In lots of northern climates, going out for a walk during winter sucks. It's cold, dark and slippery. The winter landscape is cool to look at for a few days sure but after that it just becomes depressing.

This. I live in the American Midwest. I absolutely hate the winters here. If you're the subset of people who love winter sports it can be great, but I can't bring myself to enjoy them despite living here my whole life.

The weird thing is, these kinds of videos actually stress me out, because they remind me of the fact that I'm sitting in my tiny apartment watching someone else getting out and seeing the world. The more I watch, the more I ask myself: is this ever going to end? Am I going to break out of this preexisting bubble of just being content with what's on my screen, a mentality that I'd already lived out for years before the pandemic?

The places I walk around lose their charm after a while, since I don't drive or live in a large city. It feels like a wasteland at times. A pretty wasteland. But it's pretty empty and alone at tim

And especially when it comes to Japan, I just can't get over the fact that I can't get enough time to see the country. No company is going to hire you on the basis that you'd prefer to live overseas, and of course the pandemic has set back the process by a couple of years. But each time I went to Japan, I wondered why I wasn't living there yet, personally. It's a stupid feeling that refuses to exit my mind, no matter how much I debate myself over it. They don't prefer to hire people above age 30, and they cancelled last year's JLPT, so every time I'm reminded of the fact that I'm quickly running out of time to accomplish one of my goals, it stresses me out, big time. I believe I possess a lot of the things that specifically make it hard to gain entry, like a college degree and reasonable proficiency in the language, but not... connections.

Unless you had a specific career you wanted to pursue in Japan, why not focus on Western companies with offices in Japan instead? The culture is closer to that of Western culture supposedly, so you may not need to deal with the idiosyncrasies. Or you could just do fully remote internet-based work. Lots of tech work can work just fine entirely remote and on an entirely different timezone

I just watch them in the background while doing something else which I can't do while walking.