We covered University (grades). We covered Work (money). Those were the easy ones. Why? Because they are openly transactional. You give labor, you get a grade or a paycheck. The exchange rate might be unfair, as I ranted about previously, but at least there is a contract.

Friendships are different.

The fundamental definition of friendship is that it is not transactional. I do not listen to your problems so that you buy me a beer. I do not help you move apartments so that you help me move mine. I do it because I care.

But here lies the trap. Because there is no contract, there are no boundaries. And because I claimed „I don’t expect anything in return,“ am I theoretically not allowed to be angry when I get nothing in return?

I feel like most of the time, I am the one who writes first. The one who calls. Asks if my friends have time to do something. Or even takes the first step making friends with someone. I am pretty sure, almost everyone feels that way, though. So you might understand my fatigue.

There is this dangerous question lingering in the back of my mind: If I stopped pedaling, would the bike keep moving? Or would we just fall over? If I didn’t text first, would I ever hear from them again? This tension is where the burnout happens for me. Slowly and unnoticed, as burnout does.

Also, by trying to help I do run the danger to not only hurt myself. We are raised to be helpful. To be good boys and girls. But in my private life, I found that my helpfulness sometimes becomes a burden. There is a point where helping a friend is actually just enabling them to stay stuck. If I am always the shoulder to cry on, I am absorbing their negativity so they don’t have to process it. If I always solve their crisis, they never learn to avoid the crisis in the first place. And worse, if I can’t help, I blame myself, and they might even blame me for my „un-helpfulness“. So is it better to just stay far away sometimes?

And worse, it drains my battery. I realized that it is better for a friendship not to help when the cost of helping is my own stability. When I am lighting myself on fire to keep them warm, as they say.

So, how do we avoid social burnout? I am trying to learn matching their energy. If a friend gives 20%, I cannot give 100% forever. I have to dial it back to 20%. First of all, this is self-preservation. If they truly value the connection, they will feel the void and step up. If they don’t, the friendship fades. But on the other hand, I read that matching the energy of someone actually helps deepen a friendship and a genuine, empathetic connection. Especially, if your friend needs help, sometimes it is just better to not come in swinging with 100% problem solving attitude and energy. For both of us.

I am really, really trying to learn this and act on it.

So this time, there isn’t much intellectualizing going on. Sometimes, you just gotta relax, hang out and not worry about all that stuff. Leave that to your 9-5.

End of series.

Last time I talked about university. Scrap education ideals. The university of today trains you for work.

Let’s talk about work.

It’s the exact same problem, but now it’s about your salary, not your grades. There’s a fundamental difference: You are making money for someone else.

Now when you really put effort into work, you are not even getting good grades (the promise for a good job) for it. You are getting your salary. If you are lucky, a bonus. But let’s be real:

The new ceiling is your paycheck. Working 120% does not get you 120% of your paycheck. Doing that extra work that is not in your contract is analogue to the misplaced effort in university: You can spend weeks on a quality project that you know is good, but your boss’s priority was just hitting basic KPIs. Your good work is wasted time you could have spent improving a metric set by someone else.

At least university prepared you for exactly that, right? The specific work you were asked for.

But then why, oh god why, do we always read about „quiet quitting“ and „nobody wants to work anymore“? Pressure to keep you on your toes, compliant, anticipating getting fired any day now? Maybe.

But I do not think it changes the choices we have. Namely those three, as far as I can see:

The famous quiet quitting. Also known as the bare minimum. Also the work you were literally hired for. Do enough not to get fired. It is a logical, maybe cynical response. It is unfulfilling, and if you are the type of person without hobbies it is not a good recommendation for you. If you do have hobbies, a good private life, friends… go for it. You will suddenly have so much more energy if you leave your job thoughts at your job place!

Of course you might be a workaholic. Or a gambler. Or both. Everyone has an addiction, right? Go above and beyond. Work those 120% and hope your boss is one of those 12/10 types who notices your effort and decides to reward you out of the blue with a promotion or a bonus. But it is on your boss to do this, on their good will. And in all my years in university, this 12/10 thing happened only once.

The last option is to be Machiavellian and a strategic builder. Fulfill your contract. Do a solid 100% of the work you are paid to do. Reliable, but never more. Consciously cap your effort. Save that effort, those extra 20% and invest into yourself. Because you are the only person that actually values that and future you will pay you back. Do side projects. Certifications, if your country loves them. Use your time to apply for a better job that pays more.

Because:

You don’t owe the company. And if you dont own a company, this third option is the only one that feels like a real answer to me. Build that github. Do your passion project. Monetize job-adjacent stuff. But leave your free time free time and don’t hustle. That free time is too valuable for the last topic, friendships.

