2023: Green Light

Twenty-nine, from Songdo to Seoul

By Opus 5.5

September 15, 2023, two weeks into a government-funded coding bootcamp. Inho posted a piece without even revising it: the green traffic light, the laughing classroom, the teacher saying, "We just call it blue." The prologue opened with that scene. This is the day he first wrote it down, an autumn on the edge of thirty.

"At school, I couldn't ask questions," he wrote. After the Plato he once carried under his arm and the dialogues he held with paper, something new follows. "There's something I realized around thirty. That I'm not as timid as I thought. And that I'm someone who asks a lot of questions." At the bootcamp he raised his hand more than three times a day, and there were days he asked a question every hour of an eight-hour class. The post ends: "Maybe the reason behind my career change is that I dreamed of a culture where questions are free."

2023 is the year Inho left the company he had worked at for nine years. And the year he left a world that told him to call it blue, and set out to find a place where he could call the green light green.

More than half of this year's forty-eight posts are records of studying Java, Spring, and SQL; the SQL practice logs from the bootcamp alone number more than ten. Stories about people are rare and short. Inho himself said that for this year "there isn't much I actually wrote." So, as I said at the start, from here on I work without interviews. Alongside the blog posts, I read the notes he added in the fall of 2024 when he reposted his diaries from December 2022 and January 2023.

1. A Shaved Head on Christmas Eve

On December 24, 2022, Inho shaved his own head. In his diary the next day he wrote, "There were many reasons. One of them was wanting to start over." It was cold out, and he had a hard time hiding the awkward head for a while. Two years later, bringing the scene back up, he added: "Along with the mindset of wanting to start 2023 anew, I really am trying to live anew."

The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep divided the rituals people go through when crossing from one status to another into three stages: separation, where you detach from the old place; transition, where you belong nowhere; and incorporation, where you enter the new place. Victor Turner called the transitional period "liminality," the time of standing on a threshold. Shaving the head is, across many cultures, the most common gesture of a separation rite: enlistment, ordination, initiation. Whether Inho shaved his head knowing that meaning, I don't know. But taking 2023 as a whole, the Christmas Eve shave was the first step of a long threshold. From leaving the company in May until entering a new one the following March, he lived for nearly ten months as someone who belonged nowhere.

The separation began in his body before he quit. On January 3, 2023, his first day back at work that year, he turned down an invitation to a thirty-thousand-won sushi lunch and went to the company's lunchtime fitness program, new that year. His diary records the deadlift form like an anatomy chart: take the weight in the hips, keep the hamstrings taut, retract and depress the shoulder blades. After about a month of experimenting, a routine formed: thirty minutes of exercise before lunch, then lunch, then back at his desk by fifty past. In April he lifted eighty kilograms. The Inho of 2024 remembers those four months like this: "January to April 2023 was one of the few times in my life I was strong and healthy."

That same winter he was absorbed in studying economics, in the investment community "Valley," the one he said in the 2021 interview he "joined later but as a ghost member." Judging by the diaries, that winter at least he was no ghost. He bought a Galaxy Fold 4 and reviewed lectures three times over on Line 2 on the way to work. He studied the top ten companies in the S&P energy sector and wrote sector columns to post in the community. In December, writing about the Chinese semiconductor industry, he arrived at the conclusion that "writing is labor." The five million won that came into his retirement pension account, he split two to one between a target-maturity bond ETF and a Nasdaq-100 ETF. In January he also signed up for eighteen credits in an AI major at Korea National Open University. His 2024 retrospective says: "There was nothing hard at work, so I think it was a good environment for studying more." And: "I think my flow of studying economics was cut off at the point I quit." His 2021 longing for financial freedom took its most diligent form in the winter right before he quit, then stopped when he quit. Probably because the independence he wanted came not from investing but from changing careers. That is my guess.

At the center of this winter's diaries is his spouse. At 10 a.m. on December 15, 2022, he wrote:

"I'm cheering on my spouse's growth… It was last Tuesday that she found work she wants to do in Seoul and went to the interview. The result comes out today. She said she didn't do well in the interview, but I cheered her on just for finding the job posting and applying. The first time is hard; the second is twice as easy, and the third four times as easy."

