Before I went on this winter’s Japan trip I told myself that the new year wouldn’t properly begin until after I had cycled Atsugi. I somehow also decided to pile on all my mental issues to be solved on this particular day, when I am in a good mindset to think about all that’s happened in the past year. I turned 40, lost both my parents, had some health scares and hit an important financial milestone. What a year..

Where has all the time gone? All these events certainly made me reflect on my life a lot. It’s been suggested to me that I lack ikigai. I don’t think I’ve ever had a clear purpose in all of my life (except once, briefly, a long time ago). The events of this year spurred a certain unrealistic sense of urgency in me, in that I somehow expected myself to find my ikigai on this trip. “Sure, let’s just get that pesky little problem out of the way so we can start the next year clean”. That kind of attitude. Obviously I was stupid about that, and I did not manage to find meaning in life in one day.

While I have no answers yet for any of the major issues I am facing, I think I’ve gotten better at pinpointing the issues. Ikigai is certainly a big thing for me, but it’s also an issue that’s waaaay at the upper end of the hierarchy of needs. It’s not something that’s on fire, and I can take my time on finding the right answer. I’m learning not to conflate my quest for ikigai with more practical issues like the “where-should-we-live” problem. It’s about time we found something nicer for our little family, and perhaps 2025 will be a good year to find our dream house. A third thing that gets conflated into this problem mix for me is how I tend to feel like a completely different person when I’m in the Netherlands, Japan or the UK. Integrating those parts of myself better is another thing I’d like to improve on next year.

So my mental image of cycling Atsugi wasn’t as glorious as it was last year. I was horribly underdressed from the cold, freezing my ass off, and the electric bike’s battery ran out before the slightly steeper bit, so I was pretty miserable when I came across the scene from the photo above. It’s one of my favorite roads in Atsugi, the one that leads to the mountains and lake Miyagase. There I found this old man painting the scene, and, looking at him, all my cold and misery just faded away and I felt happy. It was strange. My grandfather was a painter. Perhaps it’s something I can also find purpose in in the future.

I wish you all well. There will be more to come, and it will be better. Don’t be in a hurry.

Another year has passed. Another year in which I haven’t written much, and now there is too much to write. It’s not often that a year has ended so different from me than it started. This was one of those years, for better and worse.

I’m in Onomichi right now. I want to write “right back where it all started”, but it’s not quite that. It is a place that I have vivid memories of, though. Not in the least because it’s the start of one of the best cycling routes in all of Japan. This marks the third time I’ve been here, and it’s the first time I’ve been here in winter. The first time was at a very turbulent stage of my life, in my younger, “wilder” years. I write “wilder” because I was never really all that wild, but I was definitely a very different person then than I am now.

Despite the Shimanami Kaidou being an absolutely gorgeous cycling route and easily one of the best in Japan if not all of the world, the second time I came here, I could not appreciate it, and I couldn’t figure out why. I had begun to build up my life in the UK and had taken a short week off to cycle Shikoku. And for some reason I just couldn’t appreciate it the beauty of it at all. It registered clearly to me that what I was seeing was beautiful, but I was devoid of the positive feelings that I remembered from when I went here the first time, and I felt terrible for it. Morose. Dead inside. Being unable to appreciate that beauty bothered me for many years after that.

The third time I went here – now – is the year in which both of my parents passed away. This fact still hasn’t fully registered with me. Some people I know experience grief as a massive but brief peak and then it goes away. For me, the initial impact of such a major event barely seems to register, or at least that’s what it appears like to those around me. But then it takes a long, long, loooong time for me to come to terms with it. I’m still a ways away from that.

Cycling the Shinamami Kaidou. Three times. The first time in my youth, too naive to know about the troubles in life. The second time, with all the weight of the world starting to creep up on me. The third time, after it’s all over, for better and worse. The road was beautiful this time. I enjoyed it very much.

Happy new year everyone. New things will keep happening.

Mom had struggled with lung cancer for the past few years. She’d done chemo and overcome it. But when she started feeling ill after dad died, it took the doctors a long time and a lot of scans to figure out that, while her lungs were still clean (well, minus all the COPD she also had), the cancer was now in her bones. From there, it went really quickly.

I have no fucking clue what else to write here. Life is miserable right now.

