Not one to stay still for too long, the next chapter of my life is now planned. Much to many people's confusion, myself and the girlfriend have decided to travel to Seoul to teach English. The more I think about it, the more I'm happy with the decision, although it does seem a bit crazy. My impression of people who went to Asia to teach was generally negative, basically unemployable people who had no other options. But here I am, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Since getting back to Dublin, I've had so many interesting conversations about the state of Ireland at the moment, it does get a bit depressing, I rarely hear a positive word about it, but there are some positives. The worst thing is seeing people having to constantly reassess their goals and ambitions. The best part of youth is that there is a belief that anything is possible, a belief that success will come with hard work, but an understanding that everything will work out and the perfect future lies ahead of us. The people who were supposed to be our future stars have been beaten down in the last year or two, Ireland should be known as the land of bastards and begrudgers sometimes. I was talking to a young Irish fashion designer last week who finally had that realisation that she was going to get off her ass and start to pursue the work she dreamed of doing. She handed in the letter of resignation to her job that morning, had a cover shoot in the pipeline for a major newspaper and wanted to open her own boutique. Most of all, she was finally happy and she felt free. Someone like that needs support from everyone, we need to get behind our young talented people and make sure they achieve greatness and are not stuck in dead end jobs.


There is the debate about young people holding out for a career they would be happy in. I had it last night with someone who knew he could get anyone a job in two weeks, and really disagreed with people on the dole. The Irish Times also had an article on this last week about lower end jobs that the Irish are not happy to do. I don't really worry about people holding out for the right job, it is their life and if they are happy with what they do, they will happily work harder, be promoted, earn more and contribute more in taxes to account for what they took from the economy while unemployed. And in the case of the fashion designer, she is theoretically creating more jobs and so she should have the utmost support from the government, the banks and her peers. If we are supposed to become a land of entrepreneurs, we'll have to at least start pretending soon enough, there are so many young people out there who want to know that it will be safe to embark on their own adventure and to know that we will all support them.