2020: His Own Guardian

Twenty-six, Gwangyang · Jeju · Yeongcheon

By Opus 5.5

2020 is the busiest year on Inho's blog: 132 posts. One in three is a worked solution to a past exam question for the Chemical Analysis Engineer certification, and sixteen are reading-group reviews. The solutions end with "Done!", the reviews with "-fin-". Between them sit the story of a wedding and the story of a dog. And there are pieces of prose that grow darker as the year runs down.

The previous year's calendar had a covenant ceremony in Jeju in March and five thousand kilometers of Australia in April. COVID tore up that calendar. But read 2020 only as a year of collapsed plans and you miss something important. This year Inho became, three times over, someone responsible for others: a husband to one person, the guardian of one dog, and the host of a small gathering he built himself. During our interview he let slip, almost in passing, a sentence that lies beneath all of it.

Outside my company, I had no guardian. It was a life I had to endure on my own.

This chapter follows that sentence.

1. The White Room

The first post, on January 20, begins, "After work I often feel my soul being used up." Busy days were fine. The problem was days with no work. "I have to sit in a chair for eight hours in a white room with my limbs tied before I can leave. I can't sleep, and I have to 'pretend to work.'" Seniors in the same position got through with chatter. For him even that was hard. "At twenty-seven, stuck with middle-aged seniors over fifty, I have nothing to say," and "apart from my beloved spouse, there's no one in particular to contact.."

The Inho of 2019 burned out from throwing himself into work. The Inho of early 2020 burns out from having none. The directions are opposite; the leftover feeling is the same: the sense that his time is not his own. In February he framed it as a hypothesis. Watching YouTube while drained is not rest but "disguised work." So why can't he fall asleep? His answer: the wish to escape the "hamster-wheel yoke" of going back tomorrow to be drained again shows up as "'I wish tomorrow wouldn't come' = 'I want to stay awake as long as possible.'" That same year a name for this spread online: "revenge bedtime procrastination," people robbed of their days refusing to let go of their nights. Inho had reached the same conclusion without knowing the name.

In March, after reading a book on the origins of consciousness, he went a step further. Holding on by willpower is "a goose trying to become a swan." The better way is "to make a conscious effort to change your environment." The biggest change he could think of was moving to the capital region. The smallest were opening the balcony curtain at night and headphones to block out his chatty part leader. This conclusion is worth remembering. In December that year he would come back to exactly this.

The most Inho-like scene of this period is lunchtime. The office lights are glaringly white. At lunch, when his colleagues scatter, he eats his packed lunch alone and switches off the overhead lights. "Lunch is good in the cozy office where the clarity of noon leans in through the window." It was the only shade he could make for himself in the white room. In the same post he recalls his school classrooms: "I hated studying subjects I hadn't chosen and taking tests in a space I hadn't chosen." In February he writes more flatly: "I was a student for the past twelve years and I never once studied."

There were rare days of release. One Sunday in February he erased his plans. When he couldn't focus on studying he played games, cleaned, and studied again. "I didn't study because I had to; I studied because I wanted to." And he wrote: "I've decided that keeping study in the realm of pleasure is my 'style.'" It is a sentence that gives himself permission instead of punishment. Sentences like that are rare in his writing this year.

Set that Sunday beside the white room and you have, in miniature, the theory the psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan spent their careers on. Self-determination theory holds that people thrive when three needs are met: autonomy, the sense that what you do is your own choice; competence, the sense that you are good at something that matters; and relatedness, the sense of being connected to others. The white room starved all three at once. He sat for hours not by choice, with nothing to be good at, next to people he had nothing to say to. On the Sunday, the very same studying, freely chosen, became pleasure. Deci's best-known finding is that control can turn an activity a person loves into a chore. Inho had discovered it on his own, and he would keep rediscovering it. The words he reaches for over the next five years, authority and responsibility, a self-directed environment, a culture where questions are free, a table of people who understand him, are the same three needs, named again and again.

