By my mid-thirties, after leaving Seoul, I had lost touch with most people.
And honestly, if you're not in the same line of work, contact just fades away.
If you're not at the same economic level or in the same neighborhood, it seems like you gradually drift apart.
Your early-to-mid thirties are a strange age.
Some friends are between jobs, some have had daughters, and I'm just getting by.
Today I simply met up with a friend.
Memories of our school days, of borrowing manga together at the comic shop. I went in thinking about times like those.
My friend got married and landed a pretty good job, while I'm basically a freelancer who's closer to unemployed.
My friend was exhausted by life. There's the stress of raising a child, and burnout from being pushed to perform with AI, but he said he came to see me because, among his friends, I'm the one who knows programming well and he had something to ask.
It wasn't difficult at all. These days, Excel automation isn't done the old-fashioned way with Python anyway, so I installed Codex on his computer and set up a rough Excel automation for him, and he was thrilled.
We talked over a few things at an Ediya Coffee shop.
My friend was pretty deep into online communities. He held strong beliefs in far-right conspiracy theories from those places, things like "Chinese people should leave" or the issue of foreigners using national health insurance. He showed me the online community and talked about it. I already know that companies and other groups infiltrate these communities to steer public opinion for their own benefit, and I've actually delivered software built for that purpose, so I just listened without saying much.
I think the more exhausted people are by life, the more they feel they can't control their own lives, and from that grows a sense of powerlessness, a feeling that individual choices can't change the world. And the cheapest way to endure that powerlessness is probably to "surrender yourself to something larger."
My friend was in exactly that state. He said he was worn out by married life and by raising a child.
Honestly, I couldn't really follow what my friend was saying. He was reasonably interested in current events and seemed to know quite a lot. Whether any of it was actually true, I can't say, but he believed it.
My friend got married, had a child, and found a good job. I started a business, failed, and now I'm building software again.
We've each lived our own lives in our own way.
Even so, the friend I met today felt somehow unfamiliar. And I'm not sure whether that unfamiliarity is because of how he has changed, or because of how I have.
More than anything, what saddened me most was that the friend who used to talk breathlessly about games we'd played all night, or light up talking about manga, was gone, and in his place was someone who could only speak in the language of those online communities.
Is it sad because we've lost our common ground and shared interests? Or is it sad because what he was arguing for is exactly what I had come to despise?
Up through our early-to-mid twenties, we understood each other. He was a young man who had a lot of worries about finding work. He used to hate online communities, saying they were full of unemployed people who resented the world. I agreed with him at the time, though ironically I was deep into those communities myself then. It was a period when I hid in the crowd to escape my insecurities about appearance, my inferiority complex, and my failures.
But now that friend was addicted to online communities, while I had moved away from them.
He may have felt the same unfamiliarity toward me.
To him, was I still the friend who used to read manga together back in our school days?
Or had I become a stranger, someone who'd put on weight and only talked about programming and contracts?
To him, I'm probably a stranger. I'm not fully at leisure, but I'm not diligently working a steady job either.
I worked hard, and things just didn't pan out. I gave my best effort at romance too. I dieted, lost weight, and confessed my feelings, only to be rejected. Same with jobs, and the money I'd saved was taken in a scam. The results of giving everything my best just weren't good.
And yet, paradoxically, being a lifelong single who got pushed out of steady employment has led me to do more as a programmer, to seek out work on my own terms, and to have experiences others can't. If I had gotten married, I wouldn't have been able to make these choices, even just for the sake of stability, and if I'd stayed in a regular job, I couldn't have done all these different things.
Either way, growing older means making peace with unfamiliarity.
Even so, this unfamiliarity is genuinely heartbreaking. I always carry this feeling that I'm becoming more and more alone.