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Living Alone (1)

The Saturday before last (I started writing this in mid-August), I made a day trip to Daejeon and signed a lease on the place where I’ll live during my master’s program. It was actually my second trip to Daejeon to look for a home. Two weeks earlier—about a month ago now—I had already gone down to view some places. As I wrote in my previous post , I searched everywhere from Eoeun-dong and Gung-dong to Bongmyeong-dong and Wolpyeong-dong, willing to drive farther if it meant finding a place that met all my requirements. But nothing felt quite right. Every place failed to meet at least one of my criteria, so I came back without making a decision. The real estate agent who had taken me around to see the places was remarkably enthusiastic. Even after I returned to Seoul, they kept sending me photos of newly listed places that matched what I was looking for. The first few were nothing special, but eventually one caught my eye. I hadn’t realized how much I liked terraces. This place had a private terrace, and although it faced northeast, I thought I could live with that if it meant having a terrace. I went back to Daejeon two days later. The place looked just like the photos. It was relatively new, and the rent wasn’t especially high. Since I was there, I looked at a few other places too, but none seemed better. After viewing five or six places in the blazing sun, I was exhausted and increasingly set on that one. Then I remembered an apartment listing I’d seen online with my parents the night before. I’d actually lived in an apartment near the university before. As an undergraduate, I lived on my own in two places in Gung-dong: first, a studio of about 3 pyeong, and then an apartment with a 24-pyeong floor plan(!). Now, before you call me a rich kid, hear me out. I’d originally been looking for another studio to move into after the first one, just a larger one of around 8–10 pyeong. At the time, though, most studios in Gung-dong were 3–4 pyeong, or 5–6 at most. The newer buildings with larger studios in Gung-dong are a more recent development than you might think. Once I ruled out the listings under 7 pyeong, the next available option was, bizarrely, a 24-pyeong apartment. It was in one of the few apartment buildings in Gung-dong, which had both 17- and 24-pyeong units. There weren’t many 17-pyeong units, and none were available. The rent wasn’t high, either. In fact, per unit of floor area, it was dramatically cheaper than a studio. If you apply the statutory deposit-to-rent conversion rate to the deposit and rent on the 24-pyeong apartment I lived in, its terms come out exactly the same as those of the 9–10-pyeong studio I saw this time. Even allowing for the three-year gap and the higher maintenance fees, the increase in cost was small compared with the extra space. That’s how I ended up living in a 24-pyeong apartment. Even so, this time I started by looking at studios again, because living in that apartment had taught me that a good home needs something important besides space and an affordable price. The problem was furnishings. The apartment came with none. The built-in kitchen was about the only thing provided in the apartment I lived in as an undergraduate. Amazingly, my family home had a spare refrigerator and washing machine, so when I moved in, I hired a small moving truck to bring them from Seoul to Daejeon, along with two assemble-it-yourself desks, a bookcase, a clothes rack, and a mattress. Unsurprisingly, those few pieces, scattered around the apartment, weren’t enough for a comfortable life. But if I bought more furniture, I’d have trouble getting rid of it when I moved out after graduation, which wasn’t far away. So for a full 16 months, I lived in that 24-pyeong expanse with just seven pieces of furniture. I slept on a mattress directly on the floor, without a bed frame, and got through two summers without air conditioning 1 . It was a pretty bare-bones existence, but not buying more furniture turned out to be an excellent decision. When I moved back to Seoul, I sold everything that wouldn’t fit in two cars rather than hire a moving truck. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble even that was. 1. Granted, the apartment was right below a mountain, which kept it cool, and I get cold very easily but tolerate heat well. Still, looking back, how did I manage? I didn’t want to go through all that hassle again, so I hoped to find a studio this time if I could. Plenty of new buildings had gone up since then, and I thought I’d be able to find a decent place. Even when my mother found a few apartments for rent online the night before, over in Wolpyeong-dong near the university, we ultimately decided to look for a fully furnished studio if possible. Back on the sun-drenched streets of Gung-dong, I was sorely tempted to sign a lease on the studio with the terrace. But I’d come a long way, so I set off again to see everything I could and avoid regrets. Besides, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the terrace studio. Sunlight matters a great deal to me, and a place facing north was hard to accept. There were three apartments I wanted to see. The agent handling one was on vacation, and the tenant in another couldn’t accommodate a visit right away. That left just one I could view. When I arrived, a newlywed couple greeted me. I liked the apartment a lot. The building was over 30 years old, but the interior had been remodeled and was fairly tidy. At 13 pyeong, it was plenty big enough for one person 2 , and the deposit and rent were exactly the same as for the terrace studio! It also had a south-facing balcony, though not a terrace. 2. The old 24-pyeong apartment had honestly been far too much. That was when I first learned that a home can be too big. Cleaning spaces I didn’t even use—the two small rooms besides the living room and main bedroom, the balcony, and the main bedroom’s bathroom—nearly broke my back. I’d been thinking that somewhere in the low-to-mid teens in pyeong would be perfect. As I thought, “This would be perfect if it came with furniture,” I noticed the wall-mounted air conditioner humming away. I asked the couple whether it had come with the apartment. The husband said they’d brought it when they moved in and offered to leave it behind for roughly the cost of installation if I wanted it. He added that they were moving to a bigger place and planned to sell most of the furniture there, including the refrigerator and washing machine, on Karrot. Wait, what? I could hardly believe my ears. My mind started racing with possibilities. If I could buy that furniture cheaply, wouldn’t the apartment’s one drawback disappear in a stroke? Trying to contain my excitement, I asked, “Could you sell me everything you’re not taking with you?” Their answer was even more cheerful: “That would make things easier for us too. We’d appreciate it.” !!! We agreed to work out the details l

