Essay · 10 / 08 / 2026
Unspoken Rules
London, August 2026 — three weeks before leaving for university.
Over the past five years — leaving the Japanese school system at fifteen, leaving home at eighteen, living across five cities in two countries, working in hospitality — I learned a set of unspoken rules about how the world actually works, as opposed to how it says it works. This essay is in three parts: what I learned, what it cost, and what I intend to do with it.
I. What I Learned
People judge by situation, not by substance. Society repeats that nationality, occupation, and appearance do not matter. Hospitality taught me otherwise. Night after night, I watched rooms full of successful people measure each other before a word was spoken — job title, passport, clothes, priced within seconds. Everyone in those rooms denied doing it. Everyone did it.
And only the present state renders. Your current form is almost everything; nobody sees how you got it. The effort, the years — invisible. Move to a new city and the point becomes unmissable: nobody there remembers your work. Only your current form walks through the door.
II. What It Cost
These rules did not motivate me. They armored me.
At fifteen I gave up the shelter of belonging — a school, a place where showing up was enough. At eighteen I gave up home. Then five cities, and every move erased whatever I had been in the last one. Live like that long enough and “the present state is everything” stops being a theory. It becomes your operating condition.
So the honest version is this: the rules are armor. I built them because I kept moving through places where no one was obligated to catch me. A person with a safety net can afford to believe effort is always seen. A person without one learns to trust only what can be verified. The armor worked — I am still here.
But armor does not come off by itself. And there is a difference between wearing armor and believing you are the armor. The first is strategy. The second is the mistake I have been making: treating the self as a ledger of achievements, where an idle day is not a slow day but a missing entry. Guilt arrives on schedule.
III. What I Intend to Do
Contradictions do not delete. What is possible is knowing which hand is on the wheel. So before I buy, post, or claim anything, I run one test: would I still do this if no one could ever see it? If yes, the act is mine. If no, it belongs to the audience — and the audience is on a budget from now on.
L'existence précède l'essence. I used to read that sentence as an obligation: since nothing is underneath, build a self out of achievements before anyone notices. I am starting to read it the other way. If there is no fixed self, then nothing is lost when the list pauses. There is only the list, the hand that writes it, and the question of whether the hand can rest.
That question is the one I am taking with me.
Essay · 08 / 06 / 2026
The Floor
Four years on the service side.
I started working in high school. For four years — convenience stores, day labour, hotel restaurants, kitchens in Tokyo, Osaka, and London — I did the work a society quietly codes as low. I was always passing through. In September I leave for university in North America. But the four years were not wasted, and what I learned in them deserves to be written down. The people who write about labour rarely do it. The people who do it rarely write.
What Respect Tracks
We say all work deserves respect. We do not behave as if we mean it.
I felt the difference every day. The same person — me — was visible or invisible depending on what he was wearing. Thanked or instructed. Met or looked through. Respect in the room was not distributed according to how well anyone did their job. It was distributed according to where the job sat in an unspoken hierarchy.
My first reaction was resentment, and the resentment took a specific shape: this is unfair because I am capable of more than this. I knew where I was going, so the contempt felt aimed at someone it didn't apply to.
It took me too long to see the problem with that thought. If the disrespect was unjust because I happened to be capable of more, then I was conceding it would be just for someone who wasn't. I was not objecting to the hierarchy. I was objecting to my place in it.
Michael Sandel calls this the tyranny of merit: the belief that position reflects worth. I had read him. I had agreed with him. And the first time the system put me on the wrong side, my instinct was not to reject the logic but to plead an exception. That is the most honest thing I can say about myself from those four years: the meritocratic reflex is not something other people have. Under pressure, it was the first thing out of me.
Respect is owed to persons. Not to positions. The moment you make it conditional, you have rebuilt the hierarchy you were criticizing.
Respect Is Not Pride
But a second distinction matters.
Respect is owed to persons — universally, without condition. Pride has to be earned: by craft, by difficulty, by skill that took years to build.
The dangerous move is to take pride from the position itself, as if the title did the work. I watched managers do exactly this — imperious to subordinates, indignant when questioned, proud in a way the role never authorized. None of this makes the work worthless. It makes pride from the title alone, separate from mastery, a category error.
