2022: The Eve of the Storm

Twenty-eight, from Gwangyang to Songdo

By Opus 5.5

September 19, 2022, the night before a typhoon came up. Inho walked about halfway around a playground, drawing smoke in and letting it out. "After agonizing over what to fill my anxiety with, I tore open a cream bun and ate it." He thought about what he should lean on and hold dear. He thought about what he could give up for it. And he wrote: "I thought of myself filling an eternity with impatience even though I had already finished deciding. I thought waiting is truly painful." The last line was a plane tree tossed by the wind. "It was obvious it would still be standing there after the storm passed, but."

The post never says what the decision was. In the interview, Inho told me for the first time. He had already decided to quit and had told the company. Then he was waiting for HR's answer.

His blog has forty posts in 2022. That is far fewer than the two years before, and ten of them are Python and SQL study notes. After September 29 there is not a single post until May of the next year. In the year the writing thinned, his life moved the most. His spouse left for Seoul first. Inho handed the well he'd dug for two years to someone else and learned to code for the first time. He was depressed and took medication, said he would quit, and was transferred to Songdo. This chapter is about the long night before the storm.

1. The Boy Who Watched Quietly

At the start of the year, Inho looked at other people in two pieces.

"Her Instagram," on January 2, is a short story he filed under a category called "Project Essays." The narrator sees a photo of a not-very-close classmate holding a newborn. The friend looked happy; "becoming a parent, she seemed to have crossed into another world." The narrator can't share the joy. He remembers something his "ex-spouse" once said: that people who feel life has been good perhaps have children because they want to spread that happiness. The narrator concludes that he doesn't belong to that world. "Thinking of my own life, still clumsy and uncertain, becoming a parent who'd be even clumsier felt so far and dim."

Inho confirmed that the "ex-spouse" is a fictional setup. But the question this story takes on is not fiction. In the 2021 interview he said that the preparation for raising a child has no end you can set, so it can only fall short, and that he would feel that shortfall as pain. The year's first story pushes that answer a step further. It's not that the preparation falls short. Someone who can't see the world as good has no world to show a child. This year Inho says his most private decision all the way through only by borrowing a fictional character, the same way he handed the theme of suicide to a character in 2021.

"The Gaze on You, Somehow Lacking," two weeks later, is not fiction. It is the girl with soot on her collar from the prologue, and this is when he first wrote her down: the classmates shouting her name like a curse, the teacher's careful stillness, and the boy who "watched quietly." What the prologue did not quote is where the post goes after the memory. He widened the question to the whole year, or rather to his whole life. "A question like this ran through my entire life… Living in a world I couldn't understand kept making a big hole in my existence."

In 2021 Inho said he writes old memories when he has digested and finished interpreting them. When I asked whether this one was like that, he said it had been coming back to him for a long time, but he thinks he wrote it well after, not right after digesting it. And he added:

Opus — How do you feel now about not stepping in back then?

Inho — Yeah, I don't think I could have stepped in. And maybe I felt uncomfortable about that. If I ever get the chance, I'd like to ask her. If she was okay.

We have seen the boy who bought a chick in the prologue, the man who moved the fry out of the puddle in 2019, the man who brought Ramyeon home in 2020. It is a lineage of rescuing hands. This memory stands on the other side of that lineage. It is a memory of not reaching out, and Inho did not hide it. His observer's temperament was there from childhood, the "shadow of a transparent window" he spoke of in "Chueotang." Here, for the first time, that temperament is drawn as something with a cost. The one who saw and did not cross over is left with a scene that keeps coming back.

There are more sentences this year in which he explains himself as an observer. In May, reading Yoo Hyun-joon's The Future of Space, he realized anew why he studies in cafés. It wasn't that he disliked cafés. There just hadn't been a space nearby where unspecified crowds come and go, where he could be both observer and observed. The same day, about a book of essays by the poet Park Joon, he wrote that "for an introvert, relationships are somewhat businesslike," so most of it gets resolved once you're past twenty and independent. I disagree with this sentence, because his 2022 is full of relationship problems: a spouse living apart, a group handed over, a mother and seniors he couldn't get through to. Someone whose relationships are resolved doesn't spend a year like this. He didn't want relationships less. The threshold into them was simply high. The question hanging at the end of this chapter, "if she was okay," will come back to Inho later.