2y ago · #수필

The Truths of Life

It was last October, during a trip to Jeju Island with my friends from Stroke. I left them partway through the trip and headed to Daejeon for an IR meeting. Leaving in the middle of a trip for a single-day meeting—on the day before we were to climb Hallasan, no less, and for a meeting scheduled after the trip had already been planned—was a terrible thing to do. But the meeting mattered that much to me. Since graduating, I had been living under the banner of starting a business, without any real title to show the outside world. I felt this meeting might be a chance to change that. I am still sorry, and grateful, to the friends who traveled with me and understood my situation. The meeting was over in less than 30 minutes altogether. That included my presentation, the Q&A, and the immediate answer that an investment would realistically be difficult. As the investment manager explained the reasons one by one, I understood every one of them. If I had been listening to my presentation and the Q&A as a third party, I would have opposed investing too. Only then did it occur to me that perhaps the mistake had been arranging the IR meeting in the first place, with no clear reason to seek investment beyond the thought that surely I could do something if I got funding. By then, I had spent nearly a year trying businesses with low chances of success in ways that were not very effective. I do not mean to disparage my efforts at the time; those experiences made me who I am now. But that is how they look to me from my somewhat less subjective perspective today. Surprisingly, the hardest part of those attempts was not the business ideas or whether they had promise. It was doing everything myself. I was growing exhausted in a situation full of questions I had to answer but with no answer key. There was no one to talk things through with, or to steady me and give me strength when my state of mind wavered. At a time when I felt a greater need to belong than ever, I did not turn down a job offer from the very VC where I had given that IR presentation. About two months after the presentation, in December, one of the investment managers who had heard it called me. At first, I thought he was saying the firm had a new area it wanted to invest in and would give me an idea to try. When we met in person and I heard more, though, the question was whether I would join the firm. I thought I would enjoy working with other people again and learn a great deal about fields unfamiliar to me, such as investment, finance, and accounting. At the same time, my long-term goal was still to build a successful business. I planned to work and learn as hard as I could for three or four months, then leave and use what I had learned to try again. And so, early this year, I started my first job. The office was in Centum City, Busan. Someone with an ordinary life in Seoul might have been horrified, but I have always had a restless streak. Exploring a new city was fun, and I liked that it was less cold. Thanks to that(?), I barely saw any snow last winter. I enjoyed the work, too. The development skills I had taken an interest in and built up were an excellent match for what the company needed. I got to make things people at the company needed, enjoy doing it, and get paid! Since I was the company’s only developer, I also had a fair amount of control over how much I worked and how I worked. With a regular routine and long-term development goals, the loneliness and anxiety that had plagued me throughout the previous year gradually began to lift. But as the anxiety left, a new worry took its place. My plan to stay at the company for only three or four months before trying to start a business again was fading. It was not that I wanted to settle into life as an employee. I wanted to grow, but my work at the company felt less like growth than like using up what I had already built. Yet after nearly a year of trying to start a business, I also thought that unless my next attempt succeeded, those experiences might no longer be growth either. They might be stagnation, or even a step backward. So everything depended on the odds of my next business succeeding, and they did not look good. The backgrounds of the many founding teams I had seen at work, the attitudes toward business of people I had met in a startup club I was involved with over the same period, the startup support programs I had not been selected for—everything I had encountered and every indicator I had seen over the past few months was telling me: no-go. I had neither the conviction nor the human or material resources to make a business succeed. I might try again at another stage of life, but now was not the time. What, then, should I do until that day came? Go to graduate school, where I could pursue new research? Move to a large company, where I could grow by working with senior colleagues? Move to a fast-growing startup, where I could experience a business’s success secondhand? Or pursue my ambitions at this company? After much thought, I chose graduate school. The choice was not logical at all. What I have found when making decisions, whether about business or my career, is that the more important a choice is, the harder it becomes to arrive at it through logical reasoning. There are so many factors to consider that, even if each one could be measured quantitatively, combining them into a single conclusion through logic is nearly impossible. At that point, the choice comes down to personal philosophy and conviction. Perhaps that is why Kazuo Inamori emphasized philosophy in running a business. I thought about my own philosophy and convictions. What do I live for? What would make me willing to give up other things? For me, it was the sky and outer space. I have long imagined my moment of self-fulfillment as seeing something I helped research and develop reach a part of space no one has ever ventured into. If I could do that, I would be fine with a little less sleep and a little less money. And I felt I could let go of the many other paths I would have given up to get there. When I tell people I know that I went to graduate school for aerospace engineering, they often ask why I did not choose computer science instead. I think I have been asked more than ten times already. It is a perfectly natural question: I majored in both aerospace engineering and computer science, and most of what I had done recently was in development. But computer science research and web development are simply among the things I like and can do well. I cannot say they reach as deep as my convictions. Once I made the decision, life moved quickly. I firmly decided to apply last April, just two days before the deadline for fall-semester applications. In those two days, I prepared and submitted my application, personal statement, and supporting materials documenting my achievements. The deadline was on a Thursday, and ordinarily I would never have had enough time after work. By extraordinary luck, the Wednesday before was a public holiday for the National Assembly election. I spent the whole day camped out at a Starbucks by Haeundae Beach, writing my personal statement. After submitting my documents, I prepared for the interview by moving between study cafés near Haeundae and Gwangalli after work. Since I had taken almost nothing but computer science courses in my later undergraduate years, it was hard to recall material from courses I had taken as long as four or five years earlier. Studying after a day’s work was not easy, either. To be honest, I was far from fully prepared even on the day of the interview, and there were many questions I could not answer properly. The interview was scheduled for a Friday in mid-May, and I was prepared to take a day off. Then the company suddenly announced that the entire week would be a company holiday(!), so I did not

2y ago · #수필

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