Escape Velocity
This is me.
I’m 45. I have the dumb. I look vaguely like Santa Claus after a rough weekend.
I’m moving to Japan.
Not like, right now. Right now I have three hundred bucks in the bank and barely wakarimasu the Nihon-go. But that’s the goal:
In ten years, live in Japan.
Spend at least two years fuckin’ about in Fukuoka.
Buy a house for zero dollars and figure out how to make it not suck.
Start a business that basically runs its own damn self.
Touch a weird deer if I get a chance.
Have one of these adorable little guys fight a punchy rock on my behalf.
I like to keep my goals kinda grounded, y’know? Realistic.
“But Kristoffer!” I hear no one say. “Why would you want to move to Japan? Are you some sort of weeb?”
“Yes,” I answer anyway. “I am a weeb, but being a huge dork is only part of the reason!”
I could cite all of the normal reasons - incredible safety, efficient infrastructure, the rich culture, the beautiful language, the opportunities afforded by young people flocking to cities and an aging population. It mostly comes down to two things, though.
Time and food.
As an outsider (as someone who has never even had a chance to visit) Japan has always felt like a place that exists outside the normal flow of time, to me. It’s a little pocket dimension where hypermodernity meets centuries-old tradition meets the best parts of the 1990s. There is a sense of timelessness and stillness that I think has a pretty good shot at fixing me.
And I want to spend every evening at a different izakaya in Fukuoka eating whatever they got cookin’.
The Problem:
I live in the third-most-expensive city in Canada. I share custody of a 13-year-old who needs things like ‘pants.’ I’m making more money than I ever thought I’d need, and I’m barely scraping by. And I got a nasty case of that ADHD, which means when I got a craving for a box of chicken wings from 7-Eleven at midnight, a fairly substantial part of me thinks paying $25 for those to be delivered to my face hole is worth it.
I have a lot of groundwork to lay, and the first part of that foundation is figuring out how to escape the traditional bonds of money by making so much of it that I never have to think about it again.
This is not my first time trying to figure this specific problem out. I’ve taken a couple of half-hearted shots at starting some sort of passive income caper.
Drop-shipping. I tried to get in on that AliExpress gravy train and ended up with a pretty decent knife and a Shopify subscription that cost more than it made.
0/10 would not recommend.
Art Crime: I tried to give ChatGPT $50 to leverage Sam Altman’s wholesale theft of all human knowledge, culture, and wisdom to make me some dollars. It lost all of the money and I ended up doing a lot of chores.
2/10 at least I learned some stuff about eCommerce, I guess
Books: I’d already written a couple of terrible books. You can find The Librarian and Strong and Free on this site if you want to. Fair warning: they’re terrible. I wrote a couple more and tried to gather an audience on Royal Road. I didn’t see the sort of massive success that I was hoping for, but some people have liked them enough to throw some dollars at me. I’ve made $25 in a year of writing. The most profitable venture thus far.
8/10, fun experience, not going to pay my rent
??? This is where we’re at now, and I’m starting to run out of ideas.
I’m hunting for a new caper. New ideas. New ways to let loose these shackles of currency and debt with as little actual work as humanly possible!
Four Hour Work Week, I’m coming for you! I’ll master your secrets so I can buy a little zero-dollar akiya and sleep next to a pile of black mold while I figure out how to make the place habitable!