#수필

I had an errand in Sejong this evening, so I made a quick trip there. After spending day after day at my desk trying to finish my dissertation, the outing cleared my head. An interesting thought came to me in the car, so I’m writing it down. The title means that, as of today, I’ve been alive for 27 years, 2 months, and 7 days. I didn’t plan it, but those numbers look rather nice. Perhaps they’re telling me to write this today. I want to write about what’s happening at this point in my life. I’ve written before about things I’ve come to see differently as I’ve grown older. Those pieces were about changes that depended on me—on what I encountered, read, and thought about. This one is a little different. Today I want to talk about what I’ve observed as the consensus among people my age at this particular moment. Since I’m describing a “representative value” that averages out individual differences, my exact age seemed like a fitting title. It might be fun to write a life-version update log like this from time to time. I call it a generational consensus, but my observable universe is very small, so I should say up front that it may differ greatly from the ground truth. If anything, this post might show just how narrow the world I experience is. v27.2.7 Update Many people my age now live in households of their own—unless they live and work in the same area as their families and the city’s punishing housing prices make moving out prohibitively expensive. We sometimes visit one another’s homes. There’s much less need to fret over finding a café or bar that stays open late. Some have cars, and even those who don’t can sometimes afford a taxi, so the last bus or train is less of a concern, too. Not many are married. Women tend to marry earlier than men, so a few cases are starting to appear, but there still aren’t many. I suspect that will change substantially before long—perhaps within the next year or two. Someone I met recently, only a few years older than me, said that about half of his friends seemed to be married. I was honestly a little surprised, especially since he was a man. Even with the age of marriage rising, the wave is coming. A wave of childbirth and parenting will soon follow. Those who aren’t the oldest child can often already watch an older sibling ride that wave up close. As someone who prefers quiet places, I felt I was at the peak of independence in my life while sitting at home with friends, chatting into the late evening. But if we intend to marry—myself included—this period won’t last long. It shouldn’t. It’s a brief golden age in which we have the means to live independently but don’t yet have families of our own to care for. To start a family, we must be ready to give up that golden age and accept the merging of our worlds with those of a spouse and children. Back in high school and even early in college, differences in aptitude mostly prompted thoughts like, “Oh, this friend is good at that.” But a substantial amount of time and effort has since built up on those differences, and we’ve now branched into entirely different species species according to our fields. Our ways of life have diverged that much, and staying in touch with people of another species takes a special effort. Few people are just starting out in the arts or sports now. Quite a few are closer to the end of their careers than the beginning. Many are entering their prime or are already in it; in certain fields, such as professional Go or esports, that prime has already passed. Success tends to come later for people in academia, the professions, and the startup scene—including me and many people around me—than it does for those in the arts or sports. Almost no one in my circle has achieved definitive success yet, and even looking beyond it, I could count such people on one hand. But I’m starting to see people who have a good chance of getting there. I look forward to seeing, in five or ten years, how sound my judgment was. The moment for people in business and politics comes later still. Even beyond my own circle, it’s hard to find anyone my age who has so much as entered those worlds. The end of life no longer feels vaguely, immeasurably far away. Our parents have already retired or soon will, and with each passing day it becomes clearer that we should be caring for them rather than receiving their care. Many of the public figures whose deaths are announced are people whose names I already know.

