#수필

Back in Seoul after five months. My favorite season. For the next three months, I'm ready to savor every bit of Seoul, and I can hardly wait. On Saturday, my first weekend back, I had lunch with the people I went to the Inner Mongolian desert with in spring 2019 to plant trees as part of Future Forest's Korea–China Green Volunteer Corps. The volunteer trip was a one-off, but it left a lasting impression. Everyone is so friendly, too: whenever someone suggests meeting up, the others are happy to join, and a gathering comes together easily. So even five years later, we still see each other now and then. I'm grateful to have met them. After lunch (though we talked until past five), I went to the <Reading at Hangang Park> event in Yeouido. With its open views and the weather we've been having, the Han River is already a lovely place to read. Add beanbags, and it becomes a reader's paradise. It's open from 2 to 9 p.m. (on Saturdays only), so you can come by after lunch plans and read to your heart's content. I arrived around six, spent a good while reading The Three-Body Problem , then packed up and left when I started getting cold and hungry. Next Saturday I have free, I'll come back properly equipped with a jacket and snacks. Today, Sunday, I'd originally planned to get up at the crack of dawn and head to Jamsil for the <Easygoing Hangang Triathlon Festival> . Held for the first time this year, the festival greatly shortens the distances of a conventional triathlon so that ordinary people can take part at Hangang Park. It has beginner and advanced courses; the advanced course consists of a 1 km swim, a 20 km bike ride, and a 10 km run. I only found out about the festival last Wednesday, by which point advance registration had already closed. The official Instagram account didn't say anything about registering on-site, so I left a comment asking. Normally, I might have given up once advance registration closed, but one thing kept me trying: crossing the Han River. The advanced course's 1 km swim went right across the river, from Jamsil toward Ttukseom! When I saw the route on Wednesday, my heart raced the way it had when I watched someone bungee jump in New Zealand. Swimming across the Han River—something I'd barely considered before—went straight onto my bucket list. I didn't have the nerve to attempt it alone, so I had to take part in this festival. The lack of on-site registration information probably meant there wouldn't be any, but I held on to a sliver of hope and posted my question. To my surprise, the answer was yes. The number was far smaller than the 10,000 advance-registration spots, but they would take 300 on-site registrations on each of the festival's two days, Saturday and Sunday. Since the advanced course was offered only on Sunday morning, I needed to be among the 300 people registering from 9 a.m. that day if I wanted to swim across the river. I was prepared for that. That night, I packed my swimsuit, rash guard, swim cap, goggles, bike helmet, energy bars, and everything else, set an alarm for six, and went to bed early. But before falling asleep, I was mindlessly scrolling through Instagram when I saw a post I wished I hadn't. Saturday's limited allotment of tickets had already run out, and because of concerns about crowds, they wouldn't accept on-site registrations for the swim on Sunday. The post had gone up around midnight. Should I have been glad I saw it then, rather than getting up at dawn for nothing? Still, since the organizers had changed their plans so abruptly, I let myself hope they might retract this announcement by morning, too... and left my alarm on. I didn't even need the alarm to wake up. My eyes opened on their own at 4:55. Cruelly, the announcement hadn't changed. I considered going anyway and arguing that they couldn't reverse what they'd been saying right up until the previous day so late at night, and that I hadn't seen the post. But that didn't feel right. In the end, I gave up and went back to sleep. *** I woke up again at nine, ate breakfast with more time on my hands than I wanted, and decided what to do instead. I would go see an art exhibition. While I was in Busan, I'd saved five exhibitions I wanted to see in my notes: 《Yoon Hyup: Nocturne City》 — Lotte Museum, through 05/26 《Foreverism: To the Ends of the World》 — Ilmin Museum of Art, through 06/23 《Future Positive: Norman Foster, Foster + Partners》 — Seoul Museum of Art, through 07/21 《From Dawn to Dusk: The Nationalmuseum Sweden Collection》 — My Art Museum, through 08/25 《Jung Youngsun: For All That Breathes on Earth》 — National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, through 09/22 Nocturne City had already ended, and I'd already seen the Jung Youngsun exhibition. Of the three remaining, Foreverism offers docent tours only twice a week, on Fridays and Sundays. Since today was Sunday, I decided to go there. It's no exaggeration to say I went because of the poster. I think I first saw it in a photo of the outside wall of Ilmin Museum of Art on a friend's Instagram story. Even before I read that the exhibition was about longing, I think I instinctively felt that emotion in the poster. If I had to analyze why, perhaps it's the combination of a seaside sunset—a cliché image of happy memories—and compositing that seems to suggest a doorway into the past. I was struck by how it conveyed an intensely personal feeling like longing in a way anyone could understand. The booklet looks like this, too Because I'd decided on impulse to go after seeing the poster, I hadn't read the exhibition description closely. I was prepared for the possibility that the show wouldn't live up to my expectations, but thankfully I enjoyed it plenty. Joining the docent tour at the scheduled time and doing a quick first pass through the exhibition probably helped. Here are the works that stood out to me. <figcapt