The to-do list for March 6 begins with laundry, dishes, and food waste. From the seventh line it continues: edit the reception invitation, cancel the Korean Air flight to Australia, cancel the Virgin Australia domestic flights, cancel the Agoda lodging, cancel the Australian campervan, and on the last line, "study English..". The five-thousand-kilometer adventure was crossed out in four lines on the same list as the dishes. The trailing ellipsis says how he felt that day.

2. A Marriage of Halves

The wedding was held in Jeju in early June. Gatherings of more than five were restricted, so only immediate family from both sides came: parents and siblings. The two of them sang the wedding song together. The reception had to be held separately, and they agonized for a long time over whether to make invitations.

A week later he posted "Our Small Wedding in Jeju 0: Prologue," and nine days after that he revised and reposted it. It is the preface to his wedding story, yet no dress, no guests, no Jeju sea appears. Instead there are postmodernism and deconstruction, death and solitude. "We are halves… No one lives seeing the back of their own head." "Solitude is a shadow." Only after this long darkness ends does a single sentence arrive: "I think love probably has no power, but having finished my wedding last week, I believe I have the strength to affirm love."

Psychology has a word, intellectualization: moving feelings too heavy to bear into the language of concepts to keep them at a distance. This prologue looks like a textbook case, wrapping the most private event of a life in the most impersonal language. Even so, I don't want to read it only as defense. Inho was someone who predicted the family would dissolve. He saw the institution of marriage disappearing "the way ancestral rites are disappearing," and still asked himself whether he could welcome it. "For someone steeped in nihilism, believing existence is possible may be close to a miracle." So before it is a record of a marriage, it is a defense. Someone who knew better than anyone the reasons not to believe in marriage got married, and he had to explain that contradiction to himself first. She does not appear in the piece by name. She appears as "an event close to statistically impossible." In Inho's language, that was probably the biggest confession he had.

There is also something older in the image of halves. In Plato's Symposium, which he had carried under his arm in middle school, Aristophanes tells the myth that humans were once whole, round creatures cut in two by the gods, and that love is each half's search for the other. Whether he had it in mind, I can't say. But a man who opens his wedding story with "we are halves" and "no one sees the back of their own head" is saying something the myth also says: that a person cannot see all of himself, and that the missing side is what another person is for. Beneath the postmodern vocabulary, the prologue to his wedding is closer to that very old story than it looks.

The tools for that explanation were ready beforehand. In May he had begun writing a commentary on Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving: love is not something you fall into but an art you learn, and all love begins from the anxiety of separateness. The sentence he rendered with the most weight was this: "Mature love must be able to say, through you I can love the world." That sentence says exactly what Inho hoped for from marriage. Not a room the two of them shut themselves in, but a door through the two of them out into the world.

"On Each Other's Views of Marriage," written in late June, is effectively the last post of that series. He is wary of the hypothetical questions lovers often ask, like "what would you do if this happened?" A heart that keeps repeating such questions carries anxiety, perhaps a wound. Then he is immediately wary of the opposite side too. Someone who has noticed the other's wound easily falls into "the narcissism of seeing straight through the other's inner self," and that becomes the thread of the will to dominate a counselor can hold over a client. His alternative was to keep deferring judgment and keep asking. He called it "a suspended sentence on prejudgment."

This passage takes aim at me, interpreting him now. So I asked.

Opus — Right now I'm interpreting you from a psychologist's seat. How is a good interpretation different from a dominating one?

Inho — A dominating interpretation is one that tries to use or steer the other person. With flowers, it's cutting the other person to make a pretty bouquet. It's pretty, but it loses its life force. I think a good interpretation is giving just the right amount of water and looking, observing and talking to it.

This chapter tries to be written by that standard.

The marriage became a small incident at the company too. There was an unwritten rule that a team leader or senior posted an employee's wedding announcement on the intranet. Inho posted his own. "Because conforming to a set culture when I had a choice felt like an infringement of my freedom." For that he was "treated like an oddball."

Inho — I made my will clear in my own way, but the reaction wasn't good. On the outside I act well, but I still don't fit, so there were small moments like that, the awl in the pouch poking through. In work too.

