Existential

“There is scarcely any passion without struggle.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“The next year will be a wonderful year,” I told my friend, Wilson, when we parted at Shibuya station. Wilson is a good friend of mine, whom I met only a couple of weeks ago. He’s an Asian American and spent the last six years in Japan as an English teacher. That was December 29th, only three days away from the end of 2019.

Personally, 2019 was a heavy year. Job change, struggle, love, and regrets. Like many other years, I have been through a lot. But the silver lining is that it didn’t end in tears at least. But at the same time, it didn’t end in the best way either.

Every time we embrace the new year, we hope for a better future. It feels like it’s the new beginning despite the fact that it’s just the continuation of reality.

When I was younger, I always dreamed of a bright future and could hardly wait to see what the future holds for me. But as I grew older, I gradually started to realize that life is not that simple. It’s complicated because we’re living in such an imperfect world, where we have to face social expectations, peer pressures, long hours of labor, and many other conflicts.

Not only our personal problems, but there are many other unignorable issues we have to confront sooner or later such as global climate change, food-supply crisis, marine pollution, and political and economic conflicts surround the world. They are elephant in the room, and they barely come up to our daily conversation as far as I know. Yeah, it might be better off talking about Taylor Swift and her relationship drama with your friends, or last night’s baseball games. But those aforementioned issues are existential, and we, as mankind, have to act immediately together.

Here, let’s go back to what I told Wilson at the station: “The next year will be a wonderful year”. Do you really think so? Even though I told him so, a part of me was a little skeptical. Yeah, of course, I’ll do my best to make this year a wonderful year, so as you. But the current news headlines don’t allow me to have even a slight hope for a better future.

Our world should have been full of wonder. Many beautiful and amazing things should be waiting for us to discover. And every year, we should be able to dream of a better future. But somewhat, all I see is just our world collapsing into chaos every second, every day, every year.

So, this year, I want to document how the world surrounding us changes and possibly figure out a way to be able to get through those chaotic days. Best wishes for 2020.

Finally, here are some shots I photographed in Yokohama with my Pixel 4’s fish eye lens and my Canon DSLR.