The Real Reason I Started Caring About Climate Change (Spoiler: It Was Bugs)

People ask me sometimes why I started zero waste, and I’d love to tell you it started with a documentary. Some quiet, meaningful moment with a polar bear on a shrinking ice floe, a single tear, a life changed forever. That is not what happened. What happened is that I went to Bangkok.

My family and I took a summer trip there — Bangkok is significantly south of Korea, so obviously it was hot, the kind of hot where the air just sits on you. Fine. Expected. I mentally filed it under “that’s just how equatorial countries are” and didn’t think about it again.

Then we flew home. And Korea — my Korea, the one that’s supposed to have actual seasons — felt hotter than Bangkok had. I remember standing there thinking, wait. Wait, hold on. Something about this is wrong.

That was the moment. Not a graceful one, but a real one: the first time it actually landed that my own country was getting hotter, not in an abstract “the news says so” way, but in a “I personally felt it with my body and was alarmed” way.

The embarrassing part of the origin story

Here’s where I need you to lower your expectations again, because I promised honesty on this blog and I intend to deliver it even when it’s unflattering.

My brain’s very next move was not “think of the polar bears.” It was: hot countries have huge bugs. Genuinely enormous ones. And I hate bugs — like, structurally, at a personality level, I cannot be near a large bug and remain a calm person — so my very first, very simple thought was I need to stop my country from getting hot enough for horrifying bugs to move in.

That’s it. That’s the noble environmental awakening. I started caring about the planet’s future because of a personal vendetta against bugs I hadn’t even met yet. (Therapist, if you’re reading this, I’m fine. Mostly.)

Where zero waste actually started for me

I genuinely don’t remember what the very first thing I changed was — no dramatic single swap I can point to. But I do remember the store: there’s a zero-waste shop near my place, 알맹상점 (Almang Market), and going in and trying plastic-free products for the first time is where it really started sticking.

And here’s the part that surprised me — the inconvenience itself felt kind of good. Not in a martyr way. More like a smug, quiet satisfaction every time I did the slightly-more-annoying thing on purpose. I got a little addicted to that feeling, actually, and kept doing more of it, bit by bit, without ever deciding to become A Zero Waste Person™ in one sitting.

The part where I wanted to quit everything

I’m not going to pretend this has been a straight line up into a better, greener version of myself. There was a stretch where I genuinely wanted to stop.

I’d look around at how much trash everyone else was generating like it was nothing, and think: what is the actual point of me doing this alone? It’s a team project with something like six billion other people on the roster, and it felt like I was the only one who’d shown up to the group chat. Watching trash pile up everywhere made me anxious in a way I didn’t have a name for until I learned there’s an actual term for it — climate anxiety. It’s a real thing. I had it.

And it got more complicated, because my actual day job is at a consumer goods company. My salary goes up when people buy more, use more, throw away more. I spent a while sitting with that contradiction and, not going to lie, seriously considered just quitting the whole effort. Why bother caring on my own time about the exact thing my job depends on undoing?

The pep talk that fixed it (from someone who wasn’t even trying to fix it)

Then a friend mentioned, offhand, that she was an “intermittent vegetarian.” I said — and I want it on record that I said this with real confusion — “isn’t that just… an omnivore?”

She explained: when she’s in a situation where it’d be awkward not to (work dinners, group meals, the usual social pressure to not be The Difficult One), she eats meat. But whenever she actually can, even if that’s not every day, she chooses vegetarian. Her point was that people hear “vegetarian” and expect total, unwavering perfection from you, and that expectation is exactly what stops most people from trying at all.

That one conversation did something to me. The idea that doing it sometimes, on purpose, whenever it was actually possible, was still worth something — that wasn’t a compromise, that was the whole strategy. So I adopted it as my own personal rule: as much as I can, whenever I can. Not “all or nothing.” Just “more, when it’s possible.”

That’s the version of this I’ve landed on. It’s also, I’ll note, the entire operating philosophy of this blog, so you can see why the moment mattered.

My husband, and the container thing

My husband didn’t sign up for any of this the way I did, but he’s been quietly great about it anyway. There’s a phrase in Korean, 용기내 — it’s a little pun, because 용기 means both “courage” and “container.” The idea is you bring your own container instead of taking single-use packaging, and you’re being both literally and figuratively brave about it.

When I want tteokbokki, instead of ordering delivery, he’ll walk over with a glass container and pack it himself. I genuinely get a little emotional about this every time, which I’m aware is a lot of feeling to assign to spicy rice cakes in a glass container, but here we are.

(Yes, that’s the danmuji sitting there in its own little plastic tub in the corner. It’s a finished, store-bought side dish — there was no version of this where it was arriving any other way. Not freaking out about the plastic I genuinely have zero control over is basically my whole motto.)

Where I’ve landed

I believe, all the way down, that ten thousand people each taking one small step matters more than one person taking ten thousand steps alone. I was trying to be the one person for a while, and it nearly burned me out completely.

So that’s what this blog actually is, underneath the drama and the product reviews and the occasional crisis over a dish brush: I’m not trying to do this perfectly by myself. I’m trying to take my one step, loudly and honestly enough that maybe one more person decides to take theirs next to me.

Also, selfishly — I would still very much like to keep the bugs where they currently are.

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