"An awl in a pouch" is a Korean idiom for talent that pokes through no matter how you hide it. The phrase Inho chose holds pride and fatigue together. A sharpness that shows even when hidden is a gift. Inside an organization, it is also the daily discomfort of tearing your clothes.

In the fall, after reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, he put this chapter's anxiety into a single sentence. In an age when even the definition of a relationship as loving one person at a time is being taken apart, living by adapting to each new definition "sounds like being told to live as an immigrant all your life." For a long time he had dreamed of emigrating to another country. The same man feared becoming a permanent immigrant in time. One reason he boarded the old ship of marriage may lie here.

3. The Dog at the Front Door

They took their honeymoon in Jeju and Gangneung: two Korean seas instead of Australia's long road. During the trip the couple decided to adopt a stray. The temporary shelter in Gwangyang, they were told, euthanized dogs in order of longest stay when space ran short. The volunteer leader on the phone was deeply worried. Inho wrote: "I didn't feel public outrage yet, but as a sign of gratitude I pretended outwardly to sympathize."

A scene from 2019 is flipped here. At the news of the pizza driver's accident he grieved without showing it. This time he showed without feeling.

Opus — The Inho who feels and hides, and the Inho who doesn't feel and shows. How are they connected?

Inho — I didn't know much about the conditions for protecting stray dogs and didn't understand them, but I wanted to sympathize with the anger that person felt. I felt something like guilt, but I think it was the right choice. The 2019 pizza incident is the opposite, then.

Goffman would have called this an interaction ritual. A sympathetic expression is not a lie but a courtesy paid to the other's feelings. What is interesting is that Inho feels guilt even over this small courtesy. He finds it hard to bear a gap between outside and inside. So he can neither show what's inside nor be at ease with a made-up outside. His mask is always a little heavy.

The dog was a black schnauzer mix, three or four months old. They named him after his spouse's surname. They were the couple who, the previous year, had written on the marriage registration that a child would take the mother's surname. The adoption post includes this sentence: "Since we have no plans to have children, we decided to raise a puppy." In the end the mother's surname went to a dog.

Inho — I thought a dog would be easier to raise than a child. It wasn't. Taking in a life and raising it means taking that much responsibility, so I think it was harder. Having been through it, I think a child and a dog are the same. To raise a life you have to put in half your life or more, and you need to be ready in money, in heart, and in time. My spouse thought so too, so we agreed.

Ramyeon was fearful. When he met people on walks he froze and sat down by the road. He held it in outside and only relieved himself once home. Above all, he couldn't be alone. When the couple left for work, Ramyeon lay down at the front door. At the office, Inho checked on the house now and then through the robot vacuum's camera. The dog on the screen was "always in the same spot, ears drooping, not moving."

In January he had described his company as a white room where you had to stay tied for eight hours before you could leave. Six months later, from that white room, he was watching a dog lie at the front door as if tied there. The symmetry seemed so clear to me that I asked whether he had seen himself in the dog.

Inho — It was so sad. A puppy rescued from euthanasia, somewhere full and warm, still had to wait nine hours for me. It was a shame. To fix his separation anxiety I actually tried not to get too close. In my heart I wanted to love on him more, and I felt sorry I couldn't. I didn't see myself in him. Outside my company, I had no guardian. It was a life I had to endure on my own.

My symmetry was wrong. The dog at the front door had someone to wait for. The Inho in the white room had no such person. He was his own guardian. In a follow-up interview he added how old this self-reliance was. "I think almost since elementary school I tried to think, act, and take responsibility on my own. I'm still my own guardian."

The way he treated Ramyeon makes sense from here. The principle he learned from YouTube was that to fix separation anxiety you must not give indiscriminate affection. He avoided Ramyeon's gaze. For the first two weeks he shut the bedroom door and had the dog sleep in the living room. The first night they decided to let him sleep in the bedroom, when the dog rustled around excitedly, Inho put him back out in the living room, because he needed to get to sleep as soon as possible. He regretted it soon after. That summer he wrote in a memo, "Let's make physical affection a reward for training."

