Hurt Less and Come Alive More

I don't have one single lonely night to point to. I have a room.

A prefectural employee dorm in Fukuoka, my first year on the job as a Coordinator of International Relations on the JET program. Alone, and nothing had actually gone wrong. No disaster, no falling out, no reason. Just the ordinary isolation that settles in after work, when the day is done, the surroundings are quiet, and there is only me beneath the overhead LED.

In that space, the closest thing at hand is a device. Maybe it is a phone or a laptop. I'd lie there and scroll, looking for a little more of something I couldn't name. Social media, videos, podcasts, endless content, the highlights of everyone else's life. A typical after-work activity, if you could call it that. It filled my mind and the room so I didn't have to sit in either at night.

Yesterday the YouTube algorithm handed me a short animation about exactly this: a person in bed, lit by a phone, boxed inside a tiny room while the city kept running outside the window. It captured the feeling better than I've managed to. The top comment said some version of: we all found this while doom-scrolling.

Thousands of people, alone in their own rooms, gathered under a video about being alone, saying me too.

One comment put it plainly: there is nothing social about social media. That comment section was the closest thing to a gathering the medium offered, and it didn't touch the loneliness. It only proved how many of us were in it.

But a screen had not always felt this lonely to me.

Recently, I started thinking about an old online RPG I played as a kid called MapleStory. The company running it is reopening a classic version soon, after twenty years of evolving the game into something I barely recognize. The nostalgia picked me up from there. It made me wonder why I had loved it so much. What exactly made that game so enjoyable to play?

It wasn't only the art style, music, or game mechanics, though they were all outstanding, at least to my taste. It wasn't the adrenaline of winning. That was League of Legends. It wasn't the desire to become a better player. That was StarCraft. When I tried to pinpoint what kept me coming back to MapleStory, no single scene jumped out.

What I remembered was teaming up for a quest, grinding monsters together, or just hanging out in town and chatting about whatever came up. None of those interactions was a big deal on its own, but they built on top of one another.

People showed up.

We were physically apart, but the game created a virtual space where we could be around each other. It was always more fun to do things with other people, including just standing around doing nothing, than to grind alone on a map. People talked, joked, waited, helped, and sometimes worked toward a shared goal. You needed other people. You were there at the same time. You kept pushing toward something together, over and over. You could go AFK for a while and come back, and the group was still there.

The wider community felt receptive too, as if every moving character on the screen might become an interesting encounter because there was someone behind it. Maybe that is memory beautifying the past. But even so, constancy, membership, showing up, and interdependence were built into how the game worked.

The nostalgia for me wasn't really for the game. It was for the social connection the game helped create and hold together. There is no promise it would feel the same if I went back. It probably wouldn't. But it gave me a reference point.

The game made people necessary to one another. Modern life often seems organized around the opposite promise: that you should not have to need anyone.

None of this arrived as an argument. It arrived as a feeling, because feelings usually come before theories do. There was the nostalgia, the loneliness, and the strangeness of doom-scrolling alone. Underneath them all was a quieter one: I was doing all the right things, and what I had optimized for still wasn't giving me what I wanted.

Why?

Modern life in the city often feels removed to me. Off-center. Not only because we don't live among greenery anymore, but because of how life is organized: asynchronous, individualized, atomized.

We have built machines and services that reduce bottlenecks and serve the individual better. Food delivery. Unmanned checkout. Entertainment, appointments, and work that happen asynchronously. You don't have to be with anyone for almost anything. You don't have to wait. You move at your own pace. You buy your time back.

The tradeoff is easy to miss because each convenience is useful on its own. But taken together, they make more and more of life detachable from the people we once had to interact with. When efficiency becomes the thing the whole system optimizes for, something in you starts to notice.

The friction is gone, and so is a lot of the life.

What the city made possible, I had quietly turned into a personal philosophy.

I learned to optimize everything I could: food, sleep, productivity, workouts, finances, career. And it worked. It lessened the suffering, anxiety, and worry that used to plague me. I have felt the benefits: a less anxious mind and a fitter body.

But all of that good was measured against my own past. All the optimizing, all the growing imperviousness to uncertainty, carried me from the negative up to zero. A baseline of sorts.

I had taken Buddhism and Stoicism to mean something like: desire less, control what you can, and let go of the rest. The wisdom in that felt self-evident. For someone who has misplaced their focus and resources, it can be a kind of salvation. It was for me.

But somewhere I had narrowed "focus on what you can control" into "only invest where the return is guaranteed." Those are not the same instruction. One is about how to act when the result is uncertain. The other is a filter on what I would attempt in the first place, and it kept me out of the uncertain, spontaneous situations where connection could happen at all.

Which is roughly the opposite of what the idea was for. The discipline exists to make acting without a guaranteed return survivable.

I had turned a tool for tolerating uncertainty into a reason to avoid it.

But is the move from negative to zero the whole map?

I had made progress on every axis I could measure and still felt hungry for something none of them could provide.

Fed, biologically, but still hungry.

That hunger changed the question. It was no longer only: how do I make life hurt less? It was also: what might make life feel more alive?

I keep coming back to the same human needs. Connection. Relatedness. Belonging. I suppose you could live without them. But would you, if you had the choice?