Not long ago, for my father’s birthday, I gave my parents new phones. A gift doesn’t have to be something the recipient needs, but it should be something they’ll be happy to receive. As for whether my parents needed new phones, they’d needed them for quite a while. To me, both phones had looked like they were on their last legs for ages, but my parents insisted they worked just fine… Anyway, they were delighted with the gifts. My father’s birthday falls near the end of the year, close to Christmas. That got me thinking: this year marks exactly 20 years since I received the Christmas present I remember most vividly. At Christmas in 2005, Santa Claus gave me an electronic dictionary. It was the first electronic device I ever owned. It had a monochrome reflective LCD with a refresh rate of maybe 3 Hz, and hardly any features beyond a dictionary, notes, a calendar, and contacts. But I was probably even more excited about it than I was when I got my first MacBook. I remember spending days exploring every menu, writing diary entries in the notes app, and saving my friends’ home phone numbers. I used a feature phone until I was an adult, and I didn’t have a personal computer until high school. So I kept this dictionary close for at least ten years. I think I even left it in the study hall to use when I was in high school. I learned so many words from it. Of the words I used in a seminar I gave in English last week , I probably learned more than half from that dictionary. Looking at it now, it’s such a tiny, cute electronic dictionary. I put it through so much that I had both the top and bottom halves of its case replaced once. Truly the electronic dictionary of Theseus. That Christmas had an unusual setting, too. My uncle’s housewarming happened to be scheduled for that day, so I received the present at his place. Little me could only marvel: “How did Santa know where my uncle lives??” Later, my parents Santa Claus told me that coordinating plans with the relatives kept changing the location, and figuring out how to transport the gift along with it had taken some work. The funny thing is, I faced a similar dilemma this year. As I talked with my younger sibling about whether to risk having the phones delivered directly to my parents’ home or have them sent to mine and bring them up myself, I realized my parents must have had a similar conversation in 2005. Exactly 20 years later, our roles had completely reversed. Of course, I still rely on my parents in some ways, but it was a moment when I realized I’d grown up enough to give them gifts, at least now and then. And isn’t it fitting that the electronic dictionary and the smartphone could each be seen as a defining electronic device of its time? The difference in what they can do made me feel just how much time had passed. There’s one more happy memory I want to share. At the end of 2003, my family went to Bangkok, so I received my Christmas present during the trip. That year’s gift was a magic drawing board—a fairly fancy one, with a lever on the side that, when pulled down, would slowly spring back up and erase the whole drawing surface at once. I got a lot of use out of it, drawing whatever I wanted and writing things down as I learned them. But what struck me most that day wasn’t the gift. It was the letter that came with it. The letter was a whole page in Thai! It had never occurred to me that Santa might be from another country, so I was dumbfounded—in a good way. I probably went to my parents to tell them all about this strange and wonderful thing. I must have been quite astonished, because I still remember bits of it even though I was only five. My parents had actually written the letter in English and asked a hotel employee to translate it into Thai. Receiving that letter and gift remains one of my most treasured memories. Someday, I want to do something like that for my own children—or come up with something even more imaginative. The funny thing about gifts is that you put all the care into giving them, but later, the ones you remember are the gifts you received. It’s not as if I’ve never given anyone a gift, yet the ones that come to mind are all things people gave me. When I’m the one giving, I worry about whether the recipient will like what I’ve prepared. But when I’m receiving, it doesn’t really matter what it is. I’m simply grateful that someone thought of me and picked something out. Recently, someone gave me a plush toy. I’d never been interested in plush toys before, but I liked it so much that I’ve put it on the back of my sofa at home. A gift of something unfamiliar can also become a chance to discover something new. To my elementary school friends who gave me a Pentel mechanical pencil for my birthday in 2012: did you know I still use it? I liked it so much that, even though it’s broken a few times, I’ve gone out of my way to buy the same one two or three more times. I even used it for a quantum computing exam recently. Maybe because KakaoTalk makes it so easy to see and keep track of birthdays these days, gifts that arrive unexpectedly seem to mean more to me than ones given on occasions like birthdays. To return to that plush toy: a senior colleague in my lab bought it while attending a conference abroad. I was supposed to go too. I’d submitted an abstract, had it accepted, and even finished writing the paper; all that was left was to fly out. But something absurd came up, and I couldn’t go. It was the first international conference I’d gotten into since starting my degree, and my colleague thought of me, unable to attend at the last minute, and brought back the toy. I was so grateful for the thought. The aerospace conference was in Sydney, so it’s a kangaroo in a spacesuit. In a world where everyone is busy just managing their own lives, remembering someone when it isn’t even their birthday takes thoughtfulness and effort. As the year draws to a close, thinking about the people like that in my life warms my heart all over again. I want to try harder to be that kind of person, too.