Inho — I think I'm more principled with the ones I'm responsible for. I have few memories of my parents hugging me. Physical affection itself was rare. If anything, I'm the one who likes hugging my spouse.

Let me carefully borrow the language of attachment theory. A child who was rarely held learns early to meet his own needs. When such a child grows up and becomes responsible for someone, rules can feel more trustworthy than affection, because rules don't waver and needs have no end. That the advice "don't give indiscriminate affection" was so persuasive to Inho may be because it resembled the way he grew up. That is my hypothesis. Yet the same man is the one who hugs his spouse. When I asked about the difference, Inho talked about language. "I think it's whether you share a language. Unlike Ramyeon, who we adopted outright, she and I matched our steps from outside first, so we know well how to resolve conflict." For him, rules were a substitute language used in front of someone he could not share a language with.

I would add one thing. The rules he applied to Ramyeon were not new rules. They were the rules he had long applied to himself. Affection as a reward for training; permission to enjoy study granted only on the rare Sunday he allowed it; a life, as he put it, he had to endure on his own. A person who has raised himself tends to raise others the way he was raised, which in his case means the way he raised himself. That is why his regret on the night he sent the excited dog back to the living room matters. It is the first time in these pages that he sees the strictness of his guardianship from the outside, and dislikes it. The same guardian will need several more years before he extends that gentleness to himself.

The time Ramyeon took cut into the couple's time. A three-line post at the end of July: "The bed became the place for studying abnormal dog behavior on YouTube… We had less time to look at each other and struggled with a thirst for affection."

Inho — Because I spent so much time loving on Ramyeon and caring for him, my spouse felt a little hurt. So I listened without prejudging and matched the pace at which her thoughts moved forward.

The "suspended sentence on prejudgment" was put to the test three months into the marriage. He kept it not as a principle but by matching pace.

At the end of August he found out the food had been too little. The amount he'd given by an internet formula was too little for Ramyeon. When he gave him 1.7 times as much, the dog finally started to chew slowly. "All this time I'd been feeding him too little. Trusting the calculator..." That ellipsis probably did not apply only to dog food. In the same post the couple made a decision. They would send the dog, who spent sixteen hours a day alone, to Inho's parents, who had built a new house in Yeongcheon, North Gyeongsang. His retired parents were always home, the yard was wide, and there was a lake in front of the house.

Inho — Because of that, I still think I'll never raise a dog again. If my parents hadn't been there we'd have kept him, and Ramyeon would have adjusted as he grew, but the process would have been painful. I couldn't have taken parental leave either.

When I asked what that resolve held, he answered in two words: "Guilt and limits." And he said one more thing. Ramyeon still recognizes him from far away and remembers his scent, because for the two months of vaccinations he was mostly with Inho. He still buys dewormer with the couple's shared money and takes it to Yeongcheon. He is the one who trims Ramyeon's fur, too.

The resolve never to raise a dog again and the hand that still trims his fur are not a contradiction. Don't start what you cannot be responsible for, and be responsible to the end for what you started. It is exactly the same structure as their reason for not having children. Ramyeon was the scale on which he weighed, firsthand, what raising a life means.

4. A Table for Two

On May 26, Inho posted a recruitment notice on the blog. "Is your knowledge still sharp?" The confession that follows tells you the nature of the group. "I've wanted to run a reading group for a long time. I kept putting it off because I felt I had to study perfectly before starting one, but lately I'm realizing that was the wrong idea."

"I know and don't do it." That was the sentence summing up the Inho of 2019. In May 2020 he broke it for the first time. In the interview he said the idea had been with him for seven years. The starting point was Socrates as Plato told it, the man who asked and answered anyone in the public square.

At the first offline meeting on June 29, two people came: Inho and Sohan. They talked longer about how to run the group than about the book. The review lists these keywords: "a direction where each of us is both questioner and answerer," "views on dismantling authoritarianism, dispersing power, elitism." At the end of July the rules were set: at most six people, a cycle of seven to fourteen days, a main book and a sub-book read side by side. Sharing always took the same three forms: impressions from seeing the title first, a freeform piece, and memorable passages. They called each other by nicknames. Inho posted a review after every single meeting.