The analogy that made it clear to me: speaking English in London. The skill is universal there; a Londoner who boasted of it would be laughed at. Pride should be calibrated to the environment's baseline. What everyone around you can do is not what distinguishes you.
A great waiter who has mastered attention, anticipation, and grace under pressure has earned pride — fully, and on the same terms as a great surgeon. Mastery is a universal ground for pride. Position is not.
I say this carefully because I am about to enter finance, a field with hierarchies of its own. If I make the same error there, this critique should come back at me.
Same Age, Different Stakes
The inequality I could see most clearly was not about talent. It was about starting points.
I worked beside people my exact age. One was earning tuition: every shift was the difference between continuing his education and stopping. Another was earning pocket money: same shift, same wage, and it changed nothing either way.
Same task. Same hourly rate. Completely different meaning. You cannot understand this from outside. You have to stand at the same sink and watch what the money means to the person beside you.
Language and Hierarchy
I worked in two countries. The sharpest difference was not the food or the hours. It was how far you were allowed to speak upward.
In London, a manager could be argued with — you could disagree to his face and the relationship survived it. In Japan, that conversation is almost structurally impossible. The hierarchy is steeper, and it is built into the language itself: the grammar of deference does half the work of keeping you in your place before anyone decides anything.
I will not say which is better. I will say: until I worked in two languages, I did not understand how much of a culture's hierarchy is carried inside its grammar.
Four Kinds of People on the Floor
Spend four years on the same kind of floor and you start to see roughly four kinds of people on it.
The first: people passing through, working to fund something on the other side — tuition, a visa, a plan. The work is a means; the horizon is elsewhere. I was one of them.
The second: people who spoke of a dream but, year after year, made no move toward it. I did not know their full stories, and the market they complained about was real. But I recognized the pattern because I felt its pull myself: on the hardest weeks, it was tempting to let the conditions decide and call it being decided for. What stayed with me was not their choice. It was how reasonable the surrender sounded from inside.
The third: people who take pride in the work and call themselves professionals. Some have earned it — real craft, real attention, skill built over years. Others are proud of the title alone. The same role houses both.
The fourth is rarer, and impressed me most: the same craft and command as the third, with no need to display it. Quiet. The best workers in the room, and the least invested in being seen that way. They are the ones I still think about.
The Structural Alibi
Here I have to push against my own argument.
Foucault taught us to read industries like this one as machines that produce a certain kind of worker: uniforms, time-clocks, bodies arranged under managerial gaze. The shape of that subject is structural, not personal. This is the correct first move.
But the structural reading has a limit, and I met it personally. The case worth speaking to is the second kind — because on the hardest weeks, the same argument ran in my own head: the work has no future, so the dream has no future.
Sartre called this bad faith — hiding behind your conditions as if your conditions were your essence. The role I am playing is not who I am. To let the structure name you is the most ordinary form of self-betrayal there is.
Camus put the answer in an image. Sisyphus pushes the rock knowing it will fall. The conditions are absolute, and yet we must imagine him happy — because he chooses, again and again, to push. The opposite of Sisyphus is not the person who fails. It is the person who stops pushing because the conditions said he should.
The structure is real. The conditions do not write your essence. The right answer to real constraint is conscious continuation, not surrender. I needed those sentences more than anyone I worked with did.
What I Keep
Two things survive the four years.
One is a distinction. Respect is owed to persons, universally. Pride is earned by craft, not position. Most of what I saw confused them in both directions — respect withheld from people whose positions were low; pride claimed by people whose positions were undemanding. The day I confuse them again, I will have learned nothing.
The other is a question. Not who works hard — almost everyone on that floor worked harder than the people who looked down on them. The question is: who designed the room so that the same effort means tuition for one person and pocket money for another? That question is why I am leaving to study. What within the room is mine to refuse, even when refusal costs — that one I will be answering for the rest of my life.
Essay · 13 / 04 / 2026
Cultural Capital and Instagram
Not bad taste. Different constraints.
I used to find certain posts embarrassing: the luxury logo centred in frame, the obviously posed selfie, the caption that names the price. The reaction that came automatically was cringe.