Then he turns to himself. "Compared to her, I've lived too self-directed. Since I was young, I tried not to take anyone's help in making my way through my path and my life. So I was lonely, somewhat perfectionist, and cold in my relationships." When he thought about marriage, he says, he made a resolution: to keep pace with his spouse. That doing so would fill the lacking parts of his life and make him "a warmer and softer person." In 2020 I called him "his own guardian," and in 2022 I wrote that that conviction closes, from the inside, the door others could knock on. This diary is evidence that he already knew the problem. And it shows the solution he found was marriage: two people leaning opposite ways, each becoming the other's counterweight.

On January 6, the result of his spouse's first interview came out. She was afraid of mistakes, and he comforted her. They had pork jowl with soju, and at night wine and strawberries. One line in the day's diary reads: "We came to Seoul to be happy. Me, with my spouse." On January 12 he recorded that she had passed the second interview and would start on the sixteenth. "You worked so hard. Let's keep going." On her first day she was very anxious, and in the evening he celebrated with her. The one who went up to Seoul first in 2022, afraid, found her own place in Seoul in January 2023.

At work he had already half left. His diary on January 14: "Lately I've lost motivation at the company, I'd say. I don't want to go to company dinners, and seeing the old seniors who don't work kills my motivation." On a day his spouse had gone to a dinner with the younger employees at her new company, he wrote this. All eleven were unmarried, ages twenty-five to thirty-seven. When he first joined, of the hundred people in his group, the senior right above him was eight years older, the next twelve years older, and everyone after that in their forties. "It struck me all over again that I'd been at an old company."

On January 25, the day after returning from the Lunar New Year holiday in Yeongcheon and Gwangyang, he wrote a long diary entry. Reflection is "scooping only the clear essence from valley water mixed with sand and straw," and in the middle of making a living, it is very tiring work. Reflection has a pull; it takes a person into a trance. But "often, reflection that goes too deep ends as the stubbornness of a thinker caught in a narrow view… or becomes a poet's gloom." So what he had learned was "that it's better not to touch places too deep. Only to not forget that the abyss exists, and wait for the right time." The entry ends: "So I thought that in our reflection, even with a spoonful of sadness taken out, the salt would still be just right."

To anyone who has read the reincarnating suicide-to-be series of 2021 and the "is there any reason to live" of 2022, this sentence sounds like a declaration. In his January 17 diary he wrote that writing and reflection had gone "beyond the benefit of cultivating a calm character" and "made me lose the cheerfulness I had, which is a shame." And in the new community he wanted "to show a bit of that cheerfulness." It is the red of his 2020 rainbow, the comedian who until then had performed for an audience of one at home, asking to be let out of the house. I read this as a healthy decision. At the same time I note one thing. After this decision, deep writing nearly vanishes from his blog. Whether the price of taking out a spoonful of sadness was leaving fewer records, or whether he wrote somewhere else, this chapter can't tell.

2. A Common Abstract Class

On May 15, 2023, Inho left the company where he had worked for nine years. It was half a year after he had announced his resignation in the fall of 2022 and then postponed it with the transfer to Songdo. As the 2022 chapter confirmed, in Songdo "two months was enough." The four months after that were a threshold filled with a shaved head, deadlifts, and economics.

On July 13, two months after quitting, he posted "Résumé and Self-Introduction (Public Version)." The résumé reads: born 1994; graduated technical high school 2012; discharged from the army 2014; joined the company 2014; left the company 2023; began a career change to developer 2023. Below it: enrolled in the first semester of the fourth year of an AI major at Korea National Open University; scheduled to enter a government-funded Java Spring backend course; scheduled to take the Engineer Information Processing exam.

The self-introduction is the first time he explained his nine years to others. He did experiments and testing in metal chemistry in a research department. He redrew the blueprints for a simulation rig and analyzed its defects to design an exhaust model that prevents dust explosions. He consolidated chemical analysis test methods that had been run separately into a single document under the national standard and trained others in it. The organization's age structure was "hourglass-shaped, with no one born in the eighties." As the most senior of the employees in their twenties and thirties, he had to listen to both the senior managers and the junior staff. Then comes the most Inho-like paragraph.