I want to explore some thoughts I’ve been having lately about money and material things over the course of a few posts. This is the first in the series. *** I’ve been working at a company since January. It’s an accelerator that invests in early-stage companies. I first got in touch with them late last year to seek investment for a startup idea, and that connection eventually led to a job. Rather than directly handling the company’s core work—evaluating investments and managing them afterward—I research and develop tools that make that work more efficient by automating and assisting with parts of it. When I joined, I hoped to put my experience and strengths to use while learning about an investment process I knew nothing about. That’s worked out quite well, and I enjoy the job. But there are definite downsides, too: I’m the only R&D person here, so it’s lonely not having anyone to exchange technical ideas with, and it’s hard to grow faster without those conversations. This is my first time working full-time at a company, and I’m earning more money than ever before. My spending has gone up along with it—not to any extraordinary level in absolute terms, but compared with last year. In fact, I spent all of last year trying to start a business without much income, and I was more reluctant to spend money than ever. I’ve found that what affects my willingness to spend most isn’t my bank balance in absolute terms, but the money currently coming in versus going out. Prices kept rising, and with nothing coming in, every expense pushed me further into the red. By the end of last year, I was genuinely afraid to go out and buy a meal. Once I started earning a steady income, that feeling quickly faded. I’ve also recently become interested in a wider range of consumer goods (I’ll go into that in a later post in this series), giving me more things to spend money on. Still, being at work limits the time I have to spend, and I’m not an impulsive shopper, so I think my spending remains within reason—for now, at least. In short, $$(\text{Highest income of my life}) - (\text{Spending that hasn't risen as much})$$ $$ = (\text{Highest savings of my life})$$ That’s the equation, and it’s only natural that I’ve become more interested in managing my assets. Ever since I became an adult and started managing my own money, bank deposits and installment savings have always made up the largest part of my portfolio. Apart from those, I’ve only tried stocks and investment funds for a few months each, so it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say my portfolio was almost entirely savings products. At one point, I had nearly half my assets in stocks. I made a little money in the post-COVID recovery and started thinking I knew what I was doing, only to get battered in a downturn. I sold everything at a small net loss overall. I think of it as paying a reasonable tuition fee to learn that stocks aren’t something to jump into blindly. Since then, I’ve moved all the money back into bank deposits. Whenever income came in, my only rule was to put as much of it as possible, as quickly as possible, into the highest-interest deposit I could find. I’d estimate when my next payment would arrive, how much I’d spend before then, and therefore how much I could deposit right away. Now that many deposit products allow emergency withdrawals, and I’ve recently got my own credit card, I worry about that a lot less. I got my Hyundai Card reissued with K-Pass support, but… it’s so… ugly… I’d have ditched it if not for Apple Pay. +Or so I thought, but it’s kind of growing on me? If putting money in the bank were the only way to save, I couldn’t ask for a better policy. But it isn’t. Interest rates have stopped rising, and as my assets grow, the difference in returns between investments with different yields grows too. So I’d been thinking I should hold something with higher returns alongside my deposits. But I couldn’t just jump back into stocks blindly, and even if I studied on my own, I had no idea where to start or what to do. Time kept passing like that until one day, a YouTube thumbnail caught my eye… Click any of the thumbnails below to watch the videos. “Wait, I can’t let myself get screwed,” I thought, and clicked through as if in a trance. Despite its considerable length, I watched the whole thing in one sitting. Then I eagerly watched the follow-up, with its much more reassuring title (deliberately so, I’m sure), along with related videos uploaded much earlier: After watching more than an hour of videos in total, I came away with two things. First, a reminder that I need to keep