After lunch and after dinner, I do delivery runs on an ordinary bicycle — partly to keep my blood sugar from spiking, partly as a side gig. By the time I get back, the post-meal drowsiness is gone and I feel pretty refreshed. My neighborhood has a cluster of low-rise apartment buildings up toward the mountain, so the uphill stretches make for a decent workout.
Once I got the hang of it, delivering started to feel like going for a walk. Which means ideas start bubbling up. While I ride, I think up things to write about, or work out the structure of a piece. I think of it as a kind of training in using my head while using my body. Training to produce writing under stress. Speech-to-text is essential here — it's hard to type while riding a bike.
Each run takes an hour or two. It works out to somewhere between 5,000 and 20,000 won an hour. Most of the time it clears minimum wage. On bad-weather days the money is good. For someone without a fixed job, it's a tidy bit of income. But more than the money, it's fun.
These days the Middle East crisis has ushered in an era of high oil prices. All the more reason an eco-friendly courier like me is valuable. Turns out I cover about 6km per hour of delivering. I asked GPT, and it told me that saves roughly 300–400g of CO2 compared to a motorbike. That's what a single tree absorbs over 10 days. So every hour I spend stealing calls away from the motorbikes and delivering them myself, one ten-day-old tree gets planted in the world.
Delivery is unexpectedly fun, and the game that captures this best is Death Stranding. On a nearly ruined Earth, the protagonist is a courier. One of the main enemies here is the MULEs. The MULEs steal the protagonist's cargo. But the surprising part is that the MULEs aren't actually interested in the cargo itself. They're delivery addicts — what they're really doing is stealing the protagonist's delivery calls. Hideo Kojima, who made Death Stranding, seems to know that particular pleasure, as if he'd worked a delivery gig himself. The simple thrill of contributing to someone just by moving.
Another interesting thing about that world is that the concept of money doesn't exist. Complete a delivery and you get likes, not cash. The couriers deliver for the thrill of getting a thumbs-up from people. If a universal basic income era ever arrives, maybe that's closer to our future than it sounds.