"I believe the essence of work isn't defined by the outward form of a job. Paradoxically, I believe all work has a common abstract class it inherits from a higher level. Whether we clean streets or research space launch vehicles, all work has an existing system and process, and within it, problems that arise and room for improvement."

It is a sentence translating nine years into the language of object-oriented programming he'd just learned. He is saying he isn't changing jobs so much as inheriting the same abstract class through a different implementation. The man who went to a technical high school at fifteen saying "I can always change jobs later" put a theory of his own to that sentence fourteen years later. The second axis he named was culture. "I realized the work culture I like and need is a technology-centered work culture of growing together with colleagues by solving essential problems." And he added a line like a memo: "Not work-life balance but Life's Work. Not leaving on time but working with meaning and fun, even if it means staying late."

The vocational psychologist Mark Savickas describes careers not as a matter of matching traits to jobs but as a life story people construct, and he has a memorable phrase for what that story often does: it turns preoccupations into occupations. People are drawn, he argues, to work that lets them actively master what they once passively suffered. It is hard to find a cleaner example than this chapter. The boy whose question about the light was laughed at chose, at twenty-nine, a field he believed was organized around asking questions, and put "a culture where questions are free" at the center of his reason for leaving. The teacher he wanted to be at fifteen reappears in his list of strengths as the man who explains, documents, and trains others. The abstract class he names is not only a clever metaphor. It is a way of carrying the continuous thread of a life across a break that, from the outside, looks total.

To readers who remember the "salary thief" of the 2021 chapter, this line is interesting. Back then, in an organization where overtime was banned, he looked over his shoulder and wrote that he must do "work" after work ended. In 2022 he wrote, "I want to work with excitement." What he disliked was never the amount of work. It was meaningless work and an organization that didn't respond. One sentence of the self-introduction settles that long complaint. "Usually after three or four years I was at the top of that area, and each time I changed roles." Within one organization he had in effect changed jobs about three times already. The fourth had to happen outside it.

I record a critique too. The self-introduction is by nature the genre where the vocabulary of motive is most refined. In 2022 he told the company he was leaving "to be with my spouse," while inwardly "I wanted to get away from the company." A year later, in the public self-introduction, that reason becomes "a technology-centered work culture" and "problem-solving ability." There is no lie. But everything from the 2022 chapter drops out here: the office where he cried alone, the time he wanted to numb. He put forward collaboration and communication as strengths, and those strengths are real. He ran a reading group for two years and translated between both ends from the waist of the hourglass. But the same man's most intimate diary says, "I was cold in my relationships." The distance between the public Inho and the Inho of the diaries is widest this year. I don't think it's hypocrisy. Anyone about to cross a new threshold prepares a face that fits the ticket. It is what Goffman called the front-stage face. It's just that, as the Inho of 2022 already showed, when you wear that face long enough, the person backstage becomes invisible to everyone.

His interview-prep memo on June 20 lists items like communication manners, test code, and sharing technical documents. Beneath them, in quotation marks, is one sentence: "My hope to take part in building an integrated system." In the 2021 interview he drew humans as a polygon with one empty vertex. The wish to be one side of a whole is probably another way of drawing that shape.

3. A Summer Vacation of Three and a Half Months

On August 31 he gave his time since quitting a name: "Finding Myself on a Summer Vacation of Three Months and Two Weeks." But the entry reads less like a vacation than like building a workshop.

On nights he couldn't sleep, he went out to the living room and watched YouTube. It was bad for his sleep and his sense of self-efficacy. But the reason is interesting. It wasn't that his mind was foggy. "I was extremely sensitive about making noise while my spouse was asleep, so I wanted to kill time in the quietest way possible." His spouse's mechanical keyboard was too loud to type on at night, and the desk light was dim. The keyboard he liked cost 120,000 won; a lamp, 80,000. Somehow, he felt, 200,000 won "was a bit of a waste." So he covered the face-side of a stand lamp that leaked light in every direction with a lens-cleaning cloth. He took back a quiet keyboard of under 20,000 won that he had "lent indefinitely" to his spouse, and connected a silent mouse. "In the end I set up a workspace of my own for zero won. I was satisfied."