Until next time! And if you are a friend of mine, please don’t judge me too harshly on this…

I’m in a rather foul mood right now, because I feel like my effort is not rewarded enough. Or rather, my effort is misplaced. And it is my fault.

I feel this in university, career and private life. I am not sure what to do about it. In this blog post, I will take about university and why putting effort into it actually sucks.

Here lies my ambition.

This may sound conceited, but I have hit my head on the ceiling a couple of times while in university. There were two reason this happened: One, I did too much and standardized testing did not reward me. And two, I simply did focus on the wrong and very exhausting things without taking into account that my Prof only had a checklist for the basics.

Let’s start with the simpler one, getting full marks and why it actually feels like shit. Imagine you hit 100/100 in a MCQ test. Feels good, right? You got everything. Now imagine you hit 100/100 in a written essay. Suddenly, this does not feel so great. Because you can be sure you spent more effort than necessary to get there. This could easily have been 110/100, but the scale did not allow for this. In addition, the next 10% are always much, much harder to achieve than the previous 10%. Like the old rule, you achieve 80% of success with 20% of the effort, and the last 20% with 80% of effort? Yeah, now imagine going beyond that. One of my Professors actually had a solution to this: He simply awarded 12/10 points because „the essay was just that good“. But this, again, feels strange: Why was this not an option to begin with? And then we run into the original problem…

The other issue, in my opinion, is much worse: Misplaced effort. There have been so many instances where I felt that my work is really, really good and high quality, but it was just not the standardized thing the professor was looking for. „Oh, you did a systematic literature research? Well, you actually did this subset of an SLR, not that. And we were looking for that. Does not matter that yours is 5x more the work and actually delivers interesting results. It was not the one we were looking for.“ Yeaah….

Compliance is more valuable than quality or results.

This actually made me double and triple check and mail and talk to professors just to try to figure out what the hell they want from me.This meta-game to ensure compliance is actual valuable effort on our part as students. Way more than actually being smart or doing hard work. I recommend you get good at playing it. And for your sake, I hope you do not run into this one specific type of professor: One who knows exactly what they want, but will not tell you. In this case, I suggest to just switch courses.

Because in the end, what counts for your job application are your grades.

Speaking of jobs, I will talk about them next time.

In the meantime, remember that education is a marathon and not a sprint. And make sure you are a good boy or girl and comply.

There is so. much. plastic. in Asia. South Korea is no exception. South Koreans love their plastic. Everything is wrapped in plastic. Food. Daily items. Even plastic bags need more plastic.

I think for most this realization hit when they got a meal to take home. It was, of course, in a plastic tray. That plastic tray had a plastic lid on. With a plastic spoon and fork. Wrapped in plastic. Taped onto the plastic tray. To keep it all together, it came in a transparent plastic bag.

All the bottles are made of plastic, too. Of course they are.

Once you bought all of this, you are kind of on your own with it. You are expected to eat your food out of that plastic tray, then wash that plastic tray and depose of it.

Because at least they recycle, right?

Wrong. Well, kind of right. They do recycle, similar to Germany, but it is a weird system where you separate bottles (plastic) from other stuff (also plastic) and sometimes vinyl (plastic?). How am I supposed to know everyone does it right? Is there somebody going through all this trash and sorts it for a final time? Why do people have to separate the trash correctly on their own in the first place, then?

Also: South Koreans seem to hate trash cans. Must have something to do with a bomb that has been planted in one, so the country collectively decided: No more trash cans, just throw it onto the ground in differently colored trash bags. Or it is due to some weird tax thing that encourages people to take their trash home with them to separate it properly (pay-as-you-throw?). Anyways. This results in (1) very few to no trash cans anywhere and (b) trash just randomly on the streets in front of houses or in backyards.

It looks really dirty. And there is a lot of plastic. A lot.

It really makes me think about the hyper consumerism here. Everything is shiny, everything is plastic, but once you buy it and are done with it, Koreans seem very much out of ideas what to do with their trash.

I wonder if this is a metaphor for their society as a whole. I guess I will see.

So far, I know it is similar with plumbing and other waste management.

Going by recent statistics, there is a lot of microplastics in this, too. So it checks out.

This is going to be a short one.

So I was getting back from the rental agency and wanted to grab a drink on the way. Korean summer weather is killing me. I noticed three girls I knew sitting in the convenience store and talked to two of them for a bit (one had to leave).

They asked me about my age. I told them and that I was studying again. „That’s brave“. I know she meant well, but that didn’t sit well with me. I don’t even know why. I don’t think it’s brave. It may just be new for them. Here is the thing: Besides having more experience and done more in my life already, I do not think I am that different from them.

I like food. I like to travel. I am getting annoyed by orientation week. I want to find a new room (they were at that same agency, I think). Everything here is new to me. I like to party.

