After lunch and after dinner, I do deliveries on a regular bicycle, both to prevent blood sugar spikes and as a side gig. When I get back, the post-meal drowsiness is gone and I feel pretty refreshed. My neighborhood has a hillside area of villas, so the uphill rides give me a decent workout too.
Once I got used to it, delivering started to feel like going for a walk. Ideas even come bubbling up. While delivering, I think of topics to write about or structure an essay in my head. I think of it as a kind of training that uses the body and the mind at once: practicing writing under stress. This is where speech-to-text is extremely important, because it's hard to type while riding a bike.
Each session lasts one to two hours. The hourly pay comes to roughly 5,000 to 20,000 won. Most of the time it clears the minimum wage. On bad-weather days, I earn well. For someone like me with no fixed job, it's a nice little income. More than the amount of money, though, it's fun.
These days, the Middle East crisis has ushered in an era of high oil prices. At times like this, eco-friendly delivery people like me are all the more valuable. I found that I deliver about 6 km per hour on average. When I asked GPT, it said that compared with a motorcycle, this saves roughly 300 to 400 g of CO2, which is what one tree absorbs in about 10 days. So every time I take a motorcycle's order and deliver for an hour, a tree with a ten-day lifespan gets planted in the world.
Delivery is surprisingly fun, and the game that shows this best is Death Stranding. In a nearly ruined Earth, the protagonist is a deliveryman. One of the main enemies there is the MULEs. MULEs steal the protagonist's cargo. But surprisingly, MULEs aren't interested in the cargo itself. They are delivery addicts, and they go after the protagonist to take his delivery orders away. Hideo Kojima, the creator of Death Stranding, seems to understand that fun, as if he had worked a delivery part-time job himself. It's the pleasure of simply contributing to someone while moving from place to place.
And what's interesting about that world is that there is no concept of money. When you complete a delivery, you get likes instead of money. Deliverers deliver for the thrill of getting thumbs-ups from people. Perhaps, if an era of universal basic income arrives, our future may be closer to that.