2. The One Who Left First

In March, his spouse went up to Seoul first. She stayed temporarily in a friend's studio near Korea University while looking for a place to live. Every week or two Inho went up to rest with her and came back down. From March to October, over half a year, the two lived apart.

Opus — Was moving to Seoul something your spouse decided alone, or a plan the two of you made?

Inho — It was our plan, and I cheered her on. My spouse was ready to head for a new life, but she was afraid. I knew that and cheered her on and supported her. In the end my spouse went to Seoul, and I went to Seoul in the end too, and we've been living well ever since.

On April 23, getting off at Anam Station, he wrote Seoul down like this. "The smell of Seoul. The smell of sewage seeping out through the holes in the manhole covers." The pubs near the university were crowded with students. Beside a semi-basement window stood a food-waste bin, and a guitar sounded through a thin wall. Under a streetlight, exchange students greeted each other in their mother tongues. At two in the morning someone in pajamas bought instant noodles. And he added a sentence. "Their gazes toward each other glance off without ever overlapping, but there are geometric structures tangled with relationships that only I, the outsider, can see."

In the last post of 2021 he drew humans as a polygon with one empty vertex. Four months later he is drawing invisible lines among people in an unfamiliar neighborhood. He is not inside those lines. He is "the outsider." Yet this post has a strange warmth. It is the writing of someone learning a city he is about to live in, in advance, with an observer's eyes.

In a group review that same month he wrote, "Lately many things have happened in my life… I had time to spare but no room in my heart." When I asked what those many things were, he answered, "I think it was the feeling that, having sent my spouse to Seoul, my life was going to change now too." Here I carefully note one interpretation, one Inho has not confirmed. In the spring of 2022, the one ready to leave was Inho. The one who left first was his spouse, and the one who nudged her, afraid, out the door was also Inho. Helping the person closest to you do first what you can't yet do yourself is common. Cheering on someone who leaves is also a safe way to express your own wish to leave. Of the time he spent left alone in Gwangyang, he said:

Inho — Living alone in Gwangyang was really painful. Just using up the time was such a hard process.

For the first time since the two of them moved in together in October 2019, the Gwangyang apartment became one person's home. At seven in the evening on May 6, from the window of a bus headed up to Seoul, he watched cars filling ten lanes. "I thought they too would be suffering from something, and getting angry, and being happy, and living." He spent half the year on the road between Gwangyang and Seoul.

John Bowlby, who founded attachment theory, used the phrase secure base for the person a child ventures out from and returns to. Adults have secure bases too, usually a partner, and research on couples finds the same logic: people explore more boldly when someone steady is waiting behind them. That spring the two of them did something unusual with that arrangement. He became her secure base, cheering her toward a new life she was afraid of. And in doing so he moved his own base three hundred kilometers away. The half-year that followed, which he calls "really painful," was the price of that generosity. He was exploring nothing new; he was waiting, alone, in a town he wanted to leave, with the person who steadied him on the other end of a bus ride. It is not surprising that this was the year he broke down. What is striking is that he made the trade willingly.

3. Handing Over the Well

On January 30, ahead of the reading group's second anniversary, Inho posted a long piece. The title called it a review, but the content was closer to a small community report. He named six points. COVID was still blocking in-person meetings. Gwangyang was a small city where women's employment in particular was insecure, which affected participation. Where people lived was scattered too, across Gwangyang-eup, Donggwangyang, and Okgok. People in their twenties and thirties were less interested than he'd expected. The reading group was becoming "a hobby like LPs or audio gear," a "refined hobby" of those with economic and time to spare. Inside YouTube's algorithm, "why democratization in the Arab world is hard" couldn't beat "Among Us pro plays." And yet the last item was this: "People still want to gather. And anyone who has felt the synergy of a reading group won't easily forget it."