learning about investing and actually put what I learn into practice. Not really a spoiler, but the videos don’t reveal any magic trick guaranteed to make you spectacularly wealthy. They simply advise you to invest as much as you can as early as you can to make the most of compound returns, and to diversify to reduce the risk of losing your principal. It hardly even counts as advice—who doesn’t know those are good things to do? The first point even matches the rule I already followed with my savings. But by the time we’re adults, the solution to most problems depends less on knowing what to do than on doing it. These videos are an excellent push to take action. Second, I picked up some knowledge and found a direction for further study. I used to understand diversification only in the sense of the familiar saying about not putting all your eggs in one basket: spreading your assets across multiple products. It was only fairly recently that I learned you can combine assets that move in opposite directions to reduce risk while keeping returns roughly the same. The videos made that idea more concrete for me, and I learned for the first time that it’s called portfolio theory. I followed along with a simple example of the theory in action, too. Now that I know its name, I can study it more deeply and look up more examples. YouTube’s algorithm has already put an MIT OpenCourseWare <Portfolio Management> lecture in my feed. It was incredibly useful. I was so impressed by the series that I started watching the other lessons, too. I think I’ve watched just under ten so far, and the choice of topics has been excellent every time: housing subscriptions

The other day, my parents told me something interesting, though I can’t remember what we were talking about when it came up: the South Jeolla Provincial Office used to be in Gwangju. I don’t remember whether they were simply telling me where it had once been or wondering whether it was still there, but either way, it surprised me. For as long as I’ve been alive, Gwangju has been a metropolitan city—a top-level local government on par with South Jeolla Province. And looking further back, it seemed more natural for the South and North Jeolla provincial offices to be in Naju or Jeonju, the cities that gave Jeolla its name. But once I thought about it, Gwangju had grown larger than either Jeonju or Naju in modern times, which was presumably why it became a metropolitan city in its own right. In that case, it made sense for the South Jeolla Provincial Office to have been there until just before Gwangju’s elevation. My parents were right: the South Jeolla Provincial Office used to be in Gwangju, and is now in Muan. Similar things happened elsewhere. I learned that, apart from Incheon and Ulsan, all four of the other metropolitan cities had once housed the provincial offices of the provinces they geographically belonged to. After those cities were elevated, each office moved to another city within its province. It’s a natural progression, but to me it sounded as strange as hearing that the Gyeonggi Provincial Office had once been in Seoul. My parents said my reaction made them feel the generation gap. Haha. Changes to administrative boundaries are still happening today, and they might make me feel that same distance when I talk to future generations. There have been changes in my lifetime, too, though the only one affecting a place I lived was the division of Ilsan-gu in Goyang into Ilsandong-gu and Ilsanseo-gu. It was listed on the copy of my resident registration record when I got one. That’s minor, though. A much bigger change may be just around the corner: the creation of Northern Gyeonggi Province. The proposal is to split Gyeonggi Province in two, keeping the name Gyeonggi Province for the south and establishing a new province in the north. Given Gyeonggi’s population and the way the megacity of Seoul divides it, the proposal doesn’t seem all that strange. The problem is the name. “Northern Gyeonggi Province,” or, in full, “Northern Gyeonggi Special Self-Governing Province,” is a provisional name and would be hard to make official: its two-syllable abbreviation would be indistinguishable from that of North Gyeongsang Province. So a naming contest was held, and the results came out today to considerable controversy. The grand-prize winner was “Pyeonghwanuri Special Self-Governing Province.” Just Google that name and you’ll find plenty of complaints, so I won’t go into the controversy here. Even when a website or app’s UI changes for the better, you can’t help resisting it at first. The names of administrative regions are so familiar that I doubt the public would have liked any replacement. Some said a name made from the first syllables of major cities, as other provinces were named, would have gone over reasonably well. But take the two largest cities in Northern Gyeonggi, Goyang and Namyangju, and you get… Gonam-si? That would have sounded just as unfamiliar. Even allowing for that, I think this one will be hard to get used to. Pyeonghwanuri Special Self-Governing Province—or Pyeongnudo for short. My hometown would be Goyang City, Pyeongnudo? Hahaha, there’s something really funny about that. If the trouble with Northern Gyeonggi is that