Honestly, I struggled to think of what to write about for this year’s year-end reflection piece. My 2019 from a certain perspective can be viewed as typically good: work is going well, I got to travel a bit as usual, and personal relationships are stable as ever. I even bought a car, after a one-year hiatus of going without a vehicle. Based on those things I can certainly write the standard start-to-finish expository piece, telling you how awesome everything is chronologically, and then put down some more awesome things to look forward to in 2020.
And that would’ve sufficed okay, because from a macro view, 2019 was a good year. However, beneath the varnish and veneer of showing people only the best side of us, this year can also be viewed as one of the more confounding and tumultuous years I’ve had in quite some time. In complete truth, my feelings towards 2019 run the gamut of joy and misery, with lots of self-reflection and soul-searching.
I do grant that relative to many others, there’s really nothing to complain about; but this game of life is unique to each individual, and the problems we face aren’t diminished just because others have got it worse. Detaching to the look at the bigger picture is a tool to deal with our problems, rather than be used a cudgel to bludgeon us to “get over it”.
And I think it would be disingenuous to simply give the circumstances of the year 2019 a happy spin. It’d certainly make writing this far easier, but for the sake of posterity and learning from my faults and pitfalls, I shall allow myself to confront once again the troubles I’ve had in 2019 and spell them out for you here. They stem from three crucial moments this year, and it’s around these three incidents this 2019’s year-end reflection post will be centered on.
The first, is my Porsche 911 GT3.
In many ways, it was very premature to buy the 911 back in January. Coming back from my annual winter trip home to China, the aura of making a big change for a new year sort of took hold of me; few things would come close to as big of a move as spending six-figures on a sports car I’d only drive on the weekends. It completely altered my financial situation, especially coming off of not owning a car at all for a year. Suddenly, it’s not just car payments making a return, but ancillaries too, like insurance and fuel costs. There were definitely times where I thought I might have bitten more off than I can comfortably chew.
To be sure, the plan was always to buy the 911, and heading into the close of 2018, the financial side of the equation, in terms of saving up for the hefty down payment (half), has come to completion. In that sense I was ready to pull the trigger at any time, and as is the wont of car enthusiasts, I was not keen to wait any longer than necessary. From the time I returned from China to the moment I signed the papers for my Sapphire Blue Metallic GT3, it took but one week. I was of the mind to get it over with as quickly as possible, and as chance would have it, a reasonable example was for sale over at Porsche Fremont.
By mid-January, I was the owner of my dream car: a 2015 Porsche 911 GT3. A decision that utterly changed the trajectory of 2019 in ways I did not expect.
It didn’t take long for me to ascertain an innate understanding of the mantra that material things don’t bring you any more happiness, and chasing after them for that specific purpose is as pyrrhic as it gets. I wish it didn’t take writing the largest check I’ve ever written to achieve that clarity, but perhaps the same lesson wouldn’t have been there had I instead dropped $50,000 on a BMW M2. Immediately post purchasing the GT3 I was not overwhelmed with joy or even a sense of satisfaction; rather, the sensation I got was immense anxiety.
Anxiety that comes with car ownership: the related chores like parking and maintenance that are now back in my life after a blissful year of not having to deal with any of it. Worse, the stress is amplified by magnitudes because of how expensive the GT3 is. For sure, it’s not something I thought a lot about during the process of saving up to buy the car, and indeed that’s a gross miscalculation when the car in question is priced into the hundred thousands.
Compounding the stress is the unconventional route I took to buying the 911, one that’s largely backwards from the usual 911 owner. Primarily, I lack a house with a garage, and cars in the class of a GT3 aren’t ones you’d leave parked on the street, especially when said streets are in San Francisco. While most owners have a nicely secured place to store their 911, mine is parked at work some seven miles away from where I live. It’s a covered lot away from the elements, but to have your pride and joy be that far away and semi out in the open, it can increase anxiety levels no matter how much mind detachment exercises I do.
