? I think it is legitimate to feel any type of way about anything you want; just because my problems might not be the worst in the world doesn’t invalidate them as problems altogether. But I’m working on figuring out how to strike the right balance between maintaining space for my feelings, and the acknowledgement that on balance, nothing I struggle with is actually that hard. 

This is not the first time I’ve ever had privilege in my life and yet still complained, but it feels 10x exacerbated now that the juxtaposition is so much closer to home. For many people, COVID-19 is not the first time their lives have been so hugely disrupted. Natural disasters, severe illness, acts of violence or terrorism, wars, and so many other things interrupt people’s daily functions on a metric big ass scale all the fucking time, and people are resilient and get through it and move on. Now that it’s about ME, however, I can’t help throwing myself a giant pity party for my minor inconveniences. For the record, and I’m sure I’m not alone, my mental health and wellbeing have absolutely materially deteriorated this year. I’m talking big time sadgirl hours to the extent that I often literally can’t even get out of bed. But then, I get stuck in a feedback loop where I feel shitty about feeling shitty when my life is really not that hard, and then stay feeling shitty and feel shitty about it because I feel like I shouldn’t. Airplane training always directs people to put the oxygen masks on themselves before helping others; I’m definitely on board with taking care of your own self to create greater capacity to help others. I just don’t know how it works when (weird analogy count: 1) I’m getting almost but not quite enough oxygen to get by while others are flat out suffocating. 

Wait so what’s my point? Welp, I don’t really have one. Hope that helps validate the great use of time it was for you to read all this. I mean, not that you’ve got so many better things to be doing right now, haaaaah (gentle sobbing in the background) 

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism

This kind of dovetails into the main source of my existential dread this year: capitalism. It isn’t really the kind of topic you can really adequately explore with any nuance at all in three paragraphs, but this is my blog and I can do what I want. For tiny context before we get into it, I went to business school. And I was so rah rah business school that I was the literal valedictorian at grad. But throughout five years of being fed capitalist propaganda about ~the hustle~, I’ve always had some small doubts floating around in the back of my mind. Now that I work in social media tech during the same time that social media is literally actively dismantling democracy, questions about my own personal values and moral compass having been surfacing a leetle more aggressively. So here we go.

First of all, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so jot that down. Not to be dramatic, but my very existence necessitates oppression, and that’s super upsetting. People and the planet must suffer directly because I am alive – over exploitative labour, dangerous emissions, resource depletion, and many many other dimensions. There is pretty much nothing I can do as an individual, short of abandoning civilization for an off-the-grid cabbage patch, that would absolve me of these consequences. Ok, maybe there are small choices a consumer can make that reduce their negative footprint (carbon, social, or otherwise) on the world. Things like boycotting fast fashion, or choosing organic and vegan foods, or only purchasing locally sourced and ethically produced anything can have a small positive impact. But it’s enough, not always possible, or not always accessible for the layperson to make such choices. And even then, those choices still have their own negative externalities. 

To be clear, individuals aren’t responsible for all the bad stuff that happens, like global warming or systemic inequality. 100 corporations are responsible for 71% of the world’s climate change, so Becky isn’t personally poisoning the earth by any significant amount if she trashes one plastic water bottle. That doesn’t mean that Becky choosing to recycle doesn’t matter; people taking little steps like that is still better than the alternative. It’s just hard not to be discouraged when your actions feel so insignificant in the grand scheme of things. 

Before y’all come for me, no I do not have a perfect plan for a perfect vision of a system proven to function better than the one we have. That doesn’t mean we can’t criticize capitalism’s flaws and show extra care to those it leaves behind. And, as much as we can condemn a system, it’s still important to think about your own actions within it. Currently, my introspection is manifesting as two key questions: 

1. Should I try to play by the current rules to achieve maximum individual utility under the status quo system while tolerating and exacerbating the system’s harm to others as a result? Or should I reject the system altogether as an immoral one and attempt to, largely futilely from my tiny place in the world, change it to something better at significant personal sacrifice in order to avoid compromising my values? 
2. Assuming that the tradeoffs between hurting people and personal gain lie across a continuum, what amount of personal sacrifice is enough to make me a good person? How much greed makes me a bad person? I assume there would be some kind of diminishing marginal returns on effort:impact, but when does that occur? And are diminishing returns a reasonable justification to stop trying when smaller impact is still impact? 

I’ll share an example. Over the course of the last 9 months, I didn’t hesitate to make the personal sacrifice of having mental breakdowns by myself at home instead of hanging out in close quarters with 50 of my closest friends and experiencing any serotonin at all, because doing so would result in a non-zero chance of endangering others and causing wider suffering. Feels like a pretty easy choice. 

How then, is this different than, say, the choice to buy a pretty pair of shoes that I really like (weird analogy count: 2) ? Your initial reaction might be that purchasing footwear does not a bad person make. But, if I know (and I do know) that there’s a non-zero chance that those shoes were manufactured by underpaid women working in dangerous conditions at a facility dumping chemicals into the ocean, and then shipped to me via method that releases large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and I still make the purchase just to satisfy my instant gratification impulse of owning cute shoes, why shouldn’t I experience the same amount of shame as I would for partying in a pandemic?  