its abbreviation overlaps with North Gyeongsang, maybe we could keep “Gyeonggi” and use a different way to distinguish the two. What if we used “upper” and “lower” instead of “north” and “south”? Wait… shorten “Upper Gyeonggi Province” in Korean and you get Gyeongsang-do again. Would people in the Southern Hemisphere object to the idea that north is “up”? If we called them Gyeonggi Province One and Gyeonggi Province Two, there’d be a dispute over which got to be number one, wouldn’t there? Or we could drop the “Gyeong” from both names and keep only “Gi” (畿), which already means the region around the capital: Southern Gi Province and Northern Gi Province? Would abandoning the name Gyeonggi on both sides incur too great an administrative cost? It’s clearly not an easy problem. The contest results don’t seem to have settled the name definitively, and it looks like it could still be changed. Whatever name they choose, we’ll go through a period of resistance and eventually get used to it. One day, someone will look at me wide-eyed and ask, “Gyeonggi Province and XX Province used to be one province?” ⋮ Talking about my hometown brings something else to mind. Some cities age with an old-world charm; others simply grow old for lack of any alternative. Some are quickly torn down and remade into new cities. I think everyone has at least a small wish for their hometown, if no other city, to keep its old appearance for a long time. My hometown of Ilsan is now over thirty years old, and there has long been talk of rebuilding or remodeling its apartment complexes. Gangseon Village Complex 14, where I lived, was reportedly the first in Goyang to receive approval to establish a remodeling association, and it had selected a contractor by early last year. Progress seems to have slowed since then amid disputes over residents’ contributions and other issues, but the sense is that remodeling or rebuilding will happen eventually. I remember my childhood very happily, and I think living in Ilsan was a big part of that. An apartment complex of just the right size and age; our ground-floor home with its little flower bed. A school five minutes away on foot, and Lake Park right nearby, where even as a small child I could go by myself because I loved plants and trees. Leaving that Ilsan behind and moving to Seoul when I started middle school was emotionally hard at first. I soon adjusted to Seoul, but the happy memories stayed with me. Once I was in high school and old enough to travel that far on my own, I went back to Ilsan several times, either early on the day I had to return to school* or during vacation. After I got my driver’s license, I started driving there in my parents’ car. Ilsan is still one of my favorite places to drive. *During the school term, our high school let students leave for a weekend only once a month. We called the Sunday when we returned to school “return-to-school day.” Honestly, I’ll be very sad if our apartment complex in Ilsan changes. But what can I do? I have to accept the passage of time. Until then, I’ll visit more often and take in the sight of it as much as I can. *** This kid would later tear a cruciate ligament and still be unable to quit soccer. Look at me swinging before the teacher’s even out of the way, huh? But a few years ago, I tagged along with my parents to a golf driving range and couldn’t even hit the ball when I swung a club. How did I do it back then? Hahaha, look at those stiff m

[Runner's High] Runner's high is the feeling of euphoria that runners can experience. The term was first used in a 1979 paper by American psychologist A. J. Mandell. It refers to a feeling of happiness brought on by the physical stress of exercising amid stimuli from the surrounding environment. — Samsung Medical Center Sports Medicine Center Resources For the past week or two, I've been going on long runs outdoors regularly. I've tried to make running a habit several times before, but each attempt fizzled out when I made excuses about the weather or my other workouts. This time feels different. Lately I've discovered a kind of enjoyment in running that I hadn't felt before, and I think it might become part of my daily life, like going to the gym. The biggest change is that I've slowed down and started running farther. I used to go out aiming for 2 km and run as fast as I could manage. That was only somewhere in the 4:40s per kilometer (all paces below are per kilometer), but it felt like I was dying. On days when I wasn't feeling well or misjudged my pace, I couldn't even finish the 2 km without stopping. I can't remember exactly what prompted it, but at some point I decided to run longer distances more slowly, and I started aiming for 5 km. The first few times, I went out too fast and ran out of steam around the 3 km mark. Gradually, though, I learned what pace would let me run the full 5 km, and since then my goal has been to bring that time down little by little. Once I started running, I naturally began watching related YouTube videos, and I've learned a lot from them about running form and pacing. When I increased the distance to 5 km, the first problem I encountered was pain in my shins. The muscle, apparently called the tibialis anterior, would tighten up and start