Nevertheless, I had to quickly become okay with the situation, and that was the hope going in anyways that I would be able to handle the arrangement, because otherwise I wouldn’t have bought the car. I wasn’t going to spend an additional $300 – the going rate of a private garage for rent in San Francisco – simply to have that extra peace of mind and proximity. Instead, I had to accept the situation, and let go what I absolutely cannot control – the risk of someone – or acts of god - messing with the 911. I put my full trust onto the fact that if anything were to happen, that is precisely what auto insurance is for.
By providence and extreme good fortune, the GT3 hasn’t incurred as much as an errant nick this whole year while parked, and for that I am extremely thankful, and currently knocking vigorously on actual wood.
After the anxiety of potential damage to the car subsided, then comes the difficulty in accessing the car just to go out for a drive. It can either take 15 minutes if the family car is available to borrow, or up to an hour if it isn’t and I had to take public transport. Naturally, during the earlier months when the excitement of the GT3 was still fresh and simmering, I’d no problem doing the long schlep to get to the car. Once the newness wore off, however, it became an utter chore, which is quite an insane thing to say given it’s my dream car and whatnot – I should be chomping at the bits to drive it each and every time, but that’s how it goes once you settled back down from the highs.
It was often times annoying and stressful to have the car be that far away. A ‘first world problems’ kind of complaint, perhaps, but it’s the truth.
Ultimately, it’s the relatively vast financial commitment that I’ve made to the 911 that’s caused me the greatest amount of anxiety, and the genesis to the question whether it was premature to buy back in January. Not to say I couldn’t comfortably afford the car – this isn’t a robbing Peter to pay Paul situation, but the fact is the monetary outlay to purchase and keep the GT3 is equivalent to renting a studio apartment in San Francisco every month, and as with renting a place, the initial acquisition cost for the car took up the entire amount of savings I was comfortable to part with. To go from a place of security in having many 10s of thousands saved up to instantly vanishing it into a material object was superbly jarring, more so than I had anticipated.
I absolutely love cars, and I don’t ever regret spending money on any of it, but to make such a significant jump to another price category without the sort of income typical to the usual purchasers of such cars was a paradigm that took me much of 2019 to get used to. Sometimes the GT3 does feel like an albatross of sorts, that I’m betraying my values of growing up in a family that had to scraped by from paycheck to paycheck. The six-figure commitment took away any flexibility I had to make financial moves in the next few years, and dealing with that reality was often times quite hard.
It didn’t help that everything else that goes into supporting the 911 is dramatically more expensive than most cars, so it was tremendously difficult to get back to a savings equilibrium where I feel mentally comfortable and whole again. Two of the three crucial moments of 2019 that I will expand upon later made the problem worse, and effectively I was chasing my tail for much of the year, filling a hole that’s seemingly bottomless.
There are many positives to owning the 911, obviously, and indeed those outweigh the combined negatives of what I’ve written about. The GT3 truly is the best sports car for the money (fight me, Miata fans), and the sublime of wringing out the engine to its 9,000 RPM redline is enough to make all the stress and anxiety disappear into the background. I’ve kept a diary about the joys of ownership here on this website, and I can honestly say it’s my proudest creative work I’ve done in 2019. Please go there for many words and pretty pictures, and a far rosier frame of the 911 experience than the pages here.
The second big moment of 2019 that had a profound effect on me is traveling to Japan in July. It’s somewhat hilarious that it was a trip that I wasn’t even all that excited to go on; perhaps I’ve become jaded to traveling abroad after doing so much of it the past few years, but I think the key reason to my lack of anticipation for the Japan trip relates back to the 911. After sinking a huge chunk of money to procure the car, it was definitely not the best decision to spend another few thousand dollars only a few months later. Just as I recovered somewhat from the gaping financial hole that I purposely gave myself, out goes the last modicum of savings yet again.
The promise to go to Japan was made before I bought the GT3, so it would be unfair and selfish to renege on it. Good thing then, because as it turns out, the time in Japan was some of the most wonderful ever while traveling abroad.