It’s odd how life just.. continues, as if nothing happened. My dad was always a huge presence in my life when I was growing up, and thanks to both my parents I have had a fantastic childhood. They never had a lot, and they gave me more than anyone could have expected from them. He was well known by everyone in town, and he was always kindhearted to everyone, even if they did not deserve it. He struggled with his health for the last few years, and it’s a relief for him and those around him that he’s no longer in constant pain.

I left my home country almost twenty years ago, but I’d been back plenty of times throughout the years, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. I definitely didn’t quite see eye to eye with him in the end. We had too many differences of opinion, and my dad was always “right”, so I didn’t much feel like sticking around for that. I’ve never regretted that decision, and I still don’t. This time, going back to my home town for the funeral, seeing what other people have built up there while I’ve been away, I don’t know how to feel about that. A part of me wishes that I’d also been a part of that, but another part of me knows that I have to make my own path. Just as one can not un-see things, one can not un-experience life, so I think that makes it very difficult for me to go back. I’m very glad to see people who are committed to a lifestyle, a person, a location, so thoroughly, but that is the kind of resolve and determination I just don’t feel about anything or any place, yet. Perhaps that will come later.

So, what next? We deal with the things that are thrown at us, and move on. Life will continue to happen. Let’s make the most of it.

Wear sunscreen.

I’m turning 40 this year. Insert cliché here. Because my past lives were all very real breakpoints in life I think turning 40 doesn’t affect me as much as it might others. If I had lived only one life, I would have a lifetime worth of things I still want to accomplish by now. Instead, I have two past lives’ worth of things that other versions of me wanted to accomplish, and I feel less emotionally attached to those things than I wish I would. I still want to cycle Japan, but it’s not a hobby that current-me would start. I still like going back to Holland, but I can definitely no longer call it my home.

I’d like to write a book. I’d like to build a computer game, from the ground up, by myself. I’d like to be at peace again, the way my past lives were. Despite having it better than ever, I’ve never worried as much as I do now. Though perhaps that’s finally starting to decrease a little. I don’t know if hitting 40, or other upcoming events in my life, will trigger a new life. For the moment at least, I want to make the most of my current life.

I’d write about public events or general content, but those posts tend to require a bit more time and preparation, especially in this day and age where the internet is getting more and more locked down and you can get “cancelled” for saying one wrong word. Blogging has become an ever increasing risk with lower and lower returns. I’d like to keep doing it, but things like the UK Online Safety Bill really make me wonder if it’s still worth it. Running a blog on your own domain with all kinds of cool features has never been easier from a technical point of view, but it’s just increasingly not worth it.

Callback to my post about Firefox vs Chrome: I’m still using both. On the desktop, behind the safety of a Pi Hole and several ad blocking extensions, I’ve completely switched back to Chrome and I love it. The UX just feels that tad bit sharper than Firefox. But on mobile, especially when I’m out of the house, Firefox is still my go-to browser. The lack of ad blockers in Chrome means that I frequently end up with three quarters of my tiny phone screen being filled with video ads and banner ads. That’s just terrible. Youtube has begun to disallow ad blockers on desktop, which is quite worrying in terms of setting a precedent. Enshittification is definitely a thing, and the internet we used to know is gone. If there is a place that preserves the freedom of the old internet I would love to know about it. Now’s the time to switch.

That came as quite a shock to me, even though I knew it shouldn’t. I know I’ve got health issues I should take better care of, but I always seem to get away with things as long as I occasionally do something healthy to counteract all the unhealthy things I’m also doing. That definitely seems over now. I’ll need to severely limit myself in what I eat and drink, otherwise I’m very likely to die. It’s as simple as that.

Initially, when I heard the diagnosis, I felt upset, because I didn’t want to lose what I had. I was happy with my life, I didn’t want to make changes. But now that I’ve thought about it, and now that it’s absolutely clear that it’s just necessary, it just seems fine to me. Just another thing I have to do to survive. I think I can adjust my mindset to accept the new reality, but only time will tell. Time never stops.

