Day #005

Day #005:

Kyoto.

The Asian Food Market: An Essay in Controlled Chaos

One of My Happy Places

Bangkok. Beijing. Hanoi. Kuala Lumpur. Jakarta. Seoul. Tokyo. It’s the same story.

The smell hits first.

And it’s not polite about it.

These smells don’t unfold. They attack.

Sea creatures, soy, smoke, burnt sugar. The smell of diesel from passing traffic and motorbikes is omnipresent.

Some pull you in. Others make you question your life choices.

You can’t make sense of them all – and I suppose that’s the point.

Something’s always fermenting – I still don’t know what that means.

Something’s always frying – I always find that stall.

Something always makes you go “Ummmm…what the hell is that?!”

You can absolutely see something that died five minutes ago…

And you can see something that hasn’t yet.

Then comes the heat.

As if the humidity wasn’t enough, the thousand boiling pots finish the job. Open flames everywhere. Strangers breathing in your general vicinity – on you. No air conditioning is in sight. Your clothes are now firmly stuck to your skin.

This is the arena you chose today. Welcome to the game.

And then the noise.

Holy shi*t – the noise.

Yelling.

Always yelling.

It’s the kind of tone and body language that would get you reported to HR. But here, it’s efficient. Here, it’s the norm. Here, it gets the job done.

Layer on the clash of metal on metal. Knives striking God knows what. Scooters darting through lanes barely wide enough for a stroller…

And the voices…

All of them.

Some laugh.

Some bargain.

Some cry.

Most just add to the chaos.

There’s no such thing as personal space here. You don’t walk through the market  – you flow.You absorb elbows and backpacks. For your own survival, you deliver a few back.

There’s no lane. No signage that means much to you.

Your only strategy: Move how the crowd moves.

Your only language: Interpretive hand gestures.

And somehow – it all sorta works.

Towers of Styrofoam in every direction. Each bin holds fish. Each bin leaks water. Somehow both end up on your shoes.

A man smokes next to an open flame. There’s always that guy.

A woman balances trays of soup like she’s in the circus. It’s the start of her shift.

Someone hands you a skewer – no explanation needed. You eat it. The deal is done.

It’s hot. It’s messy. It’s loud.

And I love it. It’s my happy place.

I don’t come for clean. I come for the chaos.

To me, it works…and more than that – I see the beauty of the system.

It’s not curated. It’s not picturesque.

It’s alive. It’s beautiful. It’s unapologetic.

People. Movement. Intelligence.

It lives outside a formal structure. Outside a formal strategy.

I like to think in systems.

Binary thinking – black of white, good or bad – never made much sense to me.

I’d make a terrible lawyer.  

Organizations, businesses, people – they’re made of parts. Components. Flows.

And under it all, there’s a living logic that only surfaces when you go with the flow. When you allow your body – and all sensory “parts” – to do their thing.

I’ve worked for companies where chaos was punished – where the slightest deviation from protocol made people nervous.

“Didn’t you know we had an SOP for that?”

I have been told by leaders to stop asking questions…I like asking questions.

I’ve worked on teams that were charged with “disruption” – as long as we didn’t make things too messy.

Tolerance for disruption is a long spectrum, starting with “None.”

When systems are rigid, they break under pressure. But when they’re alive, they blend, adapt, and respond.

Unfortunately, so much of our professional life is engineered to eliminate chaos – to eliminate spontaneity. To eliminate a different way of thinking.

Automate. Control. Keep it beyond the glass.

We’ve built massive systems that flatten human predictability (or lack thereof). We restrict creativity. We minimize agency. We design workflows for efficiency based on anonymized employee identification numbers – not names.

And when we make decisions like this…

We wonder why people feel stuck.

We wonder why things break.

We wonder why no one is “bought in.”

And then the finger pointing begins...

We’re terrified of chaos because it threatens control – but it’s the only thing that gives us a shot at something real.

It gives us purpose and meaning in our work.

I’ve been in boardrooms where everything looked good on paper – polished slides, tidy org charts, KPI dashboards glowing green.

But no one was moving. No one was thinking. No one was in it.

They didn’t need better processes. They needed a pulse.

Flow doesn’t come from control – it comes from rhythm, trust, improvisation.

The Asian Food Market shouldn’t work. But every day, millions of people who depend on it satisfy their needs. And they return the next day.

Not because it’s perfectly planned, but because everyone inside shows up.

They listen. They watch. The move. They adjust. Together.

The problem isn’t chaos. The problem is building systems that can’t handle real life anymore.