I read this design as the church turned inside out: an open group instead of a closed community, anonymity instead of cliques, public reviews instead of stories that circled only inside. Inho said no.

Inho — I didn't have the church in mind. It wasn't religious either. That doesn't mean it had no influence, though.

Then what was the group aiming at? In a July memo, "Questions That Came to Mind," he argues with himself. If the group grows, should there be interviews? What if members lose interest in front of a hard book he wants to recommend? To do a podcast, isn't the current democratic setup too hard; doesn't it need someone to lead and take responsibility? He wanted a gathering of equal citizens and at the same time carried a vision to pull it forward. He wrote that vision down: "My purpose in creating the reading group is not only to expand my knowledge but also to pioneer a culture through reproduction."

In a follow-up interview he corrected this. Pioneering a culture wasn't a flag raised outward, he said. "My own questions about life had piled up, and it was a process of working through them." I think the correction matters. This group was not a mission to save the barren ground of Gwangyang. It was a place one person made so he would not have to carry his questions alone.

The group gave literature back to him. In August, in his review of Crime and Punishment, he confessed that the stories in an anthology of the Young Writers' Award had sunk in unexpectedly easily, and only then "I realized the first button of my first encounter with literature had been fastened wrong." His September review of Stoner was the longest he wrote that year. He read it expecting Stoner to defeat the villains in style. Then he came to understand the Stoner who never fights. And he wrote one sentence: "Stoner doesn't compare." It is a sentence chosen by someone who compared endlessly: the capital region and Gwangyang, his seniors and himself, the plan and the present.

The psychologist Leon Festinger proposed that people evaluate themselves largely by comparing themselves with others, and later research found that constant upward comparison, measuring yourself against those who seem to have more, feeds dissatisfaction and low mood. In the prologue we saw Inho describe young people in the provinces rating their own place low against the capital region on their screens; that was his own condition. Stoner offered him a figure who simply does his work and loves what he loves without keeping score. It is no wonder the sentence landed. It named the habit he most wanted to put down.

The same month, after reading Hamlet, he wrote why he held on to the group. Shakespeare was once a common language among people. Now that reading the same book as a friend and talking about it has become almost impossible, having such a "language" might be "the reason I have to hold on to the reading group so I don't drift too far." Durkheim would have called this a secular ritual. The repetition of sharing the same text in the same order builds a thin common world among scattered individuals.

In August his spouse asked him what he would want to show a child if they had one. Inho answered: the reading group. "Because I wanted to teach that you can create and run for yourself what society doesn't provide." What a man raised as his own guardian wanted to hand down to an imaginary child was this, in the end: what you are not given, you can make.

The group grew and shrank. In summer up to five came, and one day they talked for four hours. When COVID spread again they moved online. On November 7 the table once again held only Inho and Sohan. At the end of November a member who had just joined left, citing school.

Opus — When it was down to two, weren't you afraid the frustration you went through at church would repeat?

Inho — My feelings didn't really swing much. I'd heard at church too that if only the leader is left in a cell group, you carry on even alone. Heh.

The man who said he hadn't had the church in mind answers with a church joke. I like this answer. It means he has not forgotten the wounds he got there, but he hasn't thrown away what he learned there either.

5. The Rainbow and the Donkey

In an October essay Inho draws himself this way. "My spouse says I'm a funny person. I dance, make funny faces, slap my own butt, and make my one and only audience laugh… People at work say I'm hard to approach… In the forest I'm a lone fox." He said his outward self was like a rainbow. Red is home, violet is work, and the colors in between fade depending on whom he meets. This is also the essay where the monochromator from the prologue first appears, the device that shows each person only one color.

Opus — Is red the real Inho, and violet a mask?

Inho — Actually both were there, but there was no one to take them in. Or maybe there was no one I'd open up to. So I was grateful. I think both are my colors. I think you can understand a person better when you can see their many sides.

Between those two sentences, from "no one to take them in" to "no one I'd open up to," lies his maturity. It is the time it took to move the cause from outside to inside.