I once wrote a post called The Number Devil about how we continue to grow mentally even after we stop growing physically. That was in May 2022, about four years after I became an adult. Roughly the same amount of time has passed again. I think I’m still growing. There are things I can do now that I couldn’t do then. Some are small, like getting my gloves out and putting them on before the cold makes me miserable (amazingly, I think this is the first year I’ve managed to do that properly). Others are fundamental enough to help me in every part of my life. Today I want to write about one of those. Why do humans have emotions? Having emotions helps us survive. Fear makes us flee danger, and anger makes us fight threats. Hope motivates us to work toward long-term goals, while love and empathy play important roles in forming social bonds and living together. But emotions don’t always work in our favor. Sometimes they ruin things. When I’m overjoyed, that’s not really a problem. It means something wonderful has happened, so who cares if a few other things go wrong? Joy that intense is rare and short-lived. I might as well enjoy it. The opposite is the problem: when negative emotions take over. When something bad has already happened, and the feelings it leaves behind threaten to ruin other things in a chain reaction. At times like that, I’ve wished I could briefly become a robot—one that feels nothing and acts only on reason. As if that were possible. If you’re human, you can’t help having feelings. What matters is how you respond to them. Over the years, I’ve developed a manual for dealing with mine: *** First, consider how long it’s been. How long have you been feeling this way? 1. If the feeling has just appeared, it’s easy. Emotions that arise in an instant fade quickly, too. Anger, for example, is said to take only about 90 seconds for the chemicals that trigger it to be produced and then dissipate. So you don’t need much of a strategy. You just have to get through that one- or two-minute window. For that brief time, refrain from saying or doing anything driven by the emotion. Park Yong-maan, former chairman of Doosan Group, said in a documentary that he keeps two- and five-minute hourglasses on his desk. Before acting on an important decision, he turns one over and waits for the sand to run out. By then, he said, the emotion has drained away, and many of his decisions change. That stuck with me, so I bought a three-minute toothbrushing hourglass at Daiso and put it on my desk. Fortunately, I haven’t yet had a moment heated enough to make me turn it over. 2. Emotions that have been building for a long time, or that linger, need a more careful approach. 2.1. First, find the cause. Why do I feel bad right now? Once I’ve identified it, I ask whether it warrants feeling this strongly. Questioning whether my own feelings are justified might sound a little psychopathic, but it genuinely helps. Surprisingly often, the cause turns out not to be such a big deal—or there’s no particular reason at all. For me, the former has usually been disappointment in someone, and the latter, a low mood. Feelings I’ve found to be unwarranted at this stage are relatively easy to shake off. 2.2. The next step for feelings that do have a reason behind them is to change my perspective. I can’t undo what happened, but I can change how I take it. In psychology, this is called reframing. Suppose I completely botch a presentation at a conference. Rather than see it as a failure and wallow in frustration, I can see it as a chance to address my weaknesses and do better next time. That not only makes me feel better in the moment; it also leads me to analyze and document my mistakes from different angles and prepare more systematically for the future. reframing 2.3. Still not enough? Then fight back. Identify a few active things you can do to overcome the feeling, and do them whenever you feel bad. These aren’t quite the same as things that make you happy, like hobbies. Those can lift your mood in one area and offset the bad feeling in another, which certainly helps to a degree. But the activities I mean can bring the bad mood itself back toward neutral. What works will be different for everyone. Here are a few things that have worked for me: Sleep It has a good chance of dispelling the thoughts that come late at night. So if it’s late, stop thinking about everything else and get some sleep. Aerobic exercise Something you can do at a steady pace for a long time is good, especially if you can look at the scenery while you do it. Running outdoors and cycling, for example. Personally, anaerobic exercise hasn’t helped me much with regulating my emotions. Watching a movie Playing an instrument As I write this, I’ve just realized that all these activities have something in common. Sleep is obvious. During aerobic exercise, I have to manage my breathing and pace; when watching a movie, I’m absorbed in the protagonist’s situation; and when playing an instrument, I’m trying not to miss a single note. Each demands my full attention, and I have to stay focused for at least several dozen minutes. That forces me to spend some time apart from whatever hurt me. Perhaps that’s exactly why these activities help me recover. 