And of course, there are so many other facets to capitalism that aren’t just about shopping. Things like where you work and your relationship with your employer; how you interact with your family and friends and community around you; how and where you acquire the basic resources you need to survive; the mechanisms by which you achieve self actualization and contentment in life. If you’re thinking “Yuna, this is a lot, it’s not that deep, you’re overthinking”, you’re probably right. But this corner of the internet belongs to me, and I get to be a hot mess here. I wasn’t kidding about “existential crisis”. Anyway, there are people who spend their whole lives studying these topics so I won’t pretend like I have any good answers or that I’ve come up with any groundbreaking insight on my own. Just wanted to share what’s been turning my brain into blender parm this year. Happy no nuance new year to you too!! 

Baby’s First Home 

Cool so now that we’ve established that half the world is big time suffering, REALLY STOKED TO SHARE THE NEWS THAT I BOUGHT A HOME!!!! 

It me, CEO of segues (not to be confused with Segway, of which the CEO is currently Roger L Brown II). 

I’ll write about the actual process and specifics of it separately later [edit 14/05/21: I did it, click here] because there were a lot of learnings that I think might actually be helpful to share, but for the purposes of this particular post I just wanted to get in my feelings a little bit (not that this whole post hasn’t already just been dumping feels). Aside from the part where owning property in Vancouver (or honestly anywhere reasonably urban) is becoming increasingly inaccessible for our generation, this milestone feels particularly significant for me for a number of reasons. 

First, I’ve never in my life felt settled. My mother and I spent my first 10 years alive in a dingy one bedroom apartment (sleeping at one point in actual bunk beds), then to an even more dank rental in a low income neighbourhood (but with 2 bedrooms this time – a luxury!), before finally moving into a basement suite near Moscrop where I went to high school. Once off to UBC, I yeeted around from dorms to basements to random new countries and back for 4-8 month periods at a time. In fact, my current downtown rental has been my longest domicile over the last 8 years, ringing in at a whopping 1.5 years. All this to say, this is the first ever time in my life that I am feeling any semblance of permanence. This is a place that I actually own, where I can really settle and, as corny as it is, that I can tRuLy CaLl hOmE. Feels weird man. 

Second, I am still having a hard time wrapping my head around the sequence of events that led from growing up below the poverty line to being able to comfortably afford a 2 bedroom Yaletown apartment. To be clear, there was a lot of help and support involved, including a very generous loan from the no longer impoverished Bank of Mom (yay debt lol), and I definitely would not be anywhere near where I currently find myself in life (just in general, let alone financially) without the people by whom I am nothing short of blessed to be surrounded. It’s an uncomfortable adjustment to be transitioning from a lifetime of frugality and scarcity to confidently (well, kind of) executing the single most expensive purchase I’ve ever made. I hope I never grow accustomed to “having wealth” (which, ew, I hate myself for saying it like that, but honestly I am grossly overpaid for how smart I actually am) (which if it isn’t clear, is not very smart), and I hope I always maintain the same perspective and gratitude regardless of where I end up. 

Lastly, and possibly a little more melodramatically, it kind of feels like I’ve fulfilled all the major milestones of my life… at age 25. For my entire existence to date, it feels like I’ve been working towards externally ascribed milestones. Graduate high school; get into university; do internships; graduate university; get a job. When I was younger, I’d always envisioned some sort of tangible line you crossed at a certain age where once you’d checked enough adulting boxes off, bingo bango, you became a legitimate grown up. And because I’m wildly uninterested in the whole marriage and children thing, owning property seemed like that final frontier into adulthood before retirement and then, inevitably, death (I said melodrama). If I’m being honest, I didn’t truly believe it was something that would happen in my lifetime let alone at this age. But now that it’s done… I still don’t feel even remotely like an adult. In fact, I have never felt like I had less of a grip on reality and life than now. If you couldn’t already tell, inside of this ball of anxiety and introspection, there’s just a dumb fetus tryna fake it ‘til she makes it. That’s a lot of words for: my therapist has her work cut out for her in 2021. Shoutout to Alia – u a real one. 

Ultimately, the point (somewhat antithetically to my previous 900 word braindump about exploitation) is: I now own capital and am a dirty dirty landlord. Yay me!

Peace out 2020

In the past (aka like twice) to close out these posts, I’ve reflected on my successes and failures with achieving my goals from the previous years, and shared a list of resolutions for the upcoming one, which is a fun little exercise if you want to instill faux motivation and feel simultaneously superior but also bad about yourself. After this armpit of a year, I really can’t muster the emotional strength to look back at my optimistic 2019 self’s goals, mostly because my energy is too drained from performing bare minimum tasks to be a human (like regular hygiene maintenance and eating at least once a day) to even think about the self actualizing shit I thought I’d have the mental capacity to accomplish. 

Instead, I’ll leave you, dear reader, aka the 3 people still with me at the end, with some well wishes. I wish you the ability to safely hug your loved ones soon. I wish you the employment status you desire. I wish you many reasons to smile and laugh. I wish you an appropriate quantity of high quality sleep. I wish you as much love and light and warmth as you need. I wish you the environment you require to thrive. I wish you time and space to continue your favourite newfound quarantine hobbies. I wish you growth at a pace that works for you. I wish you the resources you need to be happy and healthy. I wish you some really delicious cheese, if that’s your thing. 

I wish you a better fucking new year.