Then I started paying attention to who I was applying that word to — and to what I was letting slide when someone else did the same thing more quietly. The judgment stopped looking like taste. It started looking like a rule I had absorbed without being taught it.
What cultural capital is
Sociologists use “cultural capital” for the part of status that money cannot buy: the right accent, the right school, knowing that discussing money is vulgar, that logos are tacky, that a selfie should look accidental rather than posed.
Some people learn these rules at home. Others learn them by being laughed at.
Two games
The same platform hosts two different games.
In the first, nobody knows you. Your credentials do not transfer. Your background does not speak on your behalf. Silence means invisibility, so you show — the object, the face, the proof that you are here.
In the second, your background has already spoken. Family, school, network: credibility is established before you post anything. Showing becomes unnecessary, and therefore looks like restraint.
The paradox
Players of the second game display wealth too. A watch at the edge of the frame. A location tag. A casual mention of where someone summered. The signal is identical. Only the volume differs.
But when they see a first-game post — logo centred, nothing hidden — the question is: why so obvious? The answer is that they had to be. You did not.
What “cringe” often means
You are performing in a way I was taught to hide.
Every feed is a performance. Some have better camouflage. And camouflage is taught — by families, schools, and networks that not everyone has access to. What looks like superior taste is frequently just an earlier education in concealment.
I am not exempt from this. I dress deliberately, and the restraint I favour is itself a signal, aimed at people who read that particular code. Knowing the rule does not put you outside the game. It only tells you which move you are making.
That is the useful part. Once you can see the mechanism, “cringe” stops working as a verdict about a person and starts working as information about the rule you were handed — and about who was in a position to hand it to you.
Essay · 12 / 04 / 2026
What I Submitted to UBC
In March 2026, I was admitted to the University of British Columbia. Below are the three essays I submitted, published unedited. Not as advice — as a record of what I could articulate at twenty, after four years of working out what I wanted to study and why. The prompts asked who I am, what matters to me, and what I learned through work.
Tell us about who you are. How would your family, friends, and/or members of your community describe you? If possible, please include something about yourself that you are most proud of and why. (1500 characters)
My family would describe me as someone who questions what others unreflectively accept — sometimes to my detriment. At fifteen, I picked up Descartes, asking questions grounded in skepticism about how things are ordered. By sixteen, I left a traditional high school for an online programme, which left my father and me arguing for weeks. By eighteen, I left home.
I left in part after reading Michael Sandel's critique of meritocracy. His work made me question assumptions I had not yet examined: that hard work alone explained success, and that outcomes were determined by choices rather than structures. Working in hospitality, I met colleagues from many countries who held professional degrees but did the same work as me. Watching people so capable take jobs far below their training stayed with me.
I am most proud of my determination, and of the challenges that shaped my thinking. Because of my tattoos, I was rejected at nearly every job interview in Japan, and accumulated significant debt as a result. When I finally found employment, I worked 54 consecutive days to pay it down. By the end, this had reinforced my earlier engagement with Sandel: effort alone is not sufficient. Structure shapes how far effort can reach.
This is what I bring to academic study: a willingness to question, and an ability to connect those questions to lived realities.
What is important to you? And why? (1500 characters)
What matters most to me is understanding how individuals face systematically unequal chances — and how institutional design can narrow those gaps.
This question emerged from experience. In London, I worked alongside two groups: international students supported by family resources, and colleagues from India and Eastern Europe whose professional qualifications carried no weight in their new country. Same kitchen. Different worlds. At first it simply felt wrong. Only later did I see these as outcomes of how systems classify people — not failures of individuals, but failures of design.
Part of why I care is that at eighteen, entry-level work was my only option. For nearly two years I lived without financial support from my family. Yet I knew that if I reached a breaking point, I had somewhere to return. When I later accepted their support, I learned how much access to a safety net shapes the way people negotiate constraint.
I am interested in institutional mechanics: how policies sort people, how design choices produce exclusion. I study institutions not to dismiss personal responsibility, but to understand how policy can widen the space where effort pays off — and to learn, through Co-op, what that looks like in practice.
