Back in 2022 I did a full year of One Second Everyday, or 1SE. You can watch it here if you'd like. I'd been trying to do 1SE for years but could never build the habit of turning it into an actual daily activity. The closest I got was when I lived in Japan, but it was also peak Covid so finding novel ways of capturing each day was hard and seeing so many blank days was demotivating. By the end of 2022 I was ready to be done with the challenge, as proud as I was of it. I hadn't intended to do a full year, and I think that's why it worked for me. I happened to be walking around the reservoir near my parents house and I knew my life was going to change in big ways that year (I moved to Korea!). It was literally January 1st and I made the snap decision to use the app and see how much I could capture - and it ended up being every single day.
I haven't done it since. Last year you may remember I wanted to take a photo every day, but it dropped off around the time I moved house and I realized how much harder a photo a day is over a second. A second of a video is nothing, it's gone in a flash. But a photo needs to stand on it's own, and that's harder. I loved looking back over my 2022 video, so I decided on a whim to try again this year. Unfortunately it wasn't so serendipitous as to be on January 1st, it was a random day in March, but I figure any time is a good time to start anything. I kept the challenge to myself for a while so I didn't build myself up for failure, but I've not skipped a day yet so here's May and June!
Looking back through 2022 made me feel so nostalgic. I've actually found myself missing and romanticizing my time in Korea a lot lately, not to minimize the painful moments which far outweighed the good but I can recognize that there were also pockets of happiness there. Traveling into central Seoul for the day and buying cute stickers for my journal from Hot Tracks. Walking home from the train station late at night. The two elderly Korean ladies who went out of their way to tell me they thought I looked beautiful in my Emily Temple Cute dress. Going to the stationery store after work. Eating a bulgogi burger at MaccyD's (🤤) I've been reminiscing like this for a while, and at first it confused me until I realized that although I may not have been happy there, I was at least living a life more closely aligned with my values. Now I'm more comfortable, but my life feels emptier and the anxiety is more persistent. There's a lesson there. My time in Korea will always be tinged with sadness, but that doesn't mean I have to give up on my adventures.
All of the discourse around Labubus and Pop Mart has enhanced a lot of these feelings too. I hate to be all 'I was here before it was cool', but literally!! I discovered Pop Mart when I was in Korea, there was a huge store in the basement of a mall I used to frequent but it was the Robo Shop vending machines that I loved the most. You can see some of my collection from then here, I was mostly focused on the Disney boxes but I also had a few Labubu and SkullPandas. I've never bought a lot, and always only boxes where I'd be happy with any design so I'm never disappointed, but I've always been a trinket girly (just look at my shelves in the back of my outfit photos!) so it figured I'd always love this stuff. I particularly love Labubu as they have a similar mischievous energy and art style to Moomin, which is something I grew up with and my favourite series of absolutely anything.
It made me really happy at first seeing them gain more popularity and become more mainstream, but it's really turned into contempt with the way it's all progressed. From adult men assaulting Pop Mart staff to get Labubus just to resell, to people's weird attitudes towards collectors. You can't talk about Labubus or Pop Mart at all now without someone clapping back about 'landfill', 'overconsumption', or trying to make it weird that adults are buying them like grown adult men haven't been collecting Lego, Star Wars toys, and Funko Pops for years. And that's what gets me, the blatant sexism of it all. I think there is absolutely a conversation to be had around micro trends and there's a subset of people going nuts over Labubu right now that can apply to, but it's also become just as much of a trend to hate on it and be mean just to try and feel morally superior. The growing lack of empathy people have in general feels like a much more pressing issue to me, with much more far reaching consequences than a few toys. In the current climate if a plush key chain makes someone feel good, just let them? It's not hard to be kind, and it's really not that deep. Just let people be happy. I'll be glad when it's all died down and I can enjoy my collection in peace again!
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