Seen through a sociologist's eyes, this post is excellent. Bourdieu would have underlined the fourth item. Reading is a taste that requires the capital of time and leisure to sustain, and taste divides classes. Inho discovered this without theory, on the ground in Gwangyang. But there is one item the post doesn't write: himself. In the 2021 interview he said the group survived through "pure luck, a fated connection," and that without Sohan it would have broken up long ago. The 2022 review finds every reason the group struggles in the city, the generation, the medium. So the plan, too, pointed toward leaving the city: end the Gwangyang group on June 1 and open a "liberal arts club" in VRChat, a metaverse space.

In the February recruitment post he wrote: "My goal is to step back from today's provocative, volatile culture and build a lasting community and content. I myself am someone who needs that kind of community." The rules he added in May were meticulous: anonymous participation, meetings recorded and uploaded to YouTube, revenue split fifty percent to Maskun and 1/n among participants. But in his April review he had already noted the response was "not very good." More people had walled themselves off from reading itself than from the platform. "Having run a reading group for two years, I'm realizing how different our worldviews have become." Four people came to the VRC meeting at the end of May. After that there is no record. In the interview he said the group "ended lightly, like a little bit of playing with fire."

Meanwhile the Gwangyang group had good nights. In April they read The Nine Cloud Dream offline for the first time in a while. He'd wondered what there could be to say about a classic from the school textbook, but the four of them talked for over two and a half hours before they "met the cool night air." In May five people gathered to read Pachinko. Going back over Sunja's childhood, he wrote: "Like layers of strata, I also thought of a future self who might remember these hard days as a happy time."

On May 21 he posted his farewell piece. Its first words were "the ship of Theseus." A person's identity is the sum of every relationship and activity they've been through, and in each space a person holds one limited identity. And he wrote: "After much searching… I've decided to set aside that metaphysical inquiry for a while. And instead of looking for a formula, I've decided to create one." If the way to live is to grow your character in each space, the reading group was the growing of one of those characters. He was leaving "because I can see a new world to adventure in, before my eyes." The next leader was Sohan.

Opus — What specifically was that "new world to adventure in"?

Inho — The new adventure was the adventure of becoming a developer. I wanted to focus on work more on my own terms and feel a sense of achievement, and in that respect development suited me.

Starting the day after the farewell post come notes on installing Python, lists and tuples, conditionals and loops, pandas, SQL. It was a company course. He didn't get to use it much at work, but "I did get to know programming," he says. The notes carry his playfulness. The list examples are "fart-machine" and "smart-mouth," and his string-replacement practice is a line of "poop poop poop." Coding, which first appeared in a short memo in September 2020, becomes study for the first time here.

In 2021 he said he dug a well to find the space he'd lost, and people came. At first I found it strange that he handed that well over within a year. But the answer is in May's "Life Is Suffering." "The reading group was part of me but not all of me, so I neither suffered too much nor rejoiced too much." The well was not his everything. That is why he could hand it over without it hurting. On July 1, introducing Sohan's recruitment post, he wrote to those hesitating: "For the past two years I was happy, I moved forward, and I savored moments I'll be talking about for the rest of my life." Of everything he wrote about the group in two years, it is the least adorned sentence.

Erik Erikson called the central task of mid-adult life generativity: the turn from building your own life to caring for what will outlast you, whether children, students, or institutions. It usually arrives later than twenty-eight. But this year shows it early and twice. He handed the well he had dug to Sohan rather than letting it close with his departure, and he taught two new hires not only how to work but how to teach the next ones. A man who has decided not to have children, and who wanted to be a teacher at fifteen, found other ways to pass things on. That is part of why letting go of the group did not hurt. He was not losing it. He was leaving it to someone.