You can read all about why in the five-part photo stories series I wrote. I was so enamored with the trip that for once I actually felt compelled to spend the numerous hours putting the many thoughts and scenes together as a memory to relive. To make a long story short, I discovered a near perfect affinity for Japan: the country’s culture and customs fit so well with my own introverted nature that I instantly felt at home. I greatly admire the Japanese people’s passion and dedication to practically anything, from the most mundane and boring to the most exquisite and complex. Particularly for my car enthusiast leanings, Japan is practically heaven.
I’d thought South Korea was the best sort of home away home for me culturally, that if I ever had to emigrate anywhere, somewhere around Seoul would be the top destination. After the Japan trip, that spot has changed. Again, it’s funny that before going I was decidedly not excited about traveling there.
So there was considerable sadness when I left and flew back home, made worse by the third major moment of 2019 that I’ll talk about soon. Before Japan, I never got the sort of post-vacation sadness or depression that some people do, and I never could empathize with those feelings. After coming back, however, I got to experience it for the very first time, and the effects of the post-travel depression lingered on for way longer than I’d expected or wanted.
Ever felt like a stranger in your own home city? Well, that was what it felt like for a certain period after returning from Japan. I had so completely fallen for the way of living in Japan – however surface and superficial one-and-half weeks’ worth of vacation time can provide and prove – that I almost hated here in San Francisco. It didn’t take much to trigger those thoughts: on the first day back to work, the morning bus was late by many minutes, which was a super stark contrast to the always-on-time (or someone is going to have to commit hara-kiri) public transportation system in Japan. Why can’t we have nice things here in States?
Rightly or wrongly, I started to compare things here in San Francisco with those in Japan, and it always led to frustration. Take for one example the amount of property crime and theft here in the Bay Area: you nearly can’t go a day without a Citizen app alert saying there’s been a strong-arm robbery somewhere, or reading someone on twitter saying his parked car has been broken into for the nth time. Compared that to Japan where I felt fully comfortable and safe leaving my camera bag exposed in the back seat of our rental car while it’s parked, and how you can walk around anywhere at any time of the day without fear of robbery.
The more I thought about the contrast between here and Japan, the more stressed I got. I was depressed that there was nothing I can do to change the situation, and it was a matter of becoming okay with living in San Francisco again, and relearning to love it, warts and all. That took a while, slowed significantly by the events that transpired immediately after my return to the States, the third crucial moment of 2019.
Thanks to my Chase credit card, I’m a member of Global Entry, so coming back into the States through immigration is usually a scan and on your way affair. In returning back from Japan into LAX, however, I got flagged for secondary search. Initially I didn’t have a problem with this, thinking that it’s probably a random routine search, and I always comply with the regulations of bring things into the country. However, during the questioning, the agents started asking pointed questions about my itinerary and what I did for a living, drilling down to what I felt was way more detail than necessary. At one point an agent even got frustrated with me because I couldn’t come up with my phone’s unlock code fast enough.
Something was amiss, because it felt like I was being treated like a suspected criminal, rather than a routine search to make sure people with Global Entry aren’t sneaking in contraband. Of course, the agents found nothing on me, and after 30 minutes of grilling I was on my way to my connect flight back to San Francisco.
Four days later, Federal agents served a search warrant on our family home.
I never thought I would get to tick the bucket list box of experiencing being held at multiple gunpoint and then be handcuffed, while I was still in my sleeping t-shirt and underwear. Thanks to having been and being acquainted with members of law enforcement, I knew exactly what do in that situation, and tried to be as calm as possible. It’s my dad who I felt sorry and worry for, him being the person who was actually awake at that ungodly early hour and had to witness the Feds knocking down the front door, DEA style.
It’s not a type of trauma you recover from quickly.
After the initial shock, I was more amused that anything because I know for sure me and my parents have not done anything wrong – I’ve never got so much as a speeding ticket. Without going into much detail, it turns out my younger brother did something shady involving things on the Internet that the CBP was investigating, and since we live under one roof, and the Comcast Internet account is under my name, that’s likely the reason why my profile was flagged and I received the intensive secondary questioning coming back into the country from Japan.