2.4. But what if an emotion still won’t come under control after all those steps? Then there’s nothing left but the last resort. Think selfishly. Is staying like this doing me any good? Sometimes, no matter how I look at it, the world really does seem to be treating me unfairly, and I can’t find a single positive angle. Some experiences leave feelings that a good night’s sleep and a run won’t resolve. But am I going to spend the rest of my life frustrated and cynical because of them? That won’t do me any good. When a situation is already bleak, the only way to make even a small positive change is to get moving. The person who breaks free of an emotion’s grip and acts is the one who ultimately wins. I added this final trick to my manual after watching a YouTube video recommended to me one day. I hope you’ll watch the video I’ve embedded below. Can a one-minute video change your life? I don’t usually believe that sort of thing. But this one changed mine. Not completely, but it made me more resilient, better able to overcome the many hardships I’ll face in the long years ahead. The full version is here . When repeated effort brings me nothing but failure, and I feel myself growing cynical, I always think of Conan’s words. *** I think back to myself just a few years ago, before I had this manual. I was so young. I’d sulk over little things, or sink into a low mood for no particular reason and get pulled deeper and de

A person dies and leaves a name behind. I’ve been thinking about this saying a lot lately. I want to leave my name behind. I want those who knew me personally to remember me as a person of good character, and those who didn’t to remember me as an engineer, entrepreneur, and creator who made the world a better place. At the same time, I realize how hard it is to leave a name behind. Of the more than a hundred billion people who have walked this earth, how many can you name? Not long ago, I became captivated by the songs of a singer who had died young and listened to nothing else for days. The singer had never married and had no children. From a biological perspective, an organism’s greatest success is to leave as many copies of its genes, or something like them, in the world as possible. Conversely, an organism that leaves no offspring has failed. By that measure, the singer was a failure. But was he really? Even now, long after his death, I listen to his songs. His creations have outlived him and continue to be enjoyed by countless people. His music comforts us and gives us the strength to face another day. Helping people who share my values live happier lives—that is what I mean by “leaving my name behind.” From a broader perspective, it is also a way of passing on my genes. It may not be as exact a copy as biological reproduction, but it can reach far more people and endure indefinitely. Reproduction is now just one of many ways to pass on genes. We can see evidence of this in how modern nations are changing. The ultimate form of a nation is a community of people who share the same values, not the same race. The boundaries between nations once drawn along racial lines are blurring with globalization; now ideas and ideologies bring people together. In God We Trust: because of its unique history, the United States was the first country to approach this ultimate form. Bonds forged through shared values can sometimes be stronger than bonds of blood. We often see people join forces with someone of a different race who shares their ideology, then stand against—and even point guns at—people of their own race. Evolutionary biology, with the preservation of genes as its first principle, struggles to explain such behavior. Or perhaps one day, when genetic research has advanced far enough, we’ll discover that the human values we thought too abstract to be encoded in a sequence of bases are, in fact, inscribed in broad patterns across our DNA. If so, the flourishing of a group that shares the ideals I support could truly count as a biological success, just as much as having sons and daughters of my own.

The file explorer will load here. If it doesn't appear after a while, try refreshing the page. When I was young, I would sometimes see professors being interviewed in clips on TV. Often, I wondered whether the producers really needed to ask a professor for answers like “As the weather gets colder, drink plenty of warm water to prevent respiratory illnesses” on the news, or “Yes, it's true. When the novel <Jaws> was first introduced in Korea, it came out under the title <Agari>” on Sponge . But I suppose they wanted to show not just the answer, but also the credibility lent to it by the professor's position. The bookshelves full of books behind the professors made them seem all the more credible. Looking at those shelves, I vaguely wondered, “Will I have a bookshelf like that when I grow up?” There they are, doing just that About twenty years later, I have grown up, but I still don't have a bookshelf like that. A few books and a few stacks of papers I've printed myself are all the materials at my desk in the lab. My sparse workspace isn't just a reflection of how short my research career has been. Even my advisor, who has spent fifteen years at our university, keeps relatively few books on the shelves compared with the professors I used to see on TV. My desk in the lab today (November 30, 2025) I think the digitization of materials has played an even bigger part in simplifying our workspaces. Today, we handle most of our materials on computers. As with this very post, I spend far more time reading and writing with a screen and keyboard than with paper and pen. Chances are you do too. As the amount of material on my drive grew, I needed a system for managing it sustainably. I began developing one around high school, when I got my own computer, and have kept refining it ever since. It has now settled into a fairly stable form. I imagine nearly everyone who does knowledge work for a living has a system of their own. Yet we rarely get to look inside one another's systems. Physical bookshelves could be