Updates (April 22, 2025)

After realizing life after working, rubbing shoulders with everyone and understanding how the world really works, it becomes really apparent what you have to do for health and life from now on. This is beyond school and normal work … This is old stuff. After youth, after young adulthood, after middle age … This is after there is no other recourse.

I did not grow up normally understanding educated life and “hard, hard” thinking work.

Life is to do what you like and keep at it while maintaining your smarts. Explore, learn and enjoy life in Canada.

There is no other ways to live life. Just keep at what you are doing because everything else is walls.

You might sag, sway time to time but if you really coup yourself up in your room kind of minding your own business that is all there is for hope, goodness and good feels. Everyone outside is stoppage. You have to maintain some kind of growing regiment.

I learned this late in life. I had to go into my interests and grow and meet the great people in my life.

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Interesting thing about doing this type of work.

The range and depth is so high. You have this thinking and doubt.

But at the end of the day, you still have to continue doing what you like for pride, growth and enjoyment. Everything outside it seems trouble and possibly wasteful after middle-age. Time is ticking.

Also when you get to this point, your people will notice.

You slaved away for X number of years as a man. And when you reach the end, you have something different and unique in value that is worth a lot.

As a Vietnamese man in his 40s, it took me a while. Lots of narrow and off tangent thinking to reaching this point. This is not young thinking no more.

I did not socialize with Vietnamese when I was young so I was lost.

But also I still did my thing.

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After middle-age, life is weird.

I worked with a number of people and realize it is OK now.

I understand how the world. Now is time to just do what you like and sometimes veer off and relax.

My brother and sisters don’t know this because they did not understand the diversity of thinking in Scarborough.

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I did not know there was more growth after middle-age.

After the highs of working thinking, thinking, thinking jobs, I see new people about.

The fog has went away.

Life is all about learning and growing until whatever. I understand the world now. It is just idle working until whatever.

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What is life living in Vietnam or elsewhere besides the West?

When I was living and working in Vietnam in 2016, the goal of some Vietnamese was to leave Vietnam and strive for life abroad.

Vietnamese knew they could do their staple jobs known to them in the West at least.

But what about other work?

It seems to really strive in the West I see now is to do what you love so well that you become really good at it and no one can replace you.

But also fall back on your culture to have that sense of community too.

I needed both living out here in Canada.

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Do I have a sense of community here in the West? But as a first gen Vietnamese-North American?

Or am I just winging it each day?