Being an employee for a speech recognition company that, until recently, always hired a lot of interns from various countries, allows me to count a large variety of people as friends. I know people from all over the world, and I've kept in touch with a bunch of them after their internship here in Japan was over. Whenever we talk about what they're doing now and how they feel about it I always get the same answer.
Life slows down after you get a full-time job. Life becomes more serious. We get our own apartment, we furnish it with nice new furniture, and we live our lives just like everybody else. We go to work every weekday, then we realize that work is not as much fun and a lot more stressful than university. Then we realize that we have to make new friends, cause all the people we knew from university have mostly disappeared or don't have time for us anymore cause they are also starting their own full-time job.
It takes us time to get used to this. Some people adapt quickly and become content with their situation, perhaps because they are striving for something better in the future, and they've already decided their plan. Others might not be happy with it, but they have no choice, cause we all need money to survive. And an even different kind of person might not be happy with the kind of normal life, no matter how luxurious he can make it. But of all the friends I have made here, we all have one thing in common: we love the time that we spent in Japan during our time at AK speech solutions, and we miss it a lot.
If we all feel that this kind of situation is preferable over our current full-time job, shouldn't the task fall to us to improve this society? We should work hard not to be a boring salary(wo)man, but to create a society where we can enjoy ourselves just like we did before. If it's us, then I'm sure we can do it.
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