cumbersome, but they also offered evidence of our past efforts—the books behind those professors—and chances to learn from someone else's work by accident: “Oh, what's that book?” Digitizing our bookshelves has taken much of that charm away. So I decided to write a post actively introducing my digital bookshelf. The file explorer at the top lets you explore the actual structure of my archive, and what follows explains some of its more noteworthy parts. Text like this refers to the name or path of a particular directory or file in the archive. ~ is shorthand for my home directory ( Macintosh HD/Users/gunheeyi ) . My YouTube recommendations one night while I was writing this post. Coincidence? Directories Here are the main directories (folders) that make up my archive. ~/iCloud Drive With a few exceptions, I store everything in iCloud. I currently use four computers, switching between them depending on where I am and what I'm doing. Cloud storage is essential if I want to work seamlessly across all of them, as well as my tablet and phone. Back when I used a Windows PC and a Galaxy phone, Google Drive served me well. But after moving into the Apple ecosystem, I moved all my materials and photos to iCloud. What I like most is that it is built into the operating system on both desktop and mobile, so it works well without any separate installation. The first exception to cloud syncing is files downloaded from the web. They go into ~/Downloads . After checking their contents, I move those worth keeping long-term into a directory under iCloud. Otherwise, I delete them immediately or during a periodic cleanup of the Downloads folder. The other exception is the material in the dev directory, which I'll explain later. ~/iCloud Drive/yearly yearly is the largest directory in my iCloud Drive. It holds almost everything that can be organized chronologically. As the name suggests, its immediate subdirectories are years such as 2025 . Within each year, I sort materials by subject. Under 2024 , for example, are 선보엔젤파트너스 (the company I worked for before graduate school), kaist (research and coursework), founders (a student entrepreneurship group I was active in early that year), freelancing (contract development work), and misc (miscellaneous odds and ends). Of course, I could have chosen subjects rather than years as the top-level categories. But thinking in terms of when and then what feels more natural to me. I also like being able to see at a glance what I was or am doing in a given year, so I chose to organize by year. Sometimes work on one subject crosses into a new year. If it doesn't continue far into that next year, I put everything under the first, primary year. That applies to an academic year running from March through the following February, for instance, or a development contract that began one summer and ended the following January. When material spans multiple years substantially, I inevitably end up with directories of the same name under several years. ~/iCloud Drive/yearly/future One of my most recent changes was adding a future directory under yearly . It holds material about things I expect to happen in the future but whose timing is still uncertain. If the timing is known, the material goes directly under a specific year instead. Examples include marriage, raising children, postdoctoral research, finding a job, and trips I haven't taken yet. Since these things haven't happened, the contents are mostly wish lists, tips that may come in handy when the time comes, and information about support programs rather than records of the past. Now that future exists, would chronological be a more accurate name than yearly ? ~/iCloud Drive/resources Things I need to keep but that aren't tied to a particular time go in resources : books, favorite works of art, sheet music, contacts, software, operating-system and application settings, wallpaper images, fonts, document templates, and more. ~/iCloud Drive/tunnel I use tunnel to move material between devices. Other directories in the cloud hold things up in the “cloud” so I can download them whenever I need them. tunnel , as its name suggests, is more like a

Unusual experiences that happen now and then. Some are so minor and personal that I forget them before I get around to asking anyone about them or looking them up. I have a few of those. Most of the time, I forget them and move on. But every once in a while, I manage to ask someone else before I forget, or find something describing a similar experience. When I discover that other people have experienced it too—and that it even has an academic name—I feel a tremendous rush of excitement. Below is a list of things I’ve discovered that way. I’ve put the rarer experiences, and those that mean more to me personally, toward the end. I’ll keep adding new discoveries even after finishing the first draft. In fact, the reason I’m finally turning notes I started gathering in May into this post today (December 16, 2024) is that I just learned the name for a particular experience I describe below: the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. *As I write, all sorts of psychological phenomena, such as déjà vu, keep coming to mind. I’ll leave out the ones that are already widely known. ‼️ I’m conducting a survey related to this post. If you have time after reading, please take it at the link below! 