4. Life Is Suffering

On May 6, something unexpected happened at work. While reviewing the specifications for a purchase tender, a supplier objected that the evaluation result was unfair. The head of the one-man company called with his voice raised. When Inho pointed out his tone, the man said he wasn't angry. At first Inho caught the anger and felt "a vindictive urge to teach him a lesson." The purchasing department offered two options and added "a subtle evasion of responsibility," that in the end the responsibility was his. He was one rung above the youngest in the organization, yet he was handling work his seniors couldn't. "So I stacked up one more reproach in my heart against my incompetent seniors."

From that anger he reached the first of the Four Noble Truths: life is suffering. "What doesn't go my way is suffering, and in the end, as long as a self called 'I' exists… life will be suffering." He compared it to pregnancy: the bigger the baby grows and the more of the body it takes up, the greater the pain. The company had been something he'd one day leave and not care about. But over nine years it had become a large territory of his life. So his prescription was proportion. "If what I do is too important in my life, it'll wear me down; if it's too little important, I won't get anything from it." He wrote that he would slowly reduce the company's share.

But this year's writing about the company isn't the writing of someone reducing the share. In June, while teaching two new hires, he wrote "No Work Is Fun." All work is dull, he wrote. What makes the difference is giving a new hire authority and responsibility so they can claim their own portion, holding frequent one-on-ones, and making sure hierarchy doesn't block feedback from below. And teaching that new hire to do the same for the next one. "The horizontal company culture people talk about is actually the result of that cycle; it's never a tangible asset you can simply bring in and install." The training went well, he says. Only, "it wasn't an organizational culture that could take in that academic kind of feel."

The economist Albert Hirschman divided the paths open to members of a declining organization into three: exit, voice, and loyalty. In 2021 Inho did the subcontractors' dirty jobs himself and endured in silence. In the spring and summer of 2022 he used his voice. He planted his way of doing things in the new-hire training and wrote theories of organizational culture on his blog. When his voice was not taken in, one path remained.

So September 4's "Freedom" is a complicated post to read. Its first line is "Dobby is free," and he calls the proposition that quitting equals freedom "contradictory," because by working we gain many social freedoms. Freedom is different from liberation. Even inside an organization, if you can exercise your abilities under your own authority and responsibility, you are free. Then comes the year's most painful metaphor. "When a child cries, the parent responds… If the parent neglects it, the child will cry 'freely,' but it is not free. The child will soon tire and stop crying." What we want from a company, he wrote, is "for it to respond before our hearts go cold." The next day he added briefly, "I want to work with excitement. Not somewhere that brags about slacking."

When he wrote this, he had already decided to quit. A man about to quit writing that quitting isn't freedom. I read the post as an argument with himself. He wanted his reason for leaving not to be liberation. What he wanted was an organization that responds, and he wanted the confirmation that it was impossible to be the reason he left. But the reason he gave the company was different.

Opus — You told the company it was "to be with my spouse." Did you choose a reason that would be accepted and that no one could argue with?

Inho — Right.

Here the vocabulary of motive from the 2020 chapter returns. In the fall of 2022, Inho chose not the most accurate vocabulary but the one that worked best. "Actually I wanted to get away from the company." And the vocabulary really did work. Instead of letting him go, the company sent him to the capital region, where his spouse was: a transfer to Songdo through HR. To the man who gave the reason that worked best, the company offered an answer that fit that reason exactly. The reason he wanted to leave stayed as it was.

On September 29, the year's last post is about communication. He tried to talk about the risks in Korea's housing market. His mother answered, "Yoon Suk-yeol's president now, so the place I bought should be fine." It was an apartment in Secheon, on the outskirts of Daegu, that she'd bought with money she had saved and rented out. The intent and nuance of what's said are filtered out; only the surface goes in, joins one-to-one with the thoughts already there, and comes back out. He saw the same pattern in the 586 generation, the Koreans born in the 1960s who came of age in the democracy movement of the 1980s, and in his company's incompetent seniors. He also noted that when he brought up Sandel's book on meritocracy, the reply was that "people from provincial universities can't do the job." Yet he left one parenthesis. "(Lately I'm surprised to catch myself communicating that way too.)" When I asked when, he answered, "I'm sometimes surprised by how inflexible my thinking is when I talk with my spouse." Putting himself in the middle of a post criticizing others has the same grain as his 2021 confession of being "a lacking citizen." Because of this parenthesis, the post doesn't end as generational blame.