The Feds took away all related electronics, which unfortunately included my computer, tablet, and phone, because what I have largely mirrored what my brother has, and for sake of thoroughness they wanted to go through my things to make sure everything is good and kosher. I knew I’d be fine, but Federal investigations take a very long time, so it’ll be a long while before I’d have my things returned to me. A mere four days after coming back from Japan, I got stripped of every one of my electronic devices, through no fault of my own.
This isn’t a cruel judgement on my brother; that’s just the reality for me. I’m a bit of stickler for routine, and the Feds breaking down our door is about the biggest shock to the system I can imagine. Already in the beginning throes of post-Japan sadness, this particular episode’s timing was horrible.
So, I had to go out and spend another many thousands of dollars to buy a new laptop and a new phone, piecing back together as much normalcy as possible. Remember I wrote earlier about the filling a seemingly bottomless hole after buying the GT3? The Japan trip was a jab against it; this thing with my brother and the Feds was nearly the knock-out punch. I went completely into austerity mode, shaving down any unnecessary spending, which meant driving the car less (fuel costs are hefty when the best you can manage is 17 miles to the gallon). That presented double-edge sword, as the act of driving is highly meditative for me, and doing less of it in the latter half of the year meant it exacerbated the existing issues I was facing.
Most acute of which was the hanging specter over my brother: his case with the CBP. While his infraction was small compared to the criminal empire that was under investigation, he did break the law, and the consequences are real, if the Feds choose to press charges. It was a huge cloud of uncertainty looming over my family, and try as you might to ignore it and go about daily life normally, it was tacitly understood that there is no relief until the investigation is over and a decision is rendered.
Adding to the difficulty was the revelation that my brother had been suicidal for a few years now, ever since he moved away to Santa Cruz for college two years ago. It was another layer to grapple with for the rest of us, dealing with not only how my brother got mentality distraught enough to want to end it all, but what roles did we each play in contributing to that crisis. Coming to grips with that was tough, and it heighten the stakes of the investigation. If the decision turns against my brother, jail-time might be the least our problems. Recovery for my brother would be lengthy process.
For much of the second half of 2019, I had to deal with that aftermath, on top of my own issues with post-travel depression and the weight of owning the GT3. It was certainly rough at times, stressed and anxious about impending bad news as I went through the motions of daily life. It’s a terrible way to live, being in fear that the next phone call or knock on the door is the one to forever change our lives permanently. The strongest one is for sure my brother, to be able to string together some semblance of regular life under such crazy pressures, able to find a job after undergrad, and seeing therapist regularly.
In any good story, there’s got to be hope and resolution at the end, and here at the conclusion of 2019, I shall provide some positivity to this otherwise stark year-end reflection.
Two weeks ago, as of this writing, CBP returned the confiscated passport to my brother, and I got my entire haul of electronics back (great, now I have two phones). While they can’t say for sure since the overall investigation remains ongoing, it appears my brother will not be charged, given the entirety of the circumstances. Needless to say, it was a massive sigh of relief, especially for my brother, who almost broke down upon hearing the news.
As for me, I’m obviously overjoyed for him, and on a personal level, getting my stuff back was a much-needed puzzle piece to get myself back to an equilibrium. It was a total trip turning the iMac on and seeing everything in pseudo suspended animation, with everything frozen in the time to that Thursday in July. The return of my things coincided perfectly with me finally shaking off the haze I was trapped in since coming back from Japan, and also coming to satisfactory terms with owning the 911.
In life, you make some big decisions, and in doing so there’s no turning back or taking a do-over. I would say buying a six-figure sports car would rank up there in that category, especially for me doing it the unconventional way: before making a great amount of money and buying a home. The trigger has been pulled, and I have to be okay with that decision and make the best of whatever associated outcomes there are, good or bad. There’s no use in lamenting inconvenient situations or the extra hassle that comes with my inability to store the car right next to where I live. Buying the 911 is the choice I made, one that I should have no regrets about, and the thing to do now is enjoy the process of ownership as much as possible in the coming years.