🔗 Survey link Contents Chronostasis Phosphenes Multiplexed display break-up Semantic satiation Photic sneeze reflex Baader–Meinhof phenomenon Other experiences The list Chronostasis Chronostasis, a.k.a. Stopped-Clock Illusion The sensation that the first moment of a new event or action stretches out in time when the brain registers the event or is called upon to perform the action. When I was little, if I suddenly looked at a clock after looking at something else, the second hand seemed to stop for a moment. Unless it has a sweeping seconds movement, a clock’s second hand does, of course, stop between jumps. But the pause seemed temporarily longer than usual. The following seconds passed at their normal pace. I used to imagine that the clock had frozen in surprise at my gaze?! Even then, I knew it was a silly thought. Chronostasis is the broader phenomenon that keeps the same cause-and-effect pattern—“perceiving a new sensation → feeling as though time has slowed”—but applies it to the senses in general. Apparently it can occur with hearing and touch as well. Still, the clock’s second hand must be a common way to notice it: Wikipedia gives the “stopped-clock illusion” as a representative example of chronostasis. The mechanism behind it is a bit complicated, so I’m moving on without claiming to understand it. See also Chronostasis (Wikipedia article) Phosphenes Phosphene A momentary sensation of light produced when the retina is physically stimulated by something other than light. When I close my eyes, I see what look like scattered dots in the darkness. I can’t quite tell what color they are. They seem red, then maybe blue, then green again. There are more of them when I put pressure on my eyes—say, when I press my eyelids because my eyes ache, or rest my head on a desk with my forearm pressing against them. The dots also seem to drift like waves as my gaze moves through the darkness. As a child, the dots reminded me of stars in space, and I enjoyed pressing on my eyelids to feel as though I were traveling through the universe. I probably shouldn’t have done that. The sources below explain that this phenomenon, called a phosphene, occurs when pressure on the eye stimulates visual cells much as light does, creating the illusion of seeing something. None of them, though, quite captures my experience. What stands out to me is that dots or blotches are scattered irregularly; their colors seem to change or are hard to identify precisely; and they slowly drift away from or toward my gaze. If I get the chance, I’d like to make my own visualization of it. *주제와 다소 벗어나는 잡소리 취중 시각 시각화: USAG Stuttgart's View from Drunk Goggles (ssri+dxm audio+visual) waking up with serotonin syndrome after drinking 2 bottles of cough syrup --> See also Phosphene (Wikipedia article) What are the flashes you see when you close your eyes and press on your eyelids? (YouTube video) Phosphenes: What You See Behind Closed Eyes (YouTube video) The world you see when you rest your eyes on your arm (Instagram post) Multiplexed display break-up Multiplexed Display Break-up The phenomenon in which characters on a seven-segment display or similar screen appear to wobble when you look at them while chewing. This isn’t a formally defined term; I borrowed the wording of Wikipedia’s description as a name for it. Just as the description says, if I look at a digital display while chewing something, its characters seem to dance and wobble. But this doesn’t happen with text on every screen—only on seven-segment displays and similar types. A seven-segment display. On these displays, only one light (or segment) is actually lit at a given instant. The characters appear whole because of the persistence of our vision. A display that works this way is called a multiplexed display. Wikipedia explains that the momentary shift in our viewpoint caused by chewing can disrupt the apparent alignment of segments even within a single character, making it seem to wobble. See also Multiplexed display (Wikipedia article) — “Break up” section Semantic satiation Semantic Satiation The phenomenon in which repeating a word or phrase temporarily makes it lose its meaning. The Wikipedia article focuses on auditory repetition, but I’ve never experienced it through hearing—only through sight. A word I was reading or writing would suddenly feel unfamiliar. I hadn’t forgotten what it meant, but for some reason it seemed strange. This often happened when a word was repeated,

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

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

I’m starting graduate school this fall. I’m returning to my alma mater and undergraduate major, KAIST’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, two years after leaving Daejeon at the end of spring 2022, which was effectively my final semester. I had plenty of doubts and worries before deciding to go, and even now I’m half excited and half anxious. But that’s a story for another time, since it isn’t what I want to write about today. Naturally, I’ve decided to leave my job in mid-to-late August. I’ll only be stopping my full-time, in-office work, though; I plan to continue doing the same work remotely and part-time. As the company’s only developer, I’ve already been doing most of it on my own, so switching to remote work shouldn’t be a major problem. I’d welcome the extra income, since I can’t expect to earn much as a graduate student. The company, meanwhile, would have a hard time finding someone as well suited to the work as I am, and hiring someone would take resources for a handover. Our interests align, which is what makes this possible. The arrangement is being considered quite favorably, but we still need to negotiate my pay under the new arrangement. It’s also possible that I’ll be so busy from my very first semester of my master’s program that I won’t have time for a side job at all. It’s now been a full seven months since I joined the company at the beginning of