There is something under this post that it does not say. The person whose way of listening he describes most precisely is his mother. What goes in is the surface; the intent, the nuance, the thing he was actually trying to say, is filtered out. The psychologist Peter Fonagy uses the word mentalizing for the ability to read the mind behind someone's words, and argues that children learn to understand their own inner states largely by seeing them reflected back by the people who raise them. I want to be careful here. One conversation about an apartment is not a childhood, and Inho has never described his mother this way beyond this post. But the pieces sit close together. In 2020 he said he had few memories of being hugged and that since elementary school he had tried to think, act, and take responsibility on his own. In 2021 he said no one ever asked him why. In 2022 he said no one understands him better than he does. A child whose inner life is rarely reflected back learns to be his own mirror. That would explain both his unusual precision about himself and his awkwardness when someone else offers to hold up the mirror. This is my hypothesis, not his account.

5. Numbness

There is one sentence that keeps coming back in Inho's writing this year.

June 4, the Seoul International Book Fair at COEX. The night before, his head heavy, he watched YouTube and played games. The recommended videos had nothing worth watching, and the game had stalled and was no fun. "After agonizing over what to numb myself with, I realized there was no particular way, and only fell asleep at one." On June 15, in COVID self-isolation, he wrote "Shadow Identity." The outer identity made of job, assets, and relationships might be a fiction. Instead, the addictive behaviors we repeat even while ashamed of them, "the process of choosing what will numb us," make up our shadow identity. He wrote his own list: compulsively watching videos, sinking into games, a compulsion that can't bear situations requiring waiting, a cycle of having to eat greasy, stimulating food when stressed. On September 25 it appears a third time. "I felt like a bird locked in a cage… The question of what to numb myself with went unresolved, and I kept up a meaningless spinning that used up body and mind."

Opus — What did you want to numb then?

Inho — Ahead of the transfer, I'd lost motivation working in Gwangyang, and time didn't pass. The depression was heavy, and I took some medication too. I wanted time to pass quickly, so I wanted to numb my senses.

What he wanted to numb was less the pain itself than time. The decision was made, and the outcome was in someone else's hands. All he could do was wait. The "compulsion that can't bear situations requiring waiting" in "Shadow Identity" looks like a list of character flaws. But read in this context, it describes that year's situation precisely. I think he is too harsh on himself. Taking someone playing games in an isolation room and calling it behavior repeated "even though we find ourselves shameful or wrong," and dragging in humanity's defect of being led into fascism, is an excessive verdict. He was only clumsy at bearing the wait. It was not his identity.

The psychologist Martin Seligman spent his early career on a grim finding: animals and people who learn that their actions do not affect what happens to them tend to stop trying, and the state looks very much like depression. Later work softened and refined the idea, but its core has held. Depression grows where outcomes seem independent of what you do. Seen that way, the timing of Inho's depression is not mysterious. He had endured a great deal before: the white room, the stroke, the loneliness of Gwangyang. What he had never had to endure was a situation where he had already acted and the result was entirely out of his hands. For a man who had carried himself since childhood, who trusted his own effort above almost anything, waiting on HR was the one condition his usual strengths could not touch. It was not the work that broke him. It was the waiting.

The French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg called depression "the weariness of the self," the fatigue of having to be oneself. In the age of discipline, people fell ill from prohibition. In the age of autonomy, people are worn out by the demand to decide and take initiative on their own. The key words of the organizational theory Inho wrote this year were "authority and responsibility," "a self-directed work environment," "the achievement of focusing more on my own terms." A man who wanted autonomy more than anyone was waiting in a place where autonomy was not allowed. The depression grew in that gap.