hurting after just 1–2 km. It lifts the front of the foot so the trailing foot doesn't drag on the ground, which means it gets a lot of use when running. I figured I simply hadn't trained this sport-specific muscle yet, much like the forearm muscles used in climbing. I thought I'd have to wait for it to get stronger by running often or doing isometric exercises with a resistance band. Since it's tucked between the shinbone and the muscles behind it, it's hard to reach with a massage, too. Easing the pain quickly didn't seem likely. But the problem turned out to have a surprisingly easy solution: changing my running form. Until then, I'd been landing on my heels. Someone on YouTube recommended landing on the middle of the foot, a technique called a midfoot strike, so I gave it a try. Since the foot has an arch, it feels more accurate to describe it as letting the whole foot touch down at once. To do that, I naturally lean my upper body a little farther forward, too. After I changed the way I landed, the pain in my shins dropped noticeably! Before, my shins would tighten up so badly I couldn't run, even before I was out of breath. Since switching, that hasn't happened, and on today's run they went beyond hurting less—they barely hurt at all. Another thing I've been paying attention to lately is the angle of my neck. Watching running videos eventually led me to a documentary about marathoner Lee Bong-ju's training, lol. He was running up ahead while his coach followed slowly in a car, calling through a megaphone for him not to lift his chin too high. I realized I was lifting mine quite a bit when I ran, too. Tucking it in made breathing much easier. When I get tired during a run, I habitually raise my chin, so I have to stay alert and consciously keep it down the whole time. Between the simple in-in-out-out breathing rhythm, how my feet land, and the angles of my upper body and neck, I'm realizing that running takes a surprising amount of concentration. If my mind wanders, my form slips or I lose my pace. So I keep my music low enough that it won't distract me and focus all my attention on running. As with anything I've only just started, my times are improving day by day. At first I was in the mid-5:40s, but a few days ago I got down into the 5:30s. Changing my pacing strategy helped a lot. I used to start out at a 5:30 pace, then fall behind as the run went on, huffing and puffing. I'd feel sad watching my pace get slower and slower. Then, about three days ago, I changed my strategy: start a little slower than my target pace and gradually speed up toward the end. That made the run feel easier even when my time was similar, and eventually it helped me set a new personal best. Three days ago, I ran 28 minutes 17 seconds (a 5'38" pace); the day before yesterday, I played soccer; and yesterday, I ran 28 minutes 9 seconds (a 5'37" pace). So I went out today thinking anything under 28 minutes would be a huge success. Instead, I shaved off a whole 31 seconds and finished in 27 minutes 38 seconds! I started at my usual 5:40 pace, then picked it up after the halfway point until the pace read 5:32–5:33. Somehow I felt confident that today I could hold that pace to the end without running out of steam—and I did. Runner's high was a big part of it, too. Last time, I started my sprint with 250 m left and still had energy to spare. So this time I picked up the pace at the 4,500 m mark, and somewhere between 4,600 and 4,700 m, I experienced runner's high. It was my first time. I'd known the term “runner's high” for ages. In the past, when my mind went blank during a run and I stopped noticing how hard it was, I'd wondered if that was what people meant. But now that I've actually experienced it, there's no mistaking it. A wave of goosebumps ran down my spine, like when you watch a great scene in a movie, only more intense. My mood lifted with it, and I covered the remaining distance at a very fast pace with relative ease. I looked it up, and apparently runner's high typically happens after running for about 30 minutes at a heart rate of at least 120 beats per minute. That fits my experience pretty well. They say that once you've felt runner's high, you risk getting hooked on it like a drug... That won't happen to me, right? Though I am planning to go running again tomorrow. Hahaha. Luckily, nothing seems wrong with my body yet. But if I get injured and still try to run, please talk me out of it. Oh, and if anyone wants to run together along the Han River, get in touch. Pushing my limits is my main reason for running, so I couldn't do group runs every day if they kept me from running at my own pace. But meeting up now and then to run and work up a sweat together sounds nice, doesn't it? ︙ Maybe I'll introduce my gear here, too. Not that there's much to introduce. I don't have a smartwatch; I just run with my phone in my hand. I track my runs with Nike Run Club. People online recommend Strava because it's easier to export your data, but I use Nike because I need it to read my pace aloud. (I just checked, and Strava does that too? But it doesn't have enough options, so I'll probably stick with Nike.) I've set it to read out my distance and pace every 250 m, but not my total time. I wear a T-shirt and shorts with a zip-up jacket over them. I brought gloves for the first time today but didn't wear them. It'll probably get insanely cold again soon, though… All I carry is my phone and a transit/debit card for getting home. I could just run 2.5 km and turn around, and then I wouldn't have to walk a long way or take public transit. But there's something about retracing your steps that you just don't want to do, you know? So I al