I’d like to caution once more that nothing material will ever make you happy or happier; it must come from within. The momentary high of achieving a goal or buying that dream car is infinitesimally fleeting, and sooner or later you return to your original baseline, necessitating a new chase to be “happy” again. Owning the 911 for sure doesn’t elevate my level of happiness: I’m still the same person who just so happen to have an expensive car. That’s it.
Not to say you shouldn’t keep striving for goals and achievement, but I think it has to be for different reasons, rather than hoping to be any happier once you’ve done it. I used to think having ‘passion’ for something was relatively useless: who needs passion when simple work ethic can carry you through anything? (Ah, must be my Chinese communist upbringing…) That may be true, though I’ve come to realize that passion is the only thing that will differentiate out what truly matters, and the key ingredient that provides meaning. Passion makes you want to continuing moving forward and making process, without the dangling carrot of money in front.
Passion is what induce people to quit their regular 9-to-5 for something new and risky, and willing to devote many hours towards that endeavor. Passion is what you’d do for free, for no applause or recognition, because it’s important to you, even if it’s just you and no one else. For example, this website is my passion, and that keeps me producing content for it on a regular basis. I don’t ever check the site’s analytics because I’d keep doing the exact same thing even if no one reads it.
Cars are obviously a huge passion for me: that’s why I religiously saved and then altered my entire financial situation with one signature to buy the Porsche. Because it’s important to me. Therefore, so what if I have to take a bus ride just to access the car? It’s part of the process.
I think the opposite of passion is attachment. When you’re attached to the outcome of something you’re doing or anxious about events turning out the way you want, there’s bound to be disappointment. As Master Yoda would say, that leads to suffering.
Going forward I think passion makes a solid litmus test to filter down things that matters to me. It’s a shift from wanting to consume and do everything and treating life as a checklist – that’s how it spirals into a never-ending, unsatisfactory hamster wheel. One of the silver linings from having my phone confiscated back in July was that I lost my lengthy queue of podcast episodes to consume (it was at least 50 deep). In starting over with the new phone, I purposely became very selective and picked only the episodes that are absolutely interesting to me. I wouldn’t hesitate to stop listening to one midway, and I also ceased the habit of listening at increased speed: the whole point is to learn and improve, not jamming it into my brain as fast, and as much, as possible.
It’s less stressful that way, too. There’s really no rushing the process; being passionate doesn’t make it go any quicker. One of the books I read this year that stuck with me the most is ‘Creative Selection’ by Ken Kocienda. The book chronicles Ken’s time at Apple writing code for the ground-breaking devices like the iPhone and iPad. The key revelation I took away from the book was that even at the level of genius computer coders, there’s no avoiding the tedium of work, of the slow and gradual process of hacking away at a problem until the eureka moment. Of course, the consumers only see the spectacular end results, and have no idea the laborious and long ordeal it took to get there.
The actual work of super smart people isn’t that different from what we do. Reading that book gave me confidence to continue doing the things I’m passionate about, that it’s important to keep going and keep iterating; changes and improvements are supposed to be irritatingly slow.
This philosophy is useful for dealing with life’s problems as well, and I couldn’t have endured through the three major moments of 2019 without drilling it completely down to the principle of putting one foot in front of the other. The next day may not be any different than the previous; you simply have to trust that eventually, things will get better.
Last year the motto was trusting the process; in the coming 2020, let’s make haste slowly, step by step. See you all on the other side.
Top 10 songs of 2019
1. ITZY – 달라달라 (DALLA DALLA)
2. 방탄소년단 (BTS) - 작은 것들을 위한 시 (Boy With Luv) (feat. Halsey)
3. TWICE – Fancy
4. Chung Ha - 벌써 12시 (Gotta Go)
5. Taeyeon – 사계 (Four Seasons)
6. 볼빨간 사춘기 (BOL4) – You(=I)
7. IU – Blueming
8. Jung Seung Hwan – 눈사람 (The Snowman)
9. Red Velvet – Sunny Side Up!
10. Hwasa – 멍청이(twit)