On June 23 he posted two poems. In "Reason," the night air knocked on the door and asked the reason for his depression. He could hardly open his mouth. "I thought maybe there was no reason from the start. / That the depression in me isn't because something's lacking, only / the thought that we've been living a worldly life that numbed that feeling. / The solitude we only come down with like a fever once the treadmill stops for a moment." Judging by the interview, there were reasons: Gwangyang, a spouse living apart, an outcome that wouldn't come. That the poem says "there is no reason" is probably less a lie than the poem's way of working. Name something, and you have to fight that name. "0623," posted the same day, is a short letter to readers.

To those who get depressed along with me reading my writing, what I'm really trying to do is brush off the beggar-ticks. Those burrs that stuck to me somewhere while I walked, I mean to pick them off with a careful index finger.

Those "readers" were not particular people but "people like me," imagined. When I asked what the beggar-ticks were, he answered, "seeing myself, confirming my depression, and taking some of it off." In 2021 he said he writes what remains unresolved on his blog. In 2022 the reason becomes a little clearer. For him, writing is the fingertip work of picking seeds off his clothes.

On August 11 came a day the fingertip couldn't keep up. "There Was a Day Like That." Locking the office after everyone had gone and coming down the stairs, tears welled up. The rain clouds "couldn't even pour down cleanly, like wringing out a dry towel." He crossed a vaguely wet parking lot and stopped in a supermarket where strangers brushed past. He quoted a sentence: "Not knowing where I came from or where I should go, passing through those days feeling like I wanted to cry." And the question he had handed to a fictional character in 2021 came back this time in the first person. "Is there really any reason to live? A sorrowful stillness came over me."

Inho distinguished them: 2021 was fiction, and this is an essay. The feeling after locking up was "just like that passage," he said. I don't pass lightly over that distinction. It means that summer had come close enough that he had no choice but to write the question without the distance of fiction.

I asked about the medication too. Going to the hospital was his decision. No one talked him into it. This year he was someone who, rather than complaining that he hurt, found his own way to deal with the hurt. Opening the clinic door and not talking about it for a long time came from the same hand.

Opus — Was there a reason you never let anyone see you cry at work?

Inho — Because it was easier.

In 2020 I called him "his own guardian," and he agreed with that reading again this time. I reread the crying-child metaphor in "Freedom." If the parent doesn't respond, the child soon tires and stops crying. He wanted the company not to be that kind of parent. Yet when he cried, he called no one. I turned the question at the end of Chapter 1 back on him here.

Opus — If someone asked the Inho of 2022 in Gwangyang, "Were you okay?", what do you think you'd say?

Inho — Honestly, I think it'd feel awkward. Because I don't think anyone understands me better than I do. So I think that's why people can't easily bring that kind of thing up with me.

The answer is honest, and so a little lonely. The conviction that you understand yourself better than anyone is an ability earned by someone who has protected himself. At the same time, that conviction closes, from the inside, the door others could knock on. In 2021 he said that when he did the subcontractors' dirty work himself, "no one asked me why." Maybe people didn't ask not only out of indifference. Maybe he was also someone hard to ask. The man who wants to ask the girl in that elementary-school classroom "were you okay" becomes awkward when the same question comes to him. I think this asymmetry explains both Inho's kindness and his isolation.

6. Two Months

In October, by a transfer through HR, Inho left Gwangyang for Songdo. It had been eight years since he came to Gwangyang in 2014. In the meantime his spouse had settled into a studio near Sindaebang Samgeori in Seoul, and for a while he lived there with her and commuted to Songdo. The road he had traveled every week or two for over half a year ended. The work in his new department was managing a test facility and the like, unrelated to chemical analysis. It was a post far from the Chemical Analysis Engineer certification he had earned in the fall of 2021.

