Ten Years of One Seconds
I’m just about to reach the ten-year anniversary of moving to mainland China. The realisation that I’ve lived over a fifth of my life here is… sobering. But what it also means is that there’s another milestone to record: ten whole years of daily one-second videos. That’s 3,653 seconds, over an hour of one-second diary entries. (And yes, that means there were three leap years: 2016, 2020 and 2024). I Benjamin Button-ed it and put the whole thing in reverse (and on speed). It’s impossible to watch, I’m just posting it here for posterity.
It started on a solitary walk in Hong Kong, I listened to a podcast interview with the founder of an app called 1 Second Everyday and decided to download it and record my first video. That was 10th October 2015.
2015
I thought I would use the app simply to record my gradual transition between living in Hong Kong and Shanghai. According to the paperwork, my residency in Shanghai officially started in October, but I counted my flight from Hong Kong on 13th Dec 2015 as my first day in Shanghai. (That’s why these annual compilations always start on Dec 13th).
2016-2017
For these next couple of years, I continued using the app, capturing my life as an international headhunter. My life was in Shanghai, but I spent over a third of my time overseas.
2018-2019
After stepping back from my company, I started studying Chinese and also launched a podcast. I see these as the years during which I finally integrated properly into life in Shanghai.
2020-2022
The COVID years were sometimes tough, but you couldn’t ask for a better education about how China works. The podcast continued, and I also completed a Masters in Chinese Philosophy.
2023-2024
The post-COVID “PTSD years”. Still enjoying life in Shanghai, but now with a slight sense of dislocation, and with eyes to setting plans for the future.
Of these 3,653 seconds, 2,902 were in my home city (the first 40 while home was Hong Kong, then 2,862 in Shanghai), and 751 were from travels. So a fifth of my time - or, a full two years out of ten - were spent traveling away from home. That’s a bit of a shock. 3,004 seconds were in mainland China, and the next five places were USA (157), Hong Kong (95), Japan (62), UK (52) and Singapore (49). There are altogether 42 territories represented, in this order: 🇭🇰🇨🇳🇬🇧🇸🇬🇺🇸🇲🇽🇰🇷🇮🇳🇯🇵🇦🇹🇬🇷🇵🇷🇻🇮🇰🇳🇦🇼🇨🇼🇻🇬🇨🇦🇹🇭🇦🇪🇧🇭🇰🇼🇶🇦🇴🇲🇪🇸🇮🇩🇱🇧🇹🇷🇬🇪🇦🇲🇲🇲🇧🇩🇫🇮🇪🇪🇦🇺🇨🇿🇲🇹🇵🇹🇲🇻🇳🇱🇸🇦🇮🇹.
But my favourite seconds are not the ones from traveling, they’re the ones that capture life’s daily contrasts. Frenetic activity and blissful inactivity; loud celebration and quiet mourning; illnesses and accidents; adventures and misadventures… just the regular cycle of life, in tiny snapshots. They also chart the relationships: old relationships, new relationships, and now disappeared relationships. Social media has become more vile over these last ten years, but I have made an effort to continue using it for conscious connectivity. I hope the reason you’re reading this is that you feel the same.
It’s not just a video diary, the project now helps shape my lifestyle. I try to live life in the moment, waking up to the promise of a new adventure. Getting out of my own head, and continuing to keep curious about the world. Saying yes to experiences out of the house, even when my happy place is sitting on the couch next to my husband.
But more than that, it has become a gratitude project. I often take the time to look back at these compilations, to appreciate what I’ve done rather than constantly trying to chase the next novelty. I will always be that chaser. But I’ve realised through this project that happiness isn’t in the pursuit of the next glass of wine. Happiness is in the realisation that your glass is already full. 🍷
For the Facebook version, see here.
For the YouTube version, see here.
