Vietnam, Japan, and Starting 2025 more boring
And starting 2025 much more boring but with some awe
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There's some irony in having to travel halfway around the world to take a proper vacation. Despite spending three years as a digital nomad, this past December traveling to Vietnam and Japan was the first time I intentionally tried to take a break from work (though it didn’t work).
Vietnam in 2024 defies easy categorization. Saigon has the hectic chaotic nature similar to Bangkok, but similar infrastructure and smells compared to China, all with the abundance of hipster coffee shops and fun restaurants like Taipei. My nomadic friend calls it the last truly cheap city in Asia, but I think that’s underselling it the high quality service and food. An amazing meal at a nice restaurant would cost us $20. Our five star hotel stay in Saigon cost $100+/night with an incredibly delicious breakfast buffet. And when we casually commented that our bed didn’t look king size, they responded by frantically moving us to a room with a ridiculously large bed.
Service is understandably good in Vietnam, partly due to culture, but also from the economics of labor. Every restaurant, spa, or coffee shop has 5x as many staff members as their equivalent in the U.S. At a couple restaurants, the waitresses were just standing around watching us eat and waiting for a sign that we might need a napkin or more water. And this is was a theme I saw across the whole country. On the street in Saigon there are countless “security guards” and retail shop workers passing time by endlessly scrolling on TikTok. It makes you wonder how Vietnam is slowly modernizing and dealing with growth pains as they move to become an ever more productive society.
Indeed Vietnam has 5x’d their GDP since 1990, growing faster than any of their other southeast Asia counterparts, but still behind Asia in absolute terms. They started at Bangladesh level poverty, and now are in the same realm as countries like the Philippines and Thailand. Their growth has been through privatization of business and migration of the population to urban areas. But clearly they are experiencing growth pains reaching the next level.
The city traffic in Hanoi and Saigon is still notoriously “Vietnam”, with motorcyclists weaving between cars, trucks, and pedestrians. A local barber told us that they spent an hour commuting into the city every day on their motorcycle because housing was too expensive in the city. And although Saigon celebrated opening their first ever subway line just after we left, the country still has a long way to go in terms of public infrastructure.
And then Japan
We traveled to Japan on the second half of the trip and it was immediately a breathe of fresh air (quite literally given the AQI levels in Hanoi / Saigon). This was the first time I visited in 10 years and quickly realized why everyone is currently visiting Japan. The magical difference between Japan and other countries is just really clean streets, great public infrastructure, incredible restaurants in high density areas, and somehow even better service than Vietnam with less workers.
I felt like Vietnam was crazy cheap. Three baristas would spend 10 minutes carefully perfecting the temperature and foam for a $2 coffee in Vietnam. But then in Japan they were doing the same thing and the coffee was….$3?! So as an American, a lot of the pricing felt similarly cheap now given the value of the Yen. I noticed quite a bit of Chinese tourists in addition to Americans walking around. And funnily enough they had to resort to speaking English as well in certain situations as a lingua franca. I was curious to see how the locals felt about the rise in tourism in their country.
You walk around a city like Tokyo and you think….man why is everything better here than in San Francisco? Japan can both build housing and be open to immigration. They easily allow anyone to get licenses to start businesses and zoning laws that create both quiet residential areas and busy business zones walking distance from each other. And of course the public transportation is so well designed that the necessity for a car is so low across the entire country.
But it’s not like Japan doesn’t have their own problems. The average salary in Japan is $6 million yen per year which equivalents to around $40K/year, but that doesn’t take in the much larger disparity in white collar professions. I met a friend in Tokyo who just beat out hundreds of other Googlers that wanted to internally transfer to the Tokyo team but did so at the expense of being paid 40% of his original salary. Another friend I met up with, his wife previously worked at a hot startup in NYC as well and is now being paid 30% of her original executive salary. And while I think it’s pretty clear where the bottlenecks exist in places like Vietnam with a 30% college education rate and low English literacy, you’re seeing more cultural problems in Japan that have contributed to the plateau and stagnation over the years.
So I don’t think the end result of any stagnating country or region like Europe or Japan is to become America’s Disney Land where we visit over the summer, trash the country, and then head back home to make money in our own isolated horrible public transit laden lives. But traveling does make you see the differences and enjoy basking in the positives of other countries. Especially the food when it’s Asia.
My New Year’s Resolution is Start a Bit More Boring
But just for a month. I’m trying my second annual Month to Monk challenge, which is exactly what it sounds like. Live like a monk which I believe means no social media, no alcohol, no weed and drugs, and no coffee (but I think Monks drink tea). If anyone wants to join me - please let me know! Abstinence is better together.
Last year was the first year that I stopped nomading after three years and ended up buying a home in San Francisco. And a lot of my memories were of myself staring at a blank page or outside my window, biding time thinking of things to write about while my focus timer was counting down. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that I was working quite a bit. But I didn’t create as much “newness” in my life.
Therefore two things come to mind that clash with my resolve to do Month to Monk. I'm not sure if my intention is to strip everything away so I can embrace the boredom of life. Or it's realizing that once I strip life of all the easy dopamine activities, I’m more motivated to plan a full itinerary of in-person or novel events that social media or other substances might be regularly holding me back from.
Attention is our greatest resource and I believe part of me is just trying to understand where it eventually all goes. But at the end of the day, switching things up for a month is always a nice way to keep things interesting.
Things To Share
The Japanese salaryman concept is both somehow funny and incredibly sad at the same time. Patrick Mckenzie was interviewed back in 2018 about his work building Indie projects in Japan but more interestingly told a few funny stories as salaryman engineer for six years. One notable story was how his boss responded to his request for more autonomy by saying he could do so when Patrick turned 54 and became CEO of an American subsidiary of their corporation. Another about how one of the best engineers that he ever knew decided to delete his entire side project from existence after talking to his wife the day before release. Part of the framing here is that taking business risks is almost akin to suicide in Japanese culture. And that’s a hard cultural barrier to change.
Tim Ferriss on always seeking more awe in the new year. I've been interested in increasing my time dilation of life. Every year feels like it's passing by faster and faster. And part of that is due to the way we live and get comfortable with routines. And part of that is because we're experiencing less new things every single year. What new things can we experience to make sure we enjoy our lives?
Dwarkesh Patel has some great notes on his recent travels to China. One bit was his travel to ChongQing that I continue to hear about as a great city to check out for it’s cyberpunk type of architecture. Funnily enough he seems to get a good amount of local chatting done because Chinese people love taking pictures with foreigners but unfortunately has to deal with the language barrier. I myself never find myself chatting with locals when I head back. And if I do so, we mostly talk about how I think my Chinese is bad and they think it’s pretty good for being an American.
This 2025 Market Outlook from Quantian’s Newsletter is not financial advice but I still sold some BTC after reading it. I’m getting PTSD from the end of 2021 / beginning of 2022 and while I tell myself I’m not in it to time the markets, we’re riding a high that’s hard to imagine will sustain itself all year.