The reason I went with Firefox is because of its extensions, and its attitude towards free software. I fundamentally believe that software should be free, and having an open ecosystem for web technologies is something that Firefox contributes to, whereas (again, in my opinion) Chrome tries to take that away. Google would love nothing better for their users to be tightly tied into the Google ecosystem, which is an idea that I really dislike but at the same time benefit greatly from. Chrome’s sync for bookmarks, passwords etc. is just better than Firefox.

Another reason I wanted to switch is that, at the time, there were rumors that Chrome was going to completely get rid of ad blocking extensions in Chrome, and that would have been a dealbreaker for me. As of June 2023 this hasn’t happened though. I’ve also switched from an Android phone to an iOS phone during this time and have found the differences to be less, since both browsers use webkit underneath on iOS.

I’ll get to the core of why I’m switching back: Firefox annoys me. It’s just less user-friendly than Chrome. Here’s some things that Firefox gets wrong on mobile:

• I have a bookmark with the word ‘weather’ in the url, and a different site that I visit every day to check the weather for my area. Chrome is smart enough to present me with the site that I just visited first whenever I search for ‘weather’. Firefox insists on showing me a stale bookmark that I haven’t visited in years and I have to scroll down to actually to get to my recent sites.
• For some reason I’ve also seen the exact opposite behavior in Firefox as well, where I’ll have a bookmark for my online banking site that I want to go when I type ‘bank’, but because I’ve visited some obscure unrelated website that had ‘bank’ in the url, once, five years ago, I keep getting that recommendation rather than the bookmark I visit every month.
• Speaking of bookmarks, I’m probably old-school in this, but I have a lot of bookmarks. One thing I do a lot is bookmark a site on mobile to my bookmark toolbar and then later check it on desktop. Firefox mobile never remembers the last folder I saved my bookmark in, and it always expands all subfolders in all my bookmarks, so I have to scroll down for half an hour and read through every folder name to get to the toolbar folder. It sucks. Chrome usually gets this right and remembers the last folder you used, but if I recall correctly this behavior did vary during the last years or so, so it is or was not perfect either.
• Speaking of sync, I’ve occasionally had issues where the sync just didn’t happen and I sat at my desktop waiting for the bookmark to pop up. Chrome’s is pretty much instant.
• On Firefox sometimes the most frequently visited sites on the start page just disappear. I don’t recall ever seeing this in Chrome.
• Firefox crashes a lot, both on Android and on iOS. I’ll try to navigate to a site and the entire app just goes away and performs a load-from-scratch routine when I next tap the app icon. Again not something I’ve ever seen Chrome do.
• Firefox is just laggy when the phone is on power-saving mode. Seriously, it takes several seconds to close a tab on my iPhone 12? That’s very, very poor. As usual, Chrome’s UX is lightning fast even in power saving mode.
• Controversial ding: Firefox doesn’t know as much about me, so its recommendations are worse. I know, I know.. I say I care about privacy, but I have to admit I just like Chrome’s recommend articles way better than whatever Pocket comes up with. Though on that note, Chrome sucks in a different way: whenever it thinks I’m interested in “Thing A”, it will start recommend me all the local newspaper sites that write about “Thing A”, and I have to blacklist those sites one by one. I really don’t care about what some local town 200 miles away writes about the topic, but Chrome will happily recommend the same thing from a different local town 210 miles away instead.

And here’s a couple more things that Firefox gets wrong on Windows 10 compared to Chrome:

• Firefox mutes tabs once, Chrome mutes sites and remembers it for all eternity.
• Firefox sucks at multi monitor. It never remembers its window size correctly when you have two monitors with different display scales.
• Site compatibility: this is not a huge thing, but some sites just look better in Chrome. I’m not sure what it is: different fonts, minor layout differences, but you can tell. It’s not a good thing because it means the web is over-optimizing for Chrome, but it’s just the way it is.

I know things may improve. I was really hoping that they would, but right now I think Chrome just has more (human) resources to throw at these things, and that, in my opinion, makes it an obviously better browser than Firefox (disclaimer: for my purposes). Perhaps I’ll try this experiment again in the future, but I think the only thing that would make me do that is if Chrome somehow becomes worse. Then again, given the kind of anti-user behavior that Google thinks is ok these days, it’s entirely possible that Chrome will become worse year of year, but for now Chrome is definitely still the clear winner for me. Let’s revisit this in a couple of years and see whether my trust in Chrome turned out to be misplaced or valid.