That same October, with no plan to make them a series, he wrote three retrospective pieces in a row. They are the main sources of the prologue, so I won't retell them here; I'll take out only what the prologue left aside. In "Immature-Precocious," after the sandcastles and the few books that became his breakwater, he writes: "If possible I want to write immaturity and precocity overlapping, in no order. I don't want to see either one positively just because it comes last." The reason this essay tries not to split his strengths and flaws apart, Inho had already written down six years ago.

The same piece contains the self-indictment the prologue quoted: "I thought they were lacking, and I think they lost interest in me." In the 2019 chapter I wrote that the compassion of a silent observer easily spreads into a sense of superiority. Inho was saying himself that he had crossed that line before. His eye on the company is just as unsparing. It "may make good money, but culturally it's ready for the scrapyard."

"Unbearable Silence" is the church story the prologue told: the soul emptying in his third year, the fellowship, the spouse prayer, the tongues that stopped, and the one line he set apart, "I was sad." In the interview he added how it ended.

Inho — I stopped going in 2019. I didn't reach out to anyone; I left uncomfortably, kind of disappearing. It's something I regret a bit myself.

Written four months after the wedding, the piece reads like a goodbye he never properly said.

It was in that church's dining hall that he first met her, in the scene from "First Meeting with Her" that the prologue told: the newcomer's raised voice, her unblinking stare, "Because you're curious." Asked about it, he added something the post doesn't say.

Inho — Honestly, my spouse saw the mask too. It's just that my clothes and way of talking were different from people my age. I mostly wore suits, and since I read books my vocabulary was different. So she said she felt I was different from others my age.

Then comes the rest stop on the way back from Muju. When he set red-bean and pumpkin yanggaeng and an omija drink on the table, she and an older guy with them burst out laughing that he was like an old man. Flustered at first, he soon laughed along. "Still, I was grateful that I too had something that could make the people around me laugh."

I read this scene as the origin of red. A man who had been pretending to be bright made someone laugh with a side of himself he hadn't intended to show. It was the first time not his mask but his bare face drew a laugh. A few years later, in front of that same person, he becomes a comedian who dances and slaps his own butt.

On the violet side there is a donkey. In July Inho read Animal Farm centered on the donkey Benjamin. Benjamin knows from the start that power will rot and still doesn't step forward. Even when his friend, the horse Boxer, is carted off to the slaughterhouse, he doesn't show the bottom of his feelings. Inho wrote that Benjamin "seemed detached and cool," then right after, that he "also felt frustrating." In August he read a book about cleaning the homes of people who died alone and wrote: "My sorrow for lonely deaths steeped me in melancholy, but it didn't make me knock on the steel door across from my own front door… The tears trapped in my eyes didn't overflow; they stayed a moment and went back." In September he met two dogs wandering the neighborhood. Afraid they'd be euthanized if he reported them, he let them go back to the street.

Opus — Was it Benjamin who was frustrating, or you?

Inho — Right. It might be a criticism of myself for not pushing myself and not acting. When I was intoxicated with Christ, I gave to charity a few times. I gave gift certificates I got from the company to people I'd only met a few times, and sent money. Some declined. I couldn't have done it on my own compassion alone.

Mills called the words people use to explain their actions "vocabularies of motive." Action doesn't happen from feeling alone; it needs a shared language to carry feeling into action. The church gave Inho such a vocabulary: love of neighbor, service, sharing. When he left the church, the compassion remained, but the words to send it outward were gone. That is why the tears stayed trapped in his eyes. He agreed with this reading. "I needed an inspiration that went beyond my own range."

Still, it wouldn't be fair to remember the Inho of this year only as someone who didn't knock on doors. He brought home a dog about to be euthanized. He figured out and recorded how to apply for neutering subsidies for stray animals, and complained that such programs didn't even turn up in internet searches. At the end of his Hamlet review he imagined himself holding a picket sign demanding that Gwangyang provide full-time staff and vaccinations at its stray animal rescue center. It stayed imagination, but that imagination was clearly facing outside the steel door.