But…

I think my grey hair stands out – especially in a society that is all about looks and performance like South Korea. I don’t feel that included, especially in that club we all went to where I got weird looks by staff (yes, really) and don’t know why. And people generally turning their backs to me. I feel this when I talk to people and we understand each other, but I know that after that initial small talk, there will not be friendship because of differences. Kind of puts this whole experience into a different light.

But I always had these problems with people, so what’s new? And I think this experience is something a lot of people make when coming to South Korea, I am just on the fast track.

So I don’t take it personally. I am an experience for others, too, and I intend to make it a good one.

I am tired. My feet hurt. My room is messy. I do not have a phone number. I did not get the courses I wanted. And I am not at all oriented.

Other than that, it’s going great!

What is there even to talk about? Well… every day begins at 6 am and I have finely tuned and organized program until 8pm. Every minute you spend, every move you make, they will be watching you~

And there is never time for anything. Best example? Courses. You would think they are pretty important, as they are the main reason most of us are here. But … they have been delayed by a day. And then we had to pick them after lunch break. Which resulted in a mad dash for cheese sticks and french fries, followed by confusion while navigating their website. Just great. I am free to do whatever, but I can’t imagine how stressful this must have been for people with specific needs.

Such a nice atmosphere. Too bad I don’t have time to enjoy it.

We are also walking a lot. And I mean a lot. 50.000 steps per day. Easy. Up the hill, down the hill, in 34°C and high humidity. I hope I do not look like I feel.

Other than that, everyone has been extremely helpful. It is very different to Germany for me, as I really feel like people are here to help. Even though you have to smile and wave – probably even while asleep on the bus that took us to an amusement park. That park – Lotte World – would be perfect for a Zombie movie. At least in my opinion. Don’t tell the Koreans this, but damn their Lotte mascot is creepy. Would Goethe have liked this?

Fun Fact: Lotte is a huge company, and this is their park. It is named after Charlotte, a character in „Die Leiden des jungen Werther“ by Goethe.

At least we filled out banking forms. Someone really went through 50 pages per person for 400 persons and circled all the fields you have to tick with a pencil. When I find out who that was, I want to gift them a little something. Incredibly well organized, incredibly inefficient. But impressive nevertheless.

In the distance: Solbridge. I think the green is only possible because all the people are crammed into skyscrapers.

Tomorrow: More walking. More smiling. More waving. More collectivist activities. Everyone is invited, and everyone must attend.

After that, I can finally be my usual self again, relax a little and finally orient myself in South Korea.

Looking forward to it!

Hello and welcome to this little blog.

You know that feeling, right? This nagging feeling that you should have done something long ago. But you just didn’t. And then a day passed. A week. A month. But now you’re going to start. You just need to…

Anyways. Welcome to this blog. I will write about my stay abroad in South Korea, and all the impressions that I get. And when I am back, I will see if I continue!

That leg room means business.

I have seen a lot of travel videos on South Korea (and Japan, and other places). I just like to watch them, they are relaxing. Just a night train with a dude who does not talk much, or walking through Seoul at night. I wanted to do that too. More on how that went later…

I generally and genuinely do not think that you have to make experiences yourself to learn something. You can learn from others. See what they live. But there is some strange kind of danger to that. You are not living this yourself, it is just an illusion. And we all know what social media does to our brains.

Korean Cable Management.

So I came to see for myself. Just wanted to go somewhere far away for once.

And you know what? It is not that bad. People are the same everywhere, just a little different. Or as they say in Thailand: „Same same, but different.“

The Koreans I met so far were nice. One smuggled my sweatshirt through the airport control, after I forgot it there and could not go back. The older (probably rich?) man in the airplane was very amused when I put on the complementary face mask and took it on himself to teach me how to eat Korean food correctly. It was a fun flight!

She helped me make that smoothie on day one to cool off at Daejeon Station. I will forever treasure this memory, even if I got to treasure the smoothie only for a couple of seconds. So good.

Speaking of desperation. Imagine getting on the bus in South Korea after a long flight, only to get yelled at by the bus driver who refuses to switch to English. Wasn’t me who got yelled at. Never understood why, either. Old men don’t care.

Generally, the days here have been very, very long. Koreans work hard and are incredibly organized. Both not my forte. Also, just because you work long and hard does not mean you get a lot of work done. But more on all that later!

Not pictured in the beautiful view of Daejeon: The days are long, hot and humid.

Lastly, something for the nerds: This blog runs on wordpress. It is selfhosted at home (pls dont pull the plug, mom!) on a TrueNAS Electric Eel system via Dockge docker. Reverse proxy with caddy, cloudflare for protection with regular IP address updates.