It Was as if God Spoke to Me Through a Taxi Driver

How a series of random events led to a profound revelation

Kyle Jung
3 min readJul 21, 2021
Image by @ffstop from Unsplash

It was a long day at work and the thought of getting on a packed subway gave me a headache. So I decided to Uber back home.

I had unusually many questions that day, about life, where I’m going. Anxiety caused by these unanswered questions was becoming a burden to my heart. They didn’t like to go away. They lingered at the back of my mind the whole day.

While my mind still troubled, I open the app to call a driver. Just a couple of minutes in, the app tells me that an Uber is on the way. Cool, he’s only one minute away.

Hmm.. 2 minutes away.. perhaps he’s going to take a u-turn.. 3 minutes, 4 minutes away. It was as if he was trying to get away.

I decide to cancel, figuring it’d be quicker to call another one, so I did, but when I pressed the button, the app made me feel like I’m the one at fault by giving me something like “If you cancel more than 5 times a week, your account will be suspended — You also can’t call another one for 5 minutes”.

So I was like okay what it’s not even my fault. I remember getting defensive, leaving a half-annoyed message to make it clear to the admins that it wasn’t my fault.

Okay… it’s late but I didn’t have dinner yet and decided to try my luck again after grabbing a pizza.

After I satisfy my hunger I grab a ride, he comes fairly quickly this time. I was hoping for a nice quiet ride back home. I hop on, and it was immediately obvious that I wasn’t going to get my wish. He asked me which road to take instead of consulting the navigation.

I live in one of the busiest parts of Korea even in Seoul. 5 minutes from my work, there is a “hot-place” called Garosu-Gil filled with fancy restaurants, bars, clothing and K-pop stores, and beauty parlors.

The place which was once vibrant was now becoming evident that covid-19 was taking a toll. Every time I visited, the more empty stores I saw.

The driver looked at the aftermath and was wondering to himself, almost musing, curious why so many stores were empty.

Now I heard somewhere it was because the store owners thought lowering the rent meant the property price would go down, so they kept the rent at the same price despite less demand, which I told the driver.

He was baffled, wondering why the owners only thought about themselves when everyone else was struggling? Can’t all of us weather the storm if they sacrificed a little?

I agreed and added my own thought that I believed the prices would recover with the economy even if it fell; and that it’s unfortunate how love for money can cause people to be short-sighted. If we look at the whole thing holistically, hogging onto money is not doing anyone good.

Perhaps they’ll survive a little longer, but it's obvious that one cannot survive without the other in the long run.

And I thought to myself, love of money causes devastation. It is the root cause of evil.

I felt very glad missing the first Uber.

It was meant to be.

--

--

Kyle Jung

Software Engineer who aims to make the world a better place by helping people discover their potential