It has been 10 years since I moved to Japan. While I still mostly enjoy a lot about living in Japan, this year was more challenging than previous years. There is still uncertainty about what 2025 will hold but I remain optimistic.
Leaving LINE
I first came to Japan on a student visa, but enjoyed living in Fukuoka and was fortunate to be hired at LINE Fukuoka for their Dev Support Team. LINE Fukuoka was a great place to work! People were very friendly and after an initial acclimation, I was assigned to a project that I enjoyed working on for many years. LINE Fukuoka also had some great perks, from the cafe space to Japanese lessons. While I had many great coworkers and continued to enjoy my project, over time, the overall company vibe changed, resulting in a lot of stress buildup.
While there were many other things that were slowly adding stress, the LINEYahoo merger was somewhat of a culmination of all my complaints added together, and reinforced that it was time for me to consider other things. While there was much more that I wanted to do for my projects, I was slowly becoming more and more grumpy, and even had an image in some people’s mind that I was “always angry”. Working with my team and manager, I decided that it was best to part ways and at the end of June, I left LINEYahoo. My slightly over 8 years working at LINE is the longest I have worked at any place.
One minor advantage to the turmoil from the merger, was that I had a lot of extra vacation days saved up, so even after leaving, I had two months of paid vacation, which I used over July and August.
Counseling
Many people realize the benefit of having yearly health checkups for our physical self, but it is still easy to neglect our mental health. While I started some counseling towards the end of 2023, I continued it and had monthly counseling sessions which I believe have helped. While I still wish for a magic incantation to make everything easier, being able to recognize patterns and label them have been helpful in moving forward.
Cats
Kinu-chan (絹) continues to do well and is all around a great cat. Towards the end of the year, I also adopted a new cat, Saya-chan (小夜). I have been very lucky with both cats getting along well and playing together. Saya-chan being younger, she tends to be a little more demanding when it comes to play time. Kinu-chan is being a kind older sister and tends to let Saya-chan get her playtime in first. Both are more vocal than my cats growing up, and I generally never have to worry about oversleeping when I have a fairly reliable wakeup call.
Side Projects
Though I have had more time off this year from leaving LINE, I have not made as much progress on my various prototypes as I was hoping. It has been easier to passively spend time on games or youtube, instead of actively spending time on projects. I also hope to package up some of my time management prototypes for release at some point.
Towards the end of the year, I did pick up a new 3D Printer so I have been having some fun experimenting with that. Initially I have been printing models from online sources, but I expect to try to design a few small things myself as well.
Next Year
I am still unsure what I want to do next post-LINE.
- Doing something myself results in the most freedom but the most risk.
- Working for a new company results in the least risk but also reduced freedom.
I have been going through some of my prototyped projects trying to think what might be good to pursue. Like many who use assorted apps and services, I definitely feel the subscription fatigue. Though as someone who would like to do their own thing, there is definitely appeal to having a more reliable revenue source.
I am not sure what I will eventually decide on, but that will be something to figure out in the near term. I also hope that I will continue to blog some for practice and to help with processing various ideas.