The Café with One Seat

There's a café in Japan I think about more often than I should. It has one seat. Maybe two. The owner clearly built it for himself, not for customers. You walk in, and you can tell — this is a man who spent decades doing something else, saved enough, and then created the exact life he wanted. A small room, good beans, a pour-over setup, and silence. No ambition to franchise. No growth strategy. Just coffee, made well, in a space that fits one person's definition of enough. I visited it on a short trip, stood there for maybe twenty minutes, and haven't stopped thinking about it since.

I think about it because it's the opposite of how I've lived.

I came to Korea with nothing. Not in the inspirational-biography sense — I mean I had no money, no connections, no language, no plan beyond "this has to be better." My first year was factory work. I'd wake up at five in the morning in the middle of winter while everyone in the dormitory was still sleeping, ride to a job site, and if there was no work that day, I'd come back and go to language class. I did this to save enough for Korean courses. After the courses came debt. After the debt came more factory work to pay it off. Then more savings for more courses. Then a low-paying office job for two years to save for a master's degree. Each step felt enormous at the time. Looking back, I was just trying to reach the starting line where everyone else was already standing.

That's the part that stays with me. Not the cold mornings or the physical work — I can handle those. What stays is the feeling of watching other people study while I carried boxes. Kids my age going to university, learning, building careers, while I was calculating how many more months of overtime I needed before I could afford tuition. I told myself I'd catch up. I didn't know yet that catching up is a race with no finish line.

I did catch up, technically. I finished a master's degree at one of Korea's top universities. Got another bachelor's degree on top of it. Became a senior developer. Built systems used by thousands of people. Learned to architect solutions for teams of twenty-five. Started freelancing from scratch and built it into a consultancy with clients from the US, UK, Australia — my own company, something I never imagined on those cold mornings. Got permanent residency after years of waiting. By any reasonable measure, I made it.

But the feeling didn't change. The goalpost just moved. I used to envy people who were studying. Now I envy people who have their own business. I used to worry about finding a decent job. Now I worry about AI making the job irrelevant. The fear is always the same shape — I worked so hard to get here, and it could all disappear. It just wears different clothes depending on the year.

I come by this fear honestly. I've watched my relatives lose everything. Not once — twice. First when they moved from Uzbekistan to Russia. People who had businesses, apartments, status — starting from zero in a new country, new language, new rules. Then again when they came to Korea, where zero felt even lower because they couldn't read the signs or ask for directions. I watched people I love become shadows of who they were. Not because they were weak, but because they'd built everything on a foundation that couldn't move with them.

I know someone — a relative — who spent their whole life working. Just working. No hobbies, no friendships outside of colleagues, no identity beyond the job. Every time they moved countries, they lost everything except the ability to show up and work. And when even that became harder, there was nothing left. I see in them what I'm terrified of becoming — someone who ran so hard for so long that when the running stopped, there was nothing underneath.

So I keep running. I study English, thinking maybe better language skills will open one more door. I freelance nights and weekends, building a client base that doesn't depend on my employer. I study architecture patterns so my value shifts from writing code to designing systems. I look at job markets in Singapore, Vietnam, Japan — not because I want to leave, but because I want to know I could. And sometimes I think about learning to be a barista — not because I need a career change, but because I want something that's just for me, something that has nothing to do with screens or deadlines.

I compare myself constantly to people who started ahead of me. People who came to Korea on scholarships, who went straight to university, who never had to calculate whether they could afford both lunch and bus fare in the same week. I know the comparison is unfair. I know my path gave me things theirs didn't — resilience, resourcefulness, a very specific understanding of what it feels like to have nothing. But knowing something is irrational doesn't make it stop. I surround myself with people who've achieved more than I have, because it pushes me forward. And then I feel worse because I haven't achieved enough. It's the same engine, producing both the fuel and the exhaust.

And then there's AI. I spent years — not months, years — clawing my way from factory floors to a job I'm actually good at. And now I watch machines do in seconds what took me a decade to learn. I've mostly stopped writing code myself. The AI does most of it. I'm learning to sell, to consult, to be the person who understands problems rather than the one who types solutions. It's probably the right move. But it feels like someone moved the finish line again, right when I was about to cross it.

I know what I'm doing. I'm hedging. Every new skill, every new language, every new market I research — it's another exit route, another parachute. Because I saw what happens to people who only have one. My relatives had one country, one language, one career. My mother had one identity. When it broke, they broke. I'm trying to be unbreakable by being everything at once — developer, freelancer, consultant, student, potential barista, potential café owner, potential expat in five different countries. And I'm starting to realize that trying to be everything is its own kind of exhaustion.

That Japanese café owner doesn't hedge. He doesn't have a backup plan for his backup plan. He has one room, one craft, one life. And it works — not because he's naive, but because he decided that enough is enough. That the race is over. That he doesn't need another credential, another market, another safety net. Just good coffee, made slowly, in a space that's his.

I'm not there yet. Most mornings, I still wake up calculating — what should I learn next, what's the market doing, am I falling behind. But some mornings are different. Some mornings I make myself a pour-over — weigh the beans, heat the water to exactly the right temperature, pour in slow circles the way I've taught myself. I sit in my rocking chair on the balcony, look at the sea, and for a few minutes I don't think about what I should be doing or who I should be catching up with. The coffee is good. The view is good. The silence is good. And for a few minutes, that's enough.

Maybe that's not a café in Japan. Maybe it's just a chair in Busan. But it's mine.

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