Tell us more about ONE or TWO activities that are most important to you. Please explain the role you played and what you learned in the process. (2100 characters)
At eighteen, I secured a job at a hotel café in Okinawa before I arrived — that job was why I moved there. I had limited work experience and no local connections. Over two years, I moved through five cities: cooking at Blue Port Café, banquet service at Tokyo Marriott, luxury events at W Hotel Osaka, and restaurant service in London.
My responsibilities evolved with each role. At Blue Port Café, I arrived early, off the clock, to learn basic cooking techniques. During one shift, a guest collapsed from what appeared to be a serious medical emergency. While a colleague called emergency services, I accompanied him in the ambulance, contacted his American family using his phone, and helped coordinate with hospital staff.
At Tokyo Marriott, I later took on an informal team leader role during high-volume service periods. Across workplaces, this willingness to learn and take responsibility was consistently recognised. Service work requires judgment and cross-cultural communication under pressure, not routine execution.
What I learned extends beyond hospitality. One colleague had been a talented graphic designer in India. In London, he set tables. I often complained about the gap between my ambitions and my daily tasks. He never did. Every day, he showed up and worked with quiet seriousness. That contrast stayed with me — his persistence made me reconsider what professionalism actually means.
This is why I want to study institutional design: not from textbooks first, but with questions formed beside people whose capabilities were not recognised by the systems they entered. I bring perspective from working alongside people from over twenty countries in high-pressure environments. In discussions of policy design, I can offer grounded observations about how abstract principles play out for people navigating systems in practice.
A Note on Structure and Agency
Written four months later.
These essays lean hard on structure — the idea that systems, more than individual choices, shape outcomes. That reflects what I was reading at the time and what I was seeing in London. It is not the complete picture.
Structures constrain and enable. They set how far effort can reach. But within those constraints, choice remains real. The colleague who set tables in London chose to show up with dignity every day. I chose to leave home, to work fifty-four consecutive days, to apply to university rather than settle.
Both matter. Structure explains why equal effort produces unequal outcomes. Agency explains what people do with the space systems leave them.
I wrote these essays emphasising structure because individuals are too often blamed for outcomes shaped by design. But the honest position is that neither explains human outcomes alone. They interact, and where exactly the line falls is what I am going to university to understand.
London, April 2026
Essay · 01 / 04 / 2026
Take One Step Forward
Privilege is responsibility, not guilt.
At seventeen, I watched a “privilege walk” exercise online. A line of people stand side by side. A facilitator reads statements.
Step forward if both your parents attended university.
Step back if you have skipped a meal because you could not afford food.
Step forward if you have never worried about your phone being cut off.
By the end, the line had broken apart. I watched it three times, and could not stop working out where I would be standing.
The answer
Near the front. Not at the very front — there is always someone further ahead. But ahead, and by a distance.
Different country. Poorer parents. A different decade. None of that was chosen by anyone in that line. Nationality, health, family resources, the era you are born into: everyone inherits some position. The question is what you do from there.
What I got wrong
At eighteen, I was uncomfortable with mine. Not guilt — guilt says I did something wrong. This was closer to I am something unearned.
I saw people working multiple jobs to afford university, supporting families, navigating systems not built for them. And I saw others who had never worked at all. Same classrooms. Entirely different routes in.
I could not reconcile it, so I tried to solve it with subtraction. I moved out, declined my parents' support, and spent close to two years removing every advantage I could identify — as if hardship, accumulated in sufficient quantity, would let me earn my position retroactively.
It did not work, and it could not have. Difficulty is not a currency you can pay a debt in. Two years of it left my starting position exactly where it had been, and left me considerably more tired.
What changed it
Michael Sandel's argument in The Tyranny of Merit is that treating success as purely the product of talent and effort is both false and corrosive. Talent is itself luck. Winners come to believe they won unaided, which licenses contempt for everyone else; the people on the receiving end of that contempt eventually stop accepting the story. Societies come apart along that seam.
Reading him clarified my error. I had treated my advantages as something that made my achievements illegitimate, and tried to dispose of them. But an advantage is not a stain to be removed. It is a resource that comes with an obligation attached.
Forward
Stripping away privilege does not make anyone more deserving. It just makes them less useful.
The problem was never having an advantage. The problem is pretending you do not — because that is the version that lets you take full credit, and full credit is where the contempt starts.
I did not choose where I began. What I do from here is the part that is mine.