Reflections: Part I "On finding purpose"

An empty road on the way from Broome to Port Headland

My funemployment is continuing and so does my search for meaning…

This deserves a separate reflection.

I’ve been busking now for just over one month now, and it’s time to do an intermediate review.

As we grow up, we absorb a lot of societal norms of what’s acceptable and what’s not. Some of these are universal, e.g. killing especially other human beings is a sin (while killing some animals is okayish).

A lot of these norms come to us through our family, others come from our immediate environment and society. In my case, there is a potent mix of both.

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👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family

A big part has to do with growing up in a 3rd generation Korean family. The Koreans value and recognise hard work, perseverance and reverence to elders. This has to do with the huge impact and continued influence the Confucian philosophy has had on the Korean culture.

The Koreans also value academic achievements. In my case, this was perhaps more so pronounced as my mother’s family was and is highly academical.

My maternal grandfather was a teacher of biology. When his father was exiled to Asia due to Stalin’s repressions, my grandfather’s family got really very poor. Yet he was doing so well academically, that the village community’s elders raised money for his education in which he excelled. He was a very humble person and arguably one of, if not, the best calligraphers and Japanese speakers in Sakhalin. Many people would come to him for calligraphy for funeral arrangements.

My father’s family, like many other families of the time, was a large family with eight kids. His family was doing quite well under my great grandmother. But with her passing away and my grandfather losing his fingers, the families fortunes turned. My father recollects times when he would be sat on a busy street or a shop entrance to beg. Because he had and still has the most charming smile, people would be so disarmed that they’d part with their money disarmed by his smile 🙂 Maybe, it’s there that he learnt to be street smart. Despite his not so excellent grades, he was the class president and is always the soul of any party. Taking after my grandmother, he is also an excellent host.

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👮🏼‍♂️👷🏻‍♀️👩🏼‍⚕️ Society

This one is going to be difficult. Most of my childhood fell into the Soviet times and the communist regime. I remember being very proud to have been selected one of the first to be sworn into the pioneers. The pioneers organisation was the Soviet equivalent of the scouts organisation in the USA. Except, this was also part of the bigger ecosystem. Before being a pioneer, the elementary school kids would be “oktyabriata”s first, or the children of the October (in the commemoration of the October revolution). They’d then progress from “oktiabriata” to pioneers, then to the “komsomol” organisation, finally culminating in being accepted into the Communist party.

Things started to change drastically by 1990s. I remember how me and my brother would devour and savour a pack of alien and indescribably delicious “Mars” and “Sneakers” bars that father brought once.

As the USSR was heavily breathing on its deathbed, the chains of the old state system would crumble and give way to a chaotic and destructive, yet so romantical freedom. You’d have to queue for several hours to get simple staple foods, books, anything really. Then we had an onslaught of the Chinese counterfeit goods as the more entrepreneurial of the newly unemployed would venture out to the Chinese, Turkish and European borders. From there, they’d bring back the highly sought apparel, electronics, anything really, sell it for profit and repeat the cycle.

We suddenly had a lot of sexual freedom too. One of the most read newspapers of the time was “SPID-Info” (a play on words as SPID also means AIDS in Russian) – a newspaper which had answers to seemingly every question on the planet regarding sexual matters. I even remember buying a newspaper which title I thought read “Day”. It turned out to be “Gay Today”. I brought it to my class that morning and one classmate who gave the impression of being of the first to lose his virginity (a very delicate matter for 15 year olds) took the nude picture out, created an enlarged Xerox copy of it and brought it back to the class for the fun of it.

With the onset of the wild west style capitalism and the communist shrine tumbling down, a lot of people including myself got disorientated. What’s wrong, what’s right? Suddenly, we went from the communist belief system and seeming equality to the free-for-all unregulated version of capitalism with dog-eat-dog, racketeers coming to one’s market stalls to extort money for providing cover, massive unemployment and collapse in whatever savings one may have accumulated.

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👼🏼🧑👴🏼Generational Era

I feel like I can relate to both Generation X (1965–1979) and Generation Y (1980–1994), the millenials. Generation Z? Eh, not so much. Snapchat just doesn’t do it for me 🙂 As a matter of quick test, what can you do if have a pencil/pen and a cassette tape? 🙂

As a Generation X representative, and an ex-Soviet child who went through the era of deficit of literally everything from underwear to basic food items, I used to highly value material possessions. The amount of and relative proportion of my money I must have spent on clothing is just beyond the present me! As a Generation Y rep and someone who spent a couple of years in the USA where the consumerism is taken to extreme, I’ve gradually come to highly value experiences over material things over time. Don’t get me wrong, I still use and default to shopping as a cure 🙂

As a side note, on a recent visit to the USA and one of the stores there, the amount and the variety of things you can buy there is just mind boggling! It’s amazing on the one hand to have such choice at your doorstep, but on the other hand I couldn’t stop thinking how much of this “stuff” is wasting Earth’s limited resources and is hoarded in people’s houses and lives. Now that I have been living away from home for more than three months, I am positively surprised with how little material possessions I can do away with.

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These three things, family, society and generational era have shaped me into who and what I am. These are inalienable part of me. I’ll carry them with me in one way or another like the invisible DNA. At the same time, as a living organism, I can and will change. This is inevitable truth about life. I am, therefore, using this timely break to listen to what it is that my soul and heart desire rather than what my family and society expect me to be doing.

I am sure my family, my loved ones want the best for me. They are rightly worried about me just as a sailor’s lover would be worried each time a sailor sets off on a long overseas voyage. Will he make it back? Will he drown in a storm? Will he fall in love with another land, another love miles away? Will he want to come back home?

▶️▶️ To be continued 🔙🔜