--> How beautiful a powerful yet controllable force can be I have one more reason to love Seoul. Today’s fireworks felt like they were comforting me. I’d always thought comfort couldn’t change my circumstances, and that ultimately I was the one who had to change. Besides, I’d never imagined fireworks could comfort me. Was it my up-and-down mood today? The sound, which felt more resonant than last year? Or was I simply exhausted from playing so much soccer? Probably the last one. I should finish writing this and get to bed. This was my second time watching, after last year. Once again, what I liked most was that it left me wanting for nothing. Other fireworks shows, like performances by top-tier idols at university festivals, leave me thinking, “That’s it?” But here, just when I thought, “Is it over? Well, that was plenty,” the fireworks would burst out again, often even more intensely. It happened several times. So I never feel disappointed when it’s time to turn away and go home. I don’t think all the other fireworks shows I’ve seen combined could measure up to the Seoul International Fireworks Festival. They might not even measure up to a single year of it. I assumed a show like this would naturally rank among the world’s top fireworks festivals, but when I looked it up, it seems even the Busan Fireworks Festival is bigger in scale? I guess I still have a lot to see when it comes to fireworks. The Busan festival is in a month—should I go? The fireworks are as varied as they are grand. Even the movements of individual fireworks differ: free fall / drifting slowly downward / hovering in midair / shooting off in various directions. The shapes they form are more varied still: a sphere of one color / a sphere with different colors inside and out / a ring around a sphere / a waterfall / a dragon (hovering in midair) / a flower / a star / a smiley face / a heart / a smiley face turning into a heart. Oh, and they added a cat! I don’t remember seeing that last year. 🐱 It must be hard to control which way shaped fireworks, like the smiley faces, are facing when they burst. So they look like this: 🙃 🙂 🙃 🙂 But that was last year, when I watched from the front near Yeouinaru. This year I was north of the river and a little off to the side, so 🙂 🙃 🙂 🙃 they looked all squished like this, haha. I watched from north of the river this time because I’d been playing soccer at Hyochang Stadium just beforehand. The fireworks started going off toward the end of the third quarter. The stadium sits on somewhat elevated ground, so I’d secretly hoped I could watch from there, but I could barely see the tips of the fireworks between the buildings. It wasn’t really a place to watch the show. So as soon as the game ended, I rushed out toward the river. The Korean team’s show was originally scheduled to start right when our game ended, but thanks to a slight delay, I don’t think I missed much. The view was actually best when bus 0411 rounded the traffic circle at the north end of Wonhyo Bridge, but I couldn’t get off there. Instead, I walked to the entrance to Seongchon Park (37.5302N 126.9532E) and watched from there. It was very close. I measured the delay between the light and sound (heh), and it came to 2.3 seconds. Taking the height of the fireworks into account, that means I was within about 600–700 meters of them. The pedestrian overpass and buildings blocked part of my view, but what overwhelmed me was the sound. It was incredibly loud. At the final climax, the sound of the mass of red fireworks went beyond awe-inspiring—it was almost frightening. Yesterday gave me a new rule for watching fireworks: get close, even if it means sacrificing some of the view. The thunderous sound fills your chest. It’s like watching a rocket launch in person. A video might have a better angle, but the one thing it can never capture is the sound. The explosions don’t sound quite as good in the official replay , but it includes the background music I couldn’t hear on-site. That’s why I watched almost the whole thing, from start to finish. DAY6’s “Feeling Good” at 05:50 is especially legendary. Anyway, I’m deeply grateful to Hanwha for bringing us this joy every year. I want to build a company that has the capacity to contribute to society, beyond simply making a profit. 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Summer The front seat on the right side of a city bus A thick, juicy beef patty that hasn’t been cooked to a crisp Villa Erbatium Mossy Glen Impressionist oil paintings with people in them A conifer forest glowing darkly in the faint sunlight What do these things have in common? ⋮ They all give me a quiet sense of satisfaction. You could say they’re my kind of thing. When I browse Instagram, I come across people around my age who are far better than I am at recognizing, exploring, and documenting their tastes. Looking at their feeds, I can see a subtle sensibility running through their posts—something quite different from the usual Instagram aesthetic. I have a lot of respect for people like that. Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about how important it is to identify exactly what you like. There are a few benefits: It keeps you exploring new things. You inevitably get used to old favorites. In seeking fresh experiences, you deepen your knowledge and widen your circle of acquaintances. It makes you grateful for chances to experience the things you like (summer comes around again!). That leads to a life full of happiness. It helps people remember you as a more fully rounded person. Which would stick in your mind longer: Geonhee Lee, an aerospace engineering student, or Geonhee Lee, who gets excited about rocket reentry technology? Speaking of discovering what you like, this app came up in an Instagram ad recently. I thought its name, Eorat (“Oh, wait!”), was really clever. There are levels to personal taste—not in the sense of good or bad, but in how much effort it takes to discover a particular preference. The items above, for example, are listed in order of increasing effort. I learned that I like summer more than winter simply by living through the seasons. To find out that I liked Mossy Glen, I had to go out of my way to ask a friend what perfume they were wearing the other day. If I hadn’t been able to visit a Canadian national park, I might have gone my whole life without knowing that I love conifer forests glowing in faint light. There are things you already know you like, and others you discover unexpectedly at some moment in life, thinking, as the app’s name suggests, “Oh, wait—I like this?” Some you can discover only by seizing a rare opportunity. Others remain out of reach no matter how hard you try, unless the world gives you the chance. My goal is not to miss a single chance to discover something I like, as long as the world makes it possible. This way of thinking probably began when I started climbing in February last year—or perhaps the year before. I saw a friend’s story looking for someone to go with and tagged along out of curiosity. Climbing went on to become my biggest hobby for over a year. I would never have taken it up on my own. Until then, I’d pictured climbing as scaling a high cliff while hanging from a rope, and extreme sports like that weren’t for me. But the type of climbing I tried on my first day—bouldering—involved no ropes. The goal was to solve problems rather than climb high, and I loved it. I was amazed by how different the reality was from what I’d imagined. I thought about all the fun things in the world I might have passed by out of vague assumptions or indifference, and resolved not to miss them anymore. That was part of why I tried bungee jumping on a recent trip to New Zealand. Watching someone else jump from the observation deck did send my adrenaline surging, but the main reason I went ahead without hesitation was that, if I might like bungee jumping more than I expected, this was the perfect chance to find out. (Or so I tell myself to justify spending 70,000 won per second. Haha.) I didn’t come away thinking, “I can’t live without bungee jumping now,” but I did learn how much I like it and how much time and money I’d be willing to spend on it. That knowledge means a lot to me. ⋮ Once you’ve identified something you like, it’s just as important to remind yourself of it now and then. If it’s something you can’t easily enjoy in everyday life, you’re bound to forget about it even if you love it—like a song buried deep in an old playlist. The easiest way I can think of to start doing that is to decorate your room. In teen movies, don’t the main characters always have posters of movies and bands on their walls? All the posters on Tony’s wall in the British series Skins . To be honest, Skins is more of a teen-downfall drama than a typical teen drama, but I included it because I really love the show. Keeping the things you love where you can see them every day can make life richer. I’ve moved around a lot—especially lately, when I’ve been living like a grasshopper—so I haven’t done much decorating myself. But I have done one thing: I bought a wire grid at Daiso and put up Life Four Cuts photo strips and travel photos I’d taken over the years. I already knew those photos so well that I could roughly describe their framing and poses without looking. Yet simply seeing them often gives them far more meaning than they had tucked away in a corner of my bookshelf. Being reminded that there are people I care about, who care about me in return—people who are my kind of people—makes life feel a little less lonely. Is there a photo of you here, or one you printed for me? If so, you mean a great deal to me. I’m skeptical about the metaverse, but another option is to fill my computer and phone wallpapers—which I look at far longer than my walls—with things I love. This wallpaper has held its place for over a year. I took the photo at the moment I discovered my love for “conifer forests glowing darkly in the faint sunlight.” Would a rotating selection of photos fit the point of this post better?