We still need them. We never stopped needing them. We don't grow out of them. We grow through them.

And when we are malnourished in them, we pay a quiet tax. We reach for cheap replacements on our phones, in social media and content. A body needs food, water, and shelter to survive, but if that is all there is, it is more organism than human. To be human is to be among others. I don't think the two are separable, and yet we are living such separated lives.

No wonder something feels missing, even though by every metric I track, I am doing better than before. It has always and only been about me, myself, and I.

Getting from negative to zero asks you to work on yourself. Your habits, patterns, systems, and reactions. The optimization mindset shines there. That is where it belongs.

Going past zero is different. It asks you to take those same resources, your time, energy, attention, and care, and offer them to other people without any promise of what, if anything, will come back.

You can put in reps at the gym and expect some muscle by the end of the month. Relationships make no such promise. You can show up with goodwill and still be rejected. You can trust and be betrayed. You can love and lose.

That is uncomfortable. It took so much effort just to get here. Why risk the peace?

When my mind grows loud in an empty room, maybe it is trying to find someone to talk to.

Belonging used to be closer to the default, and leaving was the harder thing when you were part of a small town, village, or tribe. The answer cannot be to rebuild the old cages. Opening the exits was real progress for anyone who felt trapped in the old world. But somewhere along the way, we lost track of how to build an entrance back.

Back to other people.

I don't have a blueprint for rebuilding those entrances at the scale of a city. I only know that I don't want to live my whole life inside the room, freed from dependency and inconvenience but caged by devices and a numbed mind.

My course correction is not to abandon what I have built or optimized, but to pick up what I unconsciously neglected on the path here. So far, the focus has only been on bettering myself. From here, it is about extending myself. Reaching out to others who may feel the same way. Giving more than I take, in whatever shape or form I can.

This can all sound theoretical. But I already have evidence that life does come alive that way.

When I decided to pivot into software development, I found a Discord server for developers in Tokyo. I wrote a short blurb in the introduce-yourself channel saying that I had been on JET, was changing careers, and would love to connect.

That was the whole move. A few sentences put out into a room of strangers.

D.L. was the first and only person who reached out. He had also been an ALT and was making the same pivot into software. The more we talked, the more it stacked up. Both of us from Canada. Both drawn to Japan. Both learning the language. Both trying to study and work at the same time so we could become engineers.

He was eager to share what he had figured out, and I shared where I was. We tried scheduled study sessions. We tried building projects together. Eventually, it settled into a weekly Sunday catch-up call that we have kept running for over two years.

We have visited each other in Japan and Canada, and we talk about life, career, relationships, all of it. It is one of the few real friendships I have built as a working adult, maybe the only one I would call close. I mean that by the quality of it, not the length.

Neither of us set out for this. Neither expected it to become what it did. It grew organically into something we both cherish and keep tending. It has spread beyond the two of us now, into our families and the people closest to us.

This friendship complicated the story I started out with.

It began on the same kind of screen I doom-scroll on. The difference wasn't the device. The difference was that I reached, someone reached back, and we kept showing up.

The enemy was never the screen. It was what I kept doing on it: consuming the byproducts of other people's real lives and mistaking them for a thread back into my own.

MapleStory had done something similar years earlier. It made a virtual room where repeated showing up, shared goals, and needing one another could turn strangers into familiar faces, then perhaps into friends or a larger community. The nostalgia wasn't only for what was long gone. It was a blueprint for what I felt was missing in our day-to-day lives.

Maybe the question is not whether a screen is real life. Maybe it is whether what we do through it asks us to show up for one another.

So maybe that is the shape of it. Belonging is like planting something out in the elements with other people. You can never be certain it will grow, but you tend it anyway. You show up together. You bring care, respect, curiosity, acceptance, vulnerability, and encouragement. Then you come back and do it again.

It can be hard to give something you are malnourished in yourself. I don't have a clean answer for that. Maybe it begins as a wish more than a certainty, as long as you haven't completely given up on yourself.

A relationship is always shared. It is a mutual process, one that asks us to become more dependent on one another, not less. That sounds like danger when independence has been the goal. But as the relationship strengthens, some of the uncertainty begins to fade. Familiarity becomes safety. Constancy becomes comfort. Those are things we cannot outsource or produce alone.

We never know what will come back. But I also don't think we begin by demanding a return. Once every interaction becomes a transaction, the relationship turns into a means for bettering the self again.

We are back where we started.

So the uncertainty cannot be resolved before we begin. It is not an obstacle standing in front of the planting. It is what planting is.

That shouldn't stop us. It is just what the ground is like.

This is where Stoicism echoes. Not as a reason to stop wanting, but as a way to survive disappointment without closing myself again. To absorb the storms, return to the garden, and keep tending what is already growing.

Some of what we plant will grow bigger and stronger. Some will perish. Some will root deeper and bear fruit. Some will spread on its own. And maybe, just maybe, what we planted becomes the very thing that provides for us and for the people around us.

Voltaire wrote that we must cultivate our garden. I know he was writing in a totally different historical context. Still, I keep landing on the word "our."

Not my garden, tended alone behind a fence, but our garden: the shared plot, the one that only grows because we tend it together.