Productivity Behind the Wheel
A friend recently admitted to being jealous of the amount of time that I have every day. Every day he wakes up before six o'clock, travels 90 minutes into the office, works for about ten hours, then battles rush hour traffic for two hours to get home. Monday to Friday belongs to his employer, Saturday is half spent in bed, and Sunday is the day he buys groceries and performs the various chores and errands that are standard for someone living alone. He is the very model of a "wage slave", working two hundred hours a month to economically tread water.
What do you do every day? You're so lucky to have so much free time. If I had six months to myself, I'd be building my dream business.
His dream business is to sell T-shirts and other memorabilia featuring quotes from Nishi Amane, Ito Jinsai, KitarÅ Nishida, and Hajime Tanabe; Japanese philosophical giants. I've often encouraged him to dedicating Saturday to starting his business, pointing him to platforms such as Etsy and Printify to bring his enterprise to life. However, his response is one that we tell ourselves so often it's almost a trope: "I'm just too tired on the weekends."
Fact of the matter is that a lot of us have held ourselves back because we're "tired", we "don't have time", or we "don't know where to start". All of these are valid reasons for a time but, when we tell ourselves the same thing for over a decade, it becomes a mask. Fact of the matter is that most of us can burn the candle at both ends for things we truly want to do, but struggle with a fear of failure.
We can't fail if we don't start.
That's what we tell ourselves, anyway.
How I spend my days now is very different from the first three months of my unemployment. From March to July, I hustled with several online businesses. Most were Japanese websites providing summarised information on locations across the country. The sites were built on a platform that I optimised for SEO, AI scraping, and Google AdSense. A lot of websites in Japan are notoriously hostile to being read by machines simply because so much information is conveyed in images containing text, rather than easily readable text. Looking at how some sites are built, it also became very clear that few people have ever considered optimising their site for search engines or other indexing systems. My plan was to optimise for all of this out the wazoo to get web traffic.
For a few weeks it worked. After a slow start, I started seeing thousands of visitors per week. According to Google and Bing, though, the number of visitors was measured in the dozens. Their numbers called into question the amount of work my server was performing. By mid-May, however, the projects came to a crashing halt. Google de-indexed most of my sites for reasons I can only guess about. Some online "gurus" say it's because there was no way for visitors to interact on the site. Others suggested that the site was too new to have a lot of traffic, so Google flagged it as suspect. This makes some sense, because nothing on the Internet has ever gone viral ... right?
As July gave way for August, these sites had served over 6-million pages combined. The total ad revenue for this was 56 Yen. Using these numbers, I would need to serve about 10-million pages per hour to earn minimum wage. Given these sites were all Japanese, a language that is spoken by fewer than 150-million people on Earth, it seemed unlikely that anything of value would come from these sites. I shut them down.
From July, I had also started reaching out to companies across Japan to see if they were interested in someone like me. One would think that a person with over 30 years of development experience would be in demand. I've built entire platforms for education businesses, from LMSes to textbook systems to HR analytics tools, there's a lot that I could offer.
Of the hundred or so emails sent, one person responded. This seems to be the average response rate for a lot of people, which runs counter to the constant narrative presented by news organisations that there's a "labour shortage" in Japan, making it necessary to drastically relax visa requirements to bring more people from overseas. Heck, every trip I've made to the unemployment offices over the past few months have always conveyed the same scene: hundreds of people on any given day are desperately looking for work that can pay the bills.
It's the latter half of that sentence that matters most. Yes, there are a lot of companies looking for employees, but very few are willing to pay a working wage. Salaries and hourly wages have been stagnant since the bubble economy burst in the late 90s. That's three decades of jobs paying the very same wage despite the rising cost of living. Anyone in their thirties or older simply cannot take a less-than-minimum wage job anymore. There are children to feed, bills to pay, rent to cover, cell phones, and an endless parade of ill-timed expenses for everything else.
I conveyed much of this to my friend, letting him know that my days do not consist of popcorn and Disney+. Mornings are dedicated to research and sending emails. Afternoons are often spent on job sites, talking to recruiting agents, and other efforts to find work. On occasion, I'm fortunate to have opportunities for some freelance work, but circumstances have made it impossible to bill for work performed. And, when it comes to building online businesses, I've come to the realisation that it's not my lot in life. The things that I find truly interesting have a market that is so niche I may be the only person on Earth that cares about the problem enough to do something about it. That said, I can certainly help other people solve their problems. Hence the job hunting.
But this does have its problems as well. On occasion I've been fortunate enough to have an interview. A few weeks back I had the shortest one of my life at just six minutes, cut short because my Japanese ability is nowhere near native level. Such is life, and I will not fault a Japanese company for expecting their employees read, write, and speak Japanese fluently.
One interviewer was remarkably honest, though. Ten minutes into our conversation he stopped me and said "I don't think you will enjoy working at this company". Rarely has an HR person ever been so honest with me. However, the reason he said this was because I had explained that there were two things I would never do: lie or steal. On the surface, this sounds great. However, an employee that does not lie will never allow dishonesty from management, and an employee that will not steal can never work in development. The vast majority of commercial software is not designed primarily to solve a problem, but to collect data. This is why companies like Microsoft do not refer to people who use their software as "customers", but instead as "subscribers" or "users". You are not the customer. You are a subscriber; a data point to be harvested.
I refuse to participate in such a blatant lie.
So most of my weekdays are dedicated to the effort of finding employment with a company that I might be ethically and morally aligned with. As the sun approaches the horizon the computer gets put away and I bring Ayumi out for a nice walk around the neighbourhood. We meet the neighbours and their dogs, we enjoy the fresh air despite the humidity, and then we return home for dinner. Come 10pm, so long as a typhoon is not passing overhead, I debate hopping in the car and going for a 38km drive around the prefecture. This drive is arguably one of the most productive parts of my day.
Behind the wheel I let the stress and anxieties of the day fall away. The bank account keeps dwindling, the bills keep coming in, and every so often I am surprised with yet another tax or insurance payment from an entity that is not happy about my unemployment. But none of this matters when I am in my car and travelling down the semi-rural roads of Japan. I pay close attention to my surroundings, identifying cars that are likely hazards and pedestrians that are practically invisible in the darkness of night. A brain is highly active processing all of this information as the world goes by at 60km/h.
At the same time, I use the distance from the keyboard to think about what was learned during the day. There's always something to consider, whether it's about the job market, how business actually works, or related to something I had long misunderstood. This is also an opportune time to really think about what matters to me going forward. What do I want to do with the second half of my life, and what do I need to do to make it happen?
Every drive reveals new things and most nights I sit down to write about what was thought about. Almost none of it warrants publication, but the act of sitting down to put the words on paper makes it possible to think about the topics once again. As such, I've come to the realisation that I do not want a smart phone after the current one stops working. Nor do I want to use AI to review or refine my writing anymore. Nor do I want to let myself get trapped in a cycle of familiarity. Nor will I temporarily suspend an ethical or moral belief for the sake of a paycheque.
When I finished explaining all of this, my friend looked at me straight in the eye and said:
I need to find you a girlfriend.
Perhaps. I do worry that the years of isolation has resulted in a very stilted view of the world. However, I believe it has also allowed me an opportunity to sit down and ask myself some really hard questions, then consider the answers over a period of days, weeks, and months.