Living Life

What I'm most passionate about, you ask? Life... That's what I'm most passionate about. The crazy thing is that at one point in my life I wasn't passionate about living. I didn't want to continue to live. I didn't see a future for myself or felt like any of my dreams I wanted to accomplish; that I could accomplish so what’s the point of life. If I couldn’t live the life I wish to live then what was the point of living. I didn’t want to be stuck at a job, or a place I wasn’t happy at for the majority of my life. Growing up we’re taught that we can be anything we put our minds to. We see the world as colorful with no mistakes, but the older we get the more that colorful world turns grimmer and becomes grey. Our outlook on the world isn’t the same as when we were bright-eyed children. The dreams we thought we could accomplish become just what they were; just dreams.

We focus on the things in life as to how we can make more money instead of what makes us happy. Chasing your dream isn't always guaranteed to happen but getting a job at least that's promising. You’ll have an income coming in, that gives you the money that pays for your food, clothes, housing, and sometimes if lucky you'll have money left over to buy the material things that bring temporary joy.

For the past 11 years since I was young, I have wanted to become a Youtuber. I would follow this passion but soon give up, it was an on and off again pattern of me trying than giving up. I ended up moving to Korea when I had just turned 19 in 2018 for college. I decided to document my life while living there. One of my videos where I was decorating my apartment started to grow. It started out having 10,000 views the first week I uploaded it. It was shocking to me the next month it got over 100,000 views. It took off more than I expected. I ended up making a little over $1000 off of that video and gained a few thousand subscribers from it. My channel was doing okayish after that video. I would make maybe around $200 a month from youtube. It wasn’t much but the fact I got money off something I enjoyed doing was enough for me. It took a few months after that, for my channel to hit the youtube lottery. I made a video called ‘’Making Kimchi with my Korean Mother” I did the video with a friend's mom that was like a mother to me. It took me 6 hours to edit the video I edited it with lots of care. When I found myself watching the video over and over again. I knew I had made something I was proud of and I could finally post it. The video took off more than I expected. That one video went viral which caused all my other videos to take off as well. I had gained 5,000+ subscribers in just one day. My subscribers went from 20,000 to 40,000+ in less than a month. I was finally doing something I always wanted to do. It took me 11 years but I finally did it!

Around this time I was making $1,200+ every month off of AdSense on my videos. That’s way more than I had ever made working at any job I had. It took hours and hours to make those videos but I had fun doing so, so it didn’t feel like it was hard work compared to working the 179 hours it would take making $7.25 at my old job McDonald’s to make the same amount. I was happy, but then again I wasn't happy. I was happy because I finally was doing what I always wanted, but I didn’t want to be stuck on catering to just Korean content. Especially since I was going to be leaving Korea soon after those videos had got popular. After returning back home I tried to make the videos I wanted. Everyone wanted the Korean content that I had long moved on from. My subscribers started to decrease and people didn’t watch anymore. I decided to start a new channel and start back over again making the content I wanted to make.

Life is about taking risks and living the life you want to live. Even though it took me 11 years to build my channel up, if I wasn’t happy about my channel becoming a Korean lifestyle channel then start over. That’s why I became passionate about living life but passionate about living it the way I want to live it. Chasing my dreams even when others say there's no hope. Chasing the life I dreamed about even when it gets hard. Gave me the passion to keep moving on in life. That’s why I became so passionate about life because I didn’t want to just live a life to live, I wanted to live a life full of life, so when I’m much older in life I can say at least I tried and did this one thing I always wanted to do. We tend to live in regret and wondering what if, or maybe I should have done this. I don't want to do that in life when I'm older. Having a passion for living the life I want gave me the passion to want to live again.