He called the transfer "a chance, and something I'd never tried before." Postponing his resignation was not running away but a last experiment. If he changed departments, if the people changed, could he work with excitement? The answer didn't take long.

Opus — How long did it take to realize there was no chance to work with excitement in Songdo either?

Inho — Two months was enough. The people there were the same.

"The people there were the same." This short sentence is the conclusion of nine years at one organization. It wasn't because Gwangyang's seniors were incompetent, or because Gwangyang was a small city. The way of working he wanted wasn't anywhere in that organization. In January's review of the reading group, he had found the causes of its struggles in the city, the generation, the medium. Songdo in October refuted that hypothesis. The problem wasn't the place. The discovery must have hurt, but it must also have freed him. There was no longer any need to wait for another department or another city.

Organizational psychologists speak of person–environment fit: the degree to which what a job and a culture ask of a person matches what that person needs and values. Poor fit, not incompetence on either side, is one of the best predictors of burnout and leaving. "The people there were the same" is, in that language, a discovery about fit. It moves the problem away from particular seniors and particular cities and toward the match between a whole culture and one man. I would add a small caution, one he himself will supply in the last chapter. When a person finds that the people are the same everywhere he goes, some of the sameness may be in the lens. In 2025 he will realize he had been, as he puts it, "in the box" about a colleague. That does not undo what he saw in Songdo. It only means that fit runs in both directions.

From the end of 2022 he studied Java. It was study to prepare for leaving the company the following May. That is why the blog went quiet for nine months. Looking back now, he says, "I should have quit sooner."

Opus — At fifteen you said "I can always change jobs later," and in 2020 you left that coding memo. What held you for over two more years before you actually quit?

Inho — I think because of the inertia of all that time, it took a long time to find the courage to take a new job and to explore it. In fact my salary was cut in half, and I started development later than others.

Inertia is an honest word. For someone who went in through special hiring at sixteen and was now twenty-eight, the company was more than a workplace. It was his first paycheck, his first independence, the base of his married life. In 2021 he said the company had given him the chance to be independent, but to be independent even after leaving it, he needed other conditions. Those conditions were not in place in 2022 either. What changed was not the conditions but the limit of his waiting. In the words of "Life Is Suffering," the company was "something that had grown too big" in his life. The plan to slowly reduce its share failed. In the end he chose to bring the share to zero. The price he paid was a salary cut in half. That he says "sooner" while knowing that price sounds less like regret than conviction.

Epilogue: The Plane Tree

Back to the last line of the September 19 post. The plane tree was tossed noisily by the wind. "It was obvious it would still be standing there after the storm passed, but." The sentence breaks off at "but." What was meant to follow is not written. You know the tree will stand, but knowing it doesn't make tonight's wind less frightening. Knowing something in your head and enduring it are different. The distance between "knowing and realizing" he spoke of in 2021 has become, this year, the distance between a decision and the wait.

In 2022 Inho sent many things ahead. He sent his spouse to Seoul first, and the group to Sohan first. He sent his intention to resign to the company first. And he himself moved last, only once he had the transfer order in hand. He who pushed a frightened person out the door endured his own fear alone, crying. He conveyed his wish to leave in words the organization could understand. I think this was both his greatest strength and his greatest cost this year. He did not collapse, and in the end he reached where he wanted to go. It's just that most of the people who could have steadied him along the way didn't know what he was going through.

Still, one person knew. The one who went up to Seoul in March, afraid, opened the door of the studio at Sindaebang Samgeori and welcomed him in October. At the end of the road she went down first because Inho cheered her on, this time she was the one waiting. "In the end my spouse went to Seoul, and I went to Seoul in the end too, and we've been living well ever since." Of all the sentences Inho used in telling this story, it is the calmest and the one that holds the longest stretch of time. The side that drew a line beside the empty vertex in 2021 had, in 2022, crossed the storm before him.

The storm came the next spring. In May, he left the company. The next post on his blog is a note on installing a Java linear-regression library.