the year. I’m quite busy even now. Until around the middle of this year, I could more or less set my own pace. But the in-house software I’ve been developing was slated for use in the semiannual sales reporting process starting in July, which gave the work a deadline. Since the rollout began, I’ve also had to fix small bugs and add features while making sure employees can keep using it without disruption. And now that I know how things work at the company, I’m given all sorts of miscellaneous tasks I didn’t have when I first joined. I recently picked up a freelance programming job, too. After discussing the scope and pay, I signed the contract just four days ago. Since then, I’ve been working on it whenever I can after work on weekdays and today, over the weekend. Amid all this, the company asked me to revamp its website. That would clearly be extra work beyond my main job of developing in-house software, so I thought I could reasonably ask for additional pay. If they’d agreed, the usual me would have worked overtime to get it done. But I turned it down. Not because the pay was too low, but because I didn’t have enough time. My main job and the freelance work already fill my days, and there are plenty of things in life I need to attend to besides earning money. Time is what matters most to me these days. More than anything else, I often feel that I simply don’t have enough hours. I wish either I could have two bodies or a day could have 48 hours. I’ve felt this way before, but the reason I want it so badly now is that the rewards of having more time have never been so visible. As an undergraduate, even if I’d spent twice as long on assignments or studying for exams, there was no telling whether my class rank would have improved by half. But if I had twice as much time now, I’m almost certain I could earn more than twice as much. It really troubles me that the one thing keeping me from doing more is the one resource I can’t increase no matter what I do. Well, there is one thing that’s recently had much the same effect as giving me more time: LLMs. They’re mentioned so relentlessly amid the AI hype that some people may recoil at the term by now, but I’ve genuinely benefited enormously from them. Programming seems particularly well suited to LLMs from the outset, since the work consists of inputting and outputting code—plain text—from beginning to end. As I’ve gained experience using them, I’ve also developed ways to communicate with the models to get the best results. My productivity has increased by at least 50%. With LLM-based tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, I feel as though I have two bodies. But this is only an occasional burst of acceleration brought about by rapid technological progress, not something I can choose to make happen. In the end, the only sustainable way to overcome a shortage of my own time is to manage other people—in other words, management. I’ve now developed some expertise in the narrow field of web development, and I’d like to bring other developers onto a team, train and lead them, and take on bigger projects faster than I could alone. But it isn’t easy. When I develop something on my own, I can set the pace, so I can do it as a side job. The moment I bring other people in, though, we have to maintain a steady pace together, which makes doing it part-time difficult. On the other hand, going into freelance development full-time would mean irregular income and uncertain long-term growth for me. I don’t want to spend my whole working life as a developer, either. What’s more, even if I were ready to fully commit to team-based freelance work, I’m not sure I have the management skills to run it well. From last year into this year, I tried to start businesses around a series of different ideas. I even worked with small teams along the way. What I came to realize keenly was just how much I lack the ability to lead people. In fact, I’d sensed that to some extent since childhood. In the lower grades, the class president was usually a child who did well in school and behaved properly—often me. As we got older, I watched those positions go instead to children with a knack for drawing people to them, regardless of their grades. I thought the two abilities were clearly different, and that I wasn’t particularly strong in the latter. So when I got to university, I didn’t even try to run for positions like department representative or club officer. I just watched from a distance. But if leadership and management are ultimately what it takes to accomplish anything big, I wish I’d put myself out there more and developed those skills. I used to wonder why managers were so highly valued. Now I understand. Maybe management is the ultimate skill. I’ve heard that, in the early modern era, when society was less systematically organized, it was common for generals to leave the military and take on all kinds of important positions because the military was the only place that managed people on a large scale. That makes sense to me. I don’t yet know what form it will take, but if I get opportunities to practice management in graduate school or afterward, I now intend to seize them. A book the company’s CEO happened to give me to read. I wonder if it relates to what I’ve been thinking about. But whether it does isn’t really the issue: I have to read 150 pages by tomorrow. I put it off to write this. I’m in trouble. * When I move down to Daejeon this time, I plan to take a car. Originally, I was only going to drive if I had to live farther from campus to get a larger room for the same rent. But then,

