Some pros and cons of different ways to spend my time:
- Increase my ability to converse with Japanese people.
- Increase my ability to read and consume Japanese media. Japan has a fascinating history and a lot of the books, tv shows, and movies made in Japan are totally unique and unlike anything else in the world.
- If I move to Japan (or even visit again for a longer period of time), I will be better prepared to improve quickly. This is especially true if I improve reading and texting.
- Set myself up for learning more languages down the line. I want to learn Spanish next, especially if I visit or spend time in Mexico or South America, and continuing to learn Japanese to a deeper degree would help me understand how to progress through the intermediate stages of learning a language. My case is a bit unusual since I learned Japanese as a kid then forgot most of it, but Japanese is still one of the hardest languages for English speakers and getting to a high level with it would mean many other languages could be easy by comparison.
- Potentially opens up other career opportunities. This could potentially relate to my other art or media interests.
- Social opportunities. As you well know, many of the friends you’ve made in Seattle you made through Japanese language meetups when you first came here, and that’s still true today. Japanese allows you to meet not only Japanese people but other people interested in the language and culture. It also means you’ll have a much easier time getting to know people if you visit or live in Japan.
- At least for personal day to day life, you have already picked all the low hanging fruit — you are conversational at Japanese and only especially struggle with topics involving less common vocabulary, or non-casual social situations (which you can’t really practice much in the US anyways). You are currently improving passively without dedicated study just from talking with Miri and other Japanese people and asking questions. You’ve already completed most of the 20% that gives 80% of the results that matter to you.
- Your new focus would need to be in more challenging material and reading / writing. This is necessary for you to rise to the next level of language ability but will take away from the social aspect of learning.
- You love music production! Spending time learning and tweaking isn’t particularly hard for you. It comes naturally, and there are ridiculous amounts of resources out there for you learn chord progressions, music theory, sound design, and audio production and mastering.
- You can rekindle a previous fire. You used to love doing this and had a small knack for it. With time and practice it could become something you enjoy and start to excel at again.
- Music brings things out in you that nothing else can. It could lead you to having a passion for piano again, or pick up new instruments.
- Similar to Japanese (although to a lesser degree), music production can be a social thing and meeting with and collaborating with other musicians or artists would be incredible.
- If you were willing to invest in some hardware instead of just software, this interest could be brought to the next level. You’ve always been interested with hardware stuff and a hardware synth, OP-1, Digikart, or a small modular setup would be really really fun to play around with.
- Can be incredibly expensive. Good software isn’t particularly cheap, although limiting your tools is a good way to avoid that issue. Hardware is straight up expensive, there’s no way around that. It’s true that it’s more an upfront cost than a on-going one, but it’s still a big cost. DAW and plugins can go for $100 - $300, and hardware will generally be $250 - $1000+. Not a cheap hobby.
- A lot of the time, particularly when working with a DAW, will be sitting behind a computer. You’re a software developer right now, you already sit on a computer all day. A way to mitigate this would be to invest in some cheap hardware upfront and minimize screen time, but that goes back to the cost issue.
- Very little opportunity career or life direction wise, unless you turn out to be a genius or meet a thriving group of underground DJs or something.
- Can integrate into your continuous habit of learning software development and computer science.
- Can integrate with any of the other interests mentioned here! Music, Japanese, Art, if you can think of something that interests you, it interests other people, and if it interests other people, there are things you can solve that will benefit those people.
- Big potential for career and life. At the very least, a cool side project is a great thing to put on your resume and a good way to increase your attractiveness as a potential hire down the road. At best, it could turn into a income stream or even something you could quit your full time job for. This obviously would take a lot of luck and hard work, but it’s the most feasible compared to the other interests you’ve listed, especially since you’ve made small amounts of money doing things like this before.
- Similar to music development, this involves sitting behind your computer — exclusively. This means more typing, more staring at a screen, less time socializing or going outside.
- Not particularly social, at least unless the project massively succeeds. Perhaps you could attend meetups for other entrepreneurs, or even just for developers? But again, the majority of the time would be spent on a computer coding, marketing, and designing.
- A fairly large time commitment would be required. Unlike the other interests where decent progress or enjoyment could be made from an hour popped in here and there, a side project has little chance of succeeding or taking off unless I dedicate a good amount of time to it. I’d say 5 hours a week is a good minimum, although 10 would be much better. This could arguably a pro depending on how you look at it, since it’s a opportunity for me to work on my diligence and focus, as well as improve my skills at the normal job.
- Art and other forms of media have always been a interest to you, but you’ve never really explored them deeply. Choosing a focus (physical art, film, music, some weird shit like glass blowing) and deep diving into it would definitely be rewarding and worth your time.
- It’s a opportunity to meet other art enthusiasts.
- Art is everywhere in the world and developing more of a interest in a specific form or two would go really well with your interest in travel and meeting interesting people.
- Now is a great time to be interested in art and media with boom of exploration and discovery options available through technology.
- This is by far the most vague interest on your list, and choosing it would mean doing an equally in-depth brain dump on exactly what you would do and how you would flesh this interest out into something you spend your time on. Right now it’s literally a heading saying “art”. What the hell does that mean? Go to museums? Trying to throw paint at a wall? Volunteering at gallery? Going to music shows? Making film?
In my previous journal, I had a bullet point for “social things”, but I think I’ve described the social aspects of these interests well enough that I don’t need to dedicate a specific section to that. I do want to make an effort to be more social. It’s tiring for me but I do have a knack for it and I’ve never ever regretted investing time to get to know someone and become friends with them. The last few months (maybe your whole life?) in some ways you’ve self-isolated by not inviting and reaching out to people, and it’s certainly going to be difficult to change that mentality. Taking charge of meeting people and building friendships is much better than passively sitting back and waiting for people to introduce themselves, and even if you’ve more or less gotten away with that in the past it’s a great time to change that.