Aretology

A moment of relaxation

The madness of moving our lives from Seoul to the countryside starts today, so I’m starting out with a favorite Sunday morning ritual: meeting my korean teacher, then staying behind to read a little before going home.

For much of last year, I kept my sanity through certain little rituals like this that seemed to center me and make the chaos tolerable.

Louis C.K. has a bit about how, as a father, you live for brief moments of quiet like the one between shutting the car door after loading a child in the backseat carseat, and getting in the car to drive.

While that bit certainly resonates with me, there is a certain sadness to it. Those little moments, just like my rituals, are too few and far between.

Sitting here in the neighborhood coffee shop that I coopted as my 2nd office from time to time, I know I’m going to miss my time here, but at the same time, I’ll, hopefully, be living my life in a way that has MORE of those little rituals, and longer ones at that, so that-

Well, gotta go, the wife is ready to get started.

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I Just Quit my Job. Am I Crazy?

Yesterday I signed a contract with a new University and informed my former employer I will no longer be working for them.

And thus began the process of moving my life out of Seoul and to the countryside of Korea. More specifically, onto my in-laws farm.

Smaller money, MUCH smaller city, but better deal.

I made good money in Seoul, but the stress really took it’s toll. My wife and I didn’t save nearly what we should have, as a lot of that larger salary went directly to ‘stress relief’ activities such as massages and emergency weekend getaways when things got really intense.

Furthermore, my last job wasn’t really doing anything for my career. Every day felt like ‘spinning my wheels,’ so to speak, although I certainly feel like I became a better teacher.

This new job, teaching American Politics at a university in the southern part of the country, promises opportunities for publication, teaching interesting courses (including a graduate level course), and improving my Korean.

But more than that, rather than living in the smog and angst-filled megatropolis of Seoul, we will be living in the tiny village of six households that my wife grew up in, and where my father-in-law runs a moderately successful farming business.

We will have our own house on the property that is a mansion compared to the one room rooftop apartment we live in now. My wife will have plenty of chances to help her family with their business, which is something she’s always wanted to do. And we will be living in one of Korea’s hidden areas, still largely untouched by development.

This has not been an easy decision.

I write this now remembering the big plans I had in my head when I first bought the domain name ‘Aretology.com’. I envisioned my own little corner of the web where I get philosophical about enjoying the most important things in life and getting as much as possible out of every precious moment.

But I could never really do anything with it. I didn’t know where to go with it so long as I was reporting to work every Monday at 9am to do work that I did not enjoy. So while I read books like Shopcraft as Soulcraft and the writings of Marcus Aurelius, I knew I was a fraud.

That is not to say that life in the countryside will be easy. It’s going to be hard to stretch my paycheck to cover our expenses, not to mention to take on the challenges of the new teaching. But it’s something I’m excited to be embracing, and I’m already finding myself more motivated and creative than I’ve been in a long time.

So strap in and keep your hands and feet inside at all times. It’s going to be a wild ride.

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