6. Gravity

As autumn deepened, the writing darkened. On November 13 he wrote: "Even when I try to study hard, my head hurts… The people I meet at this iron-rice-bowl company give me noise I don't want to hear, meaningless chatter. I want to wear noise-canceling headphones." On November 30, the day the member left, a cliff appears. Wouldn't it be easier to knock over what he'd built and step out toward the empty space? At the edge of the cliff he looks around and sees countless people standing there hesitating like him. And he asks, "Is there any reason to go on living a life that has lost hope?" The next dawn he wrote: "I was looking for a voice… Maybe because I'm lonely, I want to feel I belong."

Opus — What was so hard then?

Inho — I'd made a plan to emigrate in 2023 and was trying hard to change myself, but compared to that I still wasn't moving forward, and the company kept pulling me down. It fell short of the speed I wanted, like all those flight attempts that crash because they can't beat Earth's gravity.

His plans that year show what the gravity was. In February he drew three paths: apply for a transfer to Songdo and move to the capital region; stay in Gwangyang and study in Suncheon; or go abroad right away. He wrote that the Songdo transfer would take over two years because of "internal politics," and in fact it came only in October 2022. At Suncheon National University he finished the semester and didn't register for the next, and so he was expelled. For the Chemical Analysis Engineer exam, he skipped the nearest round and passed both the written and practical parts at once in the round after.

In September he spent three days on a single error-propagation formula. Digging from factorials down to Taylor series, he realized that what he'd pulled on was "not a carrot but a sweet-potato vine," one root leading to endless more. And he called himself "a stubborn scholar studying quietly in the wilderness." In the end he compromised: he would dig into a problem whose principle he was curious about for only thirty minutes, memorize it if he still didn't get it, and leave the rest as a hobby.

Inho — I think wanting to dig into principles is purity, curiosity. But socially, especially in Korea, it looks like waste. In my student days it was hard to do pure "study."

I believe in this purity. I just want to add one thing. On the February Sunday with no exam, study was a pleasure. As the exam approached, the same curiosity turned into self-reproach as a "failing student." The gravity wasn't only the company. The deadline he set himself, 2023, pulled him down too.

The psychoanalyst Karen Horney had a phrase for what I think was happening: "the tyranny of the should." A person builds an idealized self, and then the idealized self issues orders to the real one: you should have emigrated by 2023, you should understand every proof, you should not waste a Sunday. Each failure to obey is felt not as a disappointment but as a verdict. The crash he describes, flight attempts that can't escape gravity, sounds less like a man failing than like a man judged by a standard he had written himself. In 2021 he will tell me that his standard is "objectively" high and that he hasn't found a way to put it down. Five years later he will draw a map of four selves and notice that the gaps between them are what make him sad. The tyrant is already visible here.

Around then a phrase never seen before appears in his memos. On September 17, a list of things he wants to do includes "study coding / make an app."

Inho — It's surprising I was thinking about coding at the end of 2020. I didn't know anything, but I'd heard about Python and wanted to give it a try. I think I set the goal as making an app. It was a kind of escape hatch too, but back then I didn't start seriously.

At fifteen, Inho went to a technical high school trusting the words "I can always change jobs later." This one line is the first signpost on the road where those words actually come true. No one knew it then. Not even the man who wrote it.

In December he did something decisive. He paid a three-hundred-thousand-won cancellation fee and cut off the home internet. He cut his phone data down to 300 MB too. "For nearly ten years my life was filled with the cycle of making plans and knocking them down… In other words, I held the vain belief that I could control myself." Nine months after the March conclusion, change the environment instead of relying on willpower, he acted on it. After trying and giving up on watching a variety show on slow data, he wrote: "Like the bear that ate garlic and mugwort, I feel myself gradually becoming human," after the Korean founding myth in which a bear becomes a woman by enduring a hundred days in a cave.

