As I was rolling my suitcase down the hill that our hostel in Sakura was on, towards the train station to head back to Tokyo, I began to ponder.
It wasn’t that long ago — just 3 days — that I had struggled to pull it up the same road to check in when my mom and I arrived in the city. It was a steep climb and we had had to pause several times to catch our breath.
Today was an entirely different story. Gravity was doing all the work, and all we had to do was give our suitcases a little bit of direction. It was so much easier even than strolling them on flat ground.
It’s irrational but I couldn’t help but thank my past self for the effort of bringing the suitcase up the hill so that my present self could enjoy the ease of transporting it down.
And that got me thinking. I realized that this wasn’t just a metaphor for the suitcase situation — it applied to so many areas of my life. Lately, I’ve been feeling this sense of comfort and gratitude for a lot of the groundwork my past self laid.
Take my third year of university, for example, which paved the way for how relaxed my life has been over the past year or so.
It wasn’t my grand plan for it to turn out like this at the time — I was only looking for summer internship opportunities, that too on a whim. I ended up with two offers, both of which I loved, and I convinced one company to defer my start date so that I could intern at the other over the summer and then join them full time when the first term of the next academic year started.
It was actually all the extra courses that I’d taken and passed in my second year of university, leaving me with a reduced workload during my third year, that allowed me to even fathom working alongside it. Even with less courses to take, a full-time job on the side was ambitious by any standard.
It certainly took a bit of effort to convince the company that I could manage it in the first place, especially since I hadn’t graduated yet, but I had a good track record and my recruiter somehow believed in me and fought for my place in the company.
That year, I worked hard, managing coursework and work simultaneously. It wasn’t easy, especially since I’d switched my degree late in my first year and had less experience in the field than most of my peers.
The effort paid off. It gave me full-time industry experience while still in university, putting me ahead of the timeline my peers were on.
So, when the tech layoffs hit in 2023, right around the time I was graduating, I didn’t feel ‘behind’ for losing my job. I was in the same position as my peers who were looking for a job at the time, and I already had experience and savings to boot.
The severance helped a lot too, so I won’t discredit the role of luck. But, the point remains that I had a safety net. I could afford to take some time off and explore other opportunities. I didn’t need to be employed again right away. In fact, I did need some rest, because by the time I graduated I was burnt out, and I’d be lying if I said I never considered quitting the industry completely.
During that time off, I tried my hand at a few different things online — digital marketing being the most prominent. While I didn’t manage to turn it into a steady income source, I gained valuable new skills, and eventually, I settled on returning to a mixture of that and software engineering, which I’d began to miss after a few months off. This whole period led me to my current project — a language app I’ve been building and am very passionate about.
I didn’t mean for this to become a recent recap of my entire life, and I’m definitely not sharing all of this to brag. My point was to highlight the importance of laying foundations. The groundwork I put in during university — sacrificing my social life, time, sleep, and probably my mental health at times — allowed me the liberty later on to step away from the rat race. I could afford to take a breather, explore my options, and ultimately find a balance that worked for me.
It reminds me of a YouTube video I watched a while ago, explaining why airplanes cruise at such high altitudes even though skies are clear at lower ones too. Even though it takes more fuel to climb to cruising altitude, the higher the altitude, the less air resistance, making the journey more fuel-efficient in the long run. It’s a one-time effort to get to that point, but the payoff is worth it.
I see life in a similar way. My brief foray into digital marketing wasn’t born out of a passion for the field — it was about setting myself up for a future with passive income and freedom. While I’ve since learned it’s not as simple as I initially thought, the skills I’ve gained will serve me in future endeavors. I’m no longer naive about how easy it will be, but I still believe in the principle of investing in your future self.
I don’t even need far-fetched examples like airplanes (or suitcases on a hill) to make my point, really. It’s the same logic that drives people to go to the gym. They work hard now to become fitter, so that their future selves can enjoy a better quality of life. Effort today leads to ease tomorrow.
This trip marks the end of a period of relishing the comfort that my past self’s work has allowed me. I’m now due to begin work at a company at the end of the year (which, after all this time off, I’m actually looking forward to). And I’m not going to look at it in the sense of being a slave to a corporation. For starters, and for a change, I’m truly interested in the work my future company is doing. Sure, I felt that way before starting my last job too, which I quickly realized wasn’t for me, but I’m better informed this time and I truly expect things to be different.
But no matter what happens, I know that I’m constantly learning, growing, and becoming a more capable version of myself in multiple ways. And that will only benefit my future self.
People approach groundwork differently. Some, like my brother who never wants to retire, make the conscious choice to work hard their whole lives. As a result, they can enjoy a comfortable life, not needing to save as much. Others, like me, prioritize saving and working hard now to allow for an early retirement, where we can enjoy the fruits of our labor later on.
At the end of the day, whether it’s rolling suitcases downhill or putting in the effort to set yourself up for the future, the principle is the same, and it’s one I’ll continue to live by.