Look at me, at my little self Can you always find it in you to laugh? Couldn't you, at least once, look at me And just pretend you didn't notice? But sometimes they say the world will turn upside down That a kid or two like me will throw everything into chaos That everyone has to raise the same hand Don't look at me like that and curse me I'm not ruining anything, I'm left-handed Na na nananananana nananananana Na na nananananana nananananana From Panic's “Left-Handed” I'm left-handed. Last year, over a meal with friends from my university tennis club, the conversation somehow led me to mention that I'm left-handed. The friend beside me immediately responded, “Huh? No way!” Why would I lie about that, lol? But I don't play tennis left-handed, and left-handed people aren't that common, so I could see why they were surprised. There are no official statistics, but various surveys put the proportion of left-handed people in Korea at around 5%. Worldwide, about 10% of adults are said to be left-handed. The unusually low figure in Korea is probably not innate but the result of people being taught to use their right hand. Supporting this idea, a Gallup Korea survey found that left-handedness was more common among younger generations, who grew up in a relatively more permissive social climate. A survey by Dongshin University that included ambidexterity as an option also found that about 8% of respondents were ambidextrous. Source: JoongAng Ilbo article I, too, was born left-handed but became ambidextrous through practice. As the table below shows, the activities I mainly use each hand for are split fairly evenly. The clearest dividing line is, unsurprisingly, whether someone taught me how to do the activity. My parents deliberately taught me to write and eat with my right hand, and I learned without much resistance. I think that was an excellent choice. I can't speak for everything else, but doing those two things left-handed comes with plenty of inconveniences. Even setting aside how other people might look at you (which hardly seems to be an issue anymore), there are practical problems: awkward arm and wrist angles, smeared ink, and bumping into the person next to you. There are also a few things I do right-handed without having been taught, like hitting a billiard ball. Left hand Right hand Drawing Throwing Using my phone Tapping a transit card (this is the most inconvenient one) Drawing a line with a ruler (holding the ruler with my right hand and drawing with my left) Using correction tape Opening and closing lids Flipping through a book (from the back) Hanging up clothes* Playing guitar (if I could play) Wearing a crossbody bag (with the bag on my right) Shouldering and firing a rifle (based on using a BB gun in elementary school) Writing Swinging/hitting Holding a spoon, chopsticks, or fork Brushing my teeth Using scissors Using a knife Hitting a billiard ball with a cue Firing a pistol (same experience as with rifles) Either hand feels fine Shooting a basketball (I'm bad with both) Which hand I mainly use depends on the activity *I take a hanger off the rack with my right hand and put the clothes on it with my left. As a result, when I put the hanger back, the clothes face left. I noticed that in clothing stores, this often left the clothes I'd tried on hanging the opposite way from the others, so I figured it must be a left-handed habit. But it seems not all left-handed people do this . Which means some right-handed people probably hang clothes the same way I do. In high school, I wrote so much while studying that my right hand got a lot of practice. Eventually, even drawing seemed more comfortable with my right hand, and for a while I wondered if I'd converted entirely to right-handedness. It's true that I still reach for my right hand when drawing things that resemble writing or involve lots of straight lines. But my left hand is still more comfortable for drawings that call for fluid strokes, like sketching or brushwork. And it's only the major activities that are evenly divided between my hands. I do all sorts of little tasks that are hard to list with my left hand. I can write with my left hand, too. But my handwriting is terrible and I'm very slow, so it's more a matter of “not being entirely unable to write.” I assumed anyone could do at least that much, but it turns out that many right-handed people can't even apply pressure to a pen with their left hand. Around middle school, I tried practicing left-handed writing on purpose, thinking I could build on that relative advantage and become fully ambidextrous. I soon gave up. It was too frustrating that my left hand couldn't do something my right hand could so easily. More than a decade of accumulated practice is no small thing. I think my handwriting is better than Park Myung-soo's, at least Left-handed people used to face outright persecution; even now, they're sometimes pressured to switch, and the everyday inconveniences are real. Still, I like being left-handed. It makes me feel a little special, maybe? Claims that left-handed people are more intelligent or creative, or that many great historical figures were left-handed, seem to have been debunked by numerous studies. But using my left hand does sometimes give me a different perspective on things. For example, when I flip through a book, I hold it with my right hand and turn the pages with my left, so I often end up seeing its contents in reverse order. Meanwhile, there's one area where being left-handed offers a clear advantage: sports. In sports where you face an opponent, left-handers can present attack patterns their opponents rarely encounter. Unfortunately, because I learned most sports from right-handed family members or instructors, I