I had a friend about a decade back that I would always implore to go to Japan with me for a short (2 week) trip after graduation.

Her and I went back a long way - same smallish city we both originally grew up, similar majors in university, chatted always regardless of the physical distance between us.

Her upbringing was a bit more modest than mine, but her intellect and abilities were on par if not slightly better than mine. Out of school, she was always more career oriented and felt that she owed the medium-sized outsourcing company which hired her (job market in China is horribad, even now, let alone back in the day) to do a manual accountant job for a slightly above average salary.

Her job wasn't that tough, most definitely not a 996 - most months you just clock in, do nothing for most of the time, only grind a bit more when the quarterly statements come in and need to be filed.

She always said she wanted to go, but she never actually wanted to go, despite me pleading and begging, because she felt the workplace would look down upon her if she took time off, and that it's career suicide to do this.

I ended up visiting Japan 3 times without her over the years, each time asking again and laying out the reasons why spending her youth and selling her dreams off for a bargain bin price, bound to a company that didn't exist until 5 years ago and won't 10 years from now, is stupid.

She had many excuses and reasons not to travel - we're super young, there's time, time is working for us, not against us - it's literally just 4 hours away by plane, it's not going anywhere.

"You always pick the worst timing" "I'm closing the quarterlies, I don't work a lot but I can't go NOW when you want me to go with you" "I'm not gonna stay in a hostel, I need my clean space and time alone at night and I'm not gonna spend extra money when it's holiday season and when half of China is going" "I don't want the bosses to take it against me that I'm taking time off at the busiest periods of the year, they'll never live it down" "There's other visa-free destinations we can go to, doesn't have to be Japan even if I like to go with you" November 2019 comes around, we make plans for the winter holidays, and then China ends up in lockdown for a good 3 1/2 years. Obviously, no traveling took place. She advanced ever so slightly in her career in those few years since. She's visited nothing except Thailand in the past 10 years.

She sometimes, not often, but sometimes brings up and muses on the thoughts of if life would have played out differently if she took the trip, got fired, and found something much better, or perhaps met someone on that or some other trip and moved abroad.

Moral of the story:

Don't wait for the perfect conditions to appear, go headfirst into the sub-par ones and make them perfect.

Originally posted as a tweet in February 2025.