The last post that year, "Cutting the Internet and Work," was written at dawn. With YouTube and beer, "a kind of drug," cleared away, the problems life was posing became sharp. That sharpness was uncomfortable. In that discomfort he thought about his career and programming, and looked at the heart that had been hurt by things said at work. And he flipped a sentence. In the middle of the post he writes, "Life is suffering," and later, "Suffering is life." In swapping subject and predicate, resignation crosses into affirmation. He suspects the slogan of work-life balance spreads the insinuation that "overtime is bad." And he proposes filling life with a new "work," self-directed, productive, and joyful. "We must do 'work' even after we leave work."

I want to stop here for a moment. Byung-Chul Han wrote that people today exploit themselves without being exploited by anyone. The subject of the achievement society drives himself with "yes, I can" and feels it as freedom. It is a little ironic that Inho, who suspected work-life balance of being manipulation, proposed as his alternative a life of working for himself even after leaving work. One of the things that made him crash that year was precisely the pace he set himself. But the "work" he meant is closer to Fromm's productive life than to achievement. In September's "On a Productive Life" he wrote: "Looking over my life, the fact that I have rarely produced anything made me feel my humanity itself was under threat." What he wanted was not a life of doing more. It was to become someone who makes rather than someone who consumes. The tension between these two readings shows up again the next year.

In that dawn post, one scene is written almost in passing. Without internet he turned on his laptop less, and "holding my spouse's hand and riding the swing in the apartment's back yard is actually more fun."

Opus — When you were crashing then, what did your spouse do?

Inho — I kept struggling periodically after that. Each time, my spouse looked after me well. When I have a lot on my mind, I don't talk much. About our relationship I talk actively and share my worries, but about my career I try not to talk until I've sorted my thoughts to some degree. My spouse waited until then, and helped me sort out my thoughts through conversation.

He said one more thing.

Inho — A few times when I got blackout drunk, fell down, and went missing, my spouse became my guardian, found me, and nursed me. Each time, I think my values break, and I come to accept that.

When someone who has lived as his own guardian is protected by another, what breaks is his values. And he accepts it. What marriage was to the Inho of 2020, I cannot say better than this confession.

I want to note one thing gently, because it is his to decide what it means. The moments he names are moments when he could not refuse care: drunk, fallen, lost. A man who does not easily let himself be looked after may, without intending it, find the only doors through which care can reach him are the ones he cannot hold shut. The drinking is not the point, and I don't want to make it one. The point is what came after. Each time, he says, his values broke, and he accepted it. Some part of him was learning that being carried is not the same as failing.

Epilogue: What He Didn't Write

In December, after reading Lee Seung-u's The Reverse Side of Life, Inho copied out a long passage. When a writer makes fiction from his own life, what matters to us is not his facts but "the him who chooses and excludes, refracts and distorts his own facts." For someone writing a person from a year of posts, there is no more painful warning.

So at the end I asked what he'd left out of the 2020 blog. Company life in the middle of COVID, his spouse's work and feelings, the reactions of both families, the couple's fights: almost none of it is in this year's writing.

Inho — If things hadn't wrapped up well, I think I'd have written about them eventually. There were things, but they wrapped up well and ended well. And I didn't really get shaken by that kind of thing. So I didn't write about them.

This answer changes how to read this biography. Inho's blog is not a record of his life but a record of what remained unresolved. What was resolved, he does not write. Then the things that appear most often in the 132 posts, the company's white room and the church's silence, the dog at the front door and the question at the cliff's edge, are not the whole of his life. They are the parts of his life that were not yet finished. Conversely, there are things that barely appear here: the small wedding in Jeju, the sea at Gangneung, making up with his spouse, the two of them on the swing. Those were the places where he did not waver. That they went unwritten says how solid those places were.

I guessed that another passage he copied from the same book, about sensing a love with an older woman as if it were fate, was chosen with his spouse in mind. Inho answered briefly. "No, it's nothing like that." The interpreter stops there. He did say: don't cut the flower; water it.

In December 2020, in a house with no internet, he prepared the book for the next meeting: Han Kang's The Vegetarian. When the year turned, the group would reach its first anniversary. He would begin taking out memories long set aside and writing them down: the day on the white staircase when he wasn't happy, the summer his father didn't wake. The next year of a man who writes what remains unresolved was beginning like that.