This guy is my KakaoTalk profile picture right now. Know who he is? He’s the Number Devil, from the book of the same name. The book was so popular that some of you probably recognized him right away. Why did I make this strange-looking guy my profile picture? You know that feeling when you unexpectedly come across a cartoon character you saw all the time as a kid but haven’t thought about in years? That rush of nostalgia. To be honest, I didn’t think much of him back then. (I was looking him up on Namuwiki and rediscovered his real name, which I’d forgotten: Teplotaxl!) When I read the book, I identified with the little boy having the dreams, not with him. But yesterday, or maybe the day before, I was scrolling through Instagram when he suddenly appeared in a post, and I felt something strange. As a kid, I’d thought of him as an all-knowing ghost of a teacher. Looking at him now, he just seemed like someone my age with a beard. I felt an odd sense of kinship. I wonder if he’s done his military service. I’ve been having thoughts like that a lot lately— about how I’m really not that young anymore. When a hugely successful idol is younger than me. When I watch a camcorder video my dad took of an open class at my preschool sports program and realize the teacher in it might have been the age I am now. When I realize my mom wasn’t much older than I am now when she gave birth to me. It’s not that my age makes me feel inadequate. Sure, I sometimes envy people my age who found success early on. But I’ve worked hard in my own way, and I’ve achieved a few modest things too. Speaking of getting older, for some reason this year I found myself noticing spring arrive—the flowers blooming, the grass sprouting. I figured I just had more time to look around while walking now that my final semester was a little less busy. Then I had a meal with a friend and told them about it, and they said it was because I was getting older. I’m not sure I understood exactly what they meant, but I took it as a joke at the time. The more I think about it, though, the less it feels like something I should laugh off. Growing up, there have been a few milestones that showed me I’d reached a new stage of mental growth. The one I remember best happened around middle school: I gained the ability to think something over before saying it out loud. I don’t know exactly when it started, but suddenly I was doing something I definitely couldn’t do before. I think being able to notice and enjoy the arrival of spring might be another milestone like that. And more recently, I feel like I’m learning how to appreciate song lyrics. Until now, most of the songs I loved had won me over with their melodies. Of course I understood the lyrics, and some of them moved me, but I think it’s only recently that I’ve fully felt what happens when lyrics and melody come together as a song. I used to think that just as people stop growing taller once their physical growth ends, there would come a point when the mind’s growth plates closed too. After that, you could learn more facts, but your depth of understanding wouldn’t change much. I thought I’d already passed that point. There was even a time when I arrogantly responded to my parents’ advice by thinking, “Do you think I don’t know that already?” But seeing myself discover new milestones even now makes me realize I was wrong. The mind keeps growing, even if it grows more slowly than it did in adolescence. I imagine it’ll keep doing so until just before I die. I’ve had that thought a few times. The most vivid was at the end of my first year of college, on a trip to Australia. After spending the day exploring a national park, I got on a train back to Sydney, pleasantly worn out. BTS’s “Euphoria” was playing in my earphones. I felt so satisfied with the day that I wondered whether I could ever be happier. What if this moment was the peak of my life, and it was all downhill from here? When I got old, I wouldn’t have the energy to roam around like this, and fewer new sights would make my heart race. I’d overlooked mental growth. As the years go by, I’ll probably find more to feel even in the same things—just as flowers, grass, and song lyrics have come to mean something different to me over the past few years. So far, my mind seems to have grown just fine on its own. But it suddenly occurs to me that there might be things I can do to help it along. Maybe there are heights I’ll never reach unless I make a conscious effort. Perhaps I should read more books. I went to bed early tonight, hoping to get to sleep sooner, but I couldn’t sleep. These thoughts kept running through my head, so I just rambled on and wrote them down.