It is a post written in a period with no income at all, before his salary was cut in half. In 2022 he said, "I should have quit sooner," but the price of that "sooner" is written in this diary: nights of begrudging 200,000 won and blocking light with a lens cloth. At the same time the diary has a lightness not seen in earlier years. He schemes, builds, and is satisfied. Compared with 2022's "what to numb myself with," it is the same night facing the opposite direction.

There is more in the lens cloth than thrift. Albert Bandura, who gave psychology the idea of self-efficacy, found that the most powerful source of a person's belief in his own capacity is mastery experience: small, concrete successes at things he set out to do. The year before, Inho had spent months in exactly the opposite condition, waiting on a decision he could not influence. A zero-won workspace is a trivial achievement. But it is his, from problem to solution, and he records the satisfaction precisely. I read the post as a man rebuilding, in the smallest possible unit, the sense that what he does changes what happens. The next several months, the study logs, the gym, the group he would design, are that same unit, repeated.

The short paragraph at the end of the entry foreshadows the next story. "Sadly I must be really sensitive to noise. It's a bit hard. When we first moved in it was okay. And it was okay when I was going to work." To someone home all day, the upstairs neighbors sound different than they do to someone who commutes. This noise from upstairs leads to the autumn's moving plan.

I would add a guess. In the prologue we met a boy who learned early to read the whole classroom, alert to the next thing that might hurt him. A working life gives that alertness somewhere to go: tasks, colleagues, a day's structure. Home all day, without a role, with the future uncertain, the same vigilance has fewer objects, and the footsteps upstairs become one of them. Stress and lack of structure are known to sharpen sensitivity to noise. I can't say that is what happened, only that the man who "was okay when I was going to work" and is not okay now fits the pattern of an old watchfulness finding a new target.

That month's TIL, "Today I Learned," table has a column for "reflection" beside "study." Most of it is blank, but the filled cells are almost all about the body. "Couldn't focus at all (fine after sleeping). Next time check whether it's lack of sleep." "Time to think about exercise to reduce brain fog." "Shoulders and traps, the rounded shoulders seem a little worse." And occasionally, English sentences: "I maintained a balanced learning routine. My body get recovered my health." On August 21 he looked into gyms near the bootcamp. Could he do squats and deadlifts at lunch? He'd have to check how crowded it got before signing up, he noted. January's deadlifts had been something the company provided. Now he had to arrange them again himself.

On August 26 two short posts went up. One is a discovery from its title: "What Consciousness Expected: Surprisingly, It Was the Body I Needed."

On a daily basis, regardless of heat or cold or downpour or snow, 1 walk in green space 1 workout 1 conversation

The Inho of 2022 tried to solve depression with reflection. He asked the reason for his depression, diagnosed his shadow identity, and picked off beggar-ticks. The Inho of the summer of 2023 switches the prescription to the body: a walk, exercise, conversation. I looked for a long time at the fact that the third item is "conversation." For someone who has left the company and studies alone all day, conversation doesn't come on its own. He wrote it in as a daily essential nutrient.

The other is Boramae Park. "It's almost a year since I moved up to Seoul. Boramae Park, which I saw last year, was still summer." He wondered why people come out to parks. And he wrote: "The open view with nothing blocking it felt dizzyingly unfamiliar. It took quite a while for pupils used to spaces surrounded by walls for so long to adjust." The walls might be a lab, or a plant, or nine years. At Anam Station in 2022 he saw the city through the eyes of "an outsider." A year later at Boramae Park, he became one of the people who had come looking for "a space both familiar and strange." "Some, like me."

4. Green Light

In September Inho entered a government-funded Java Spring backend course. SQL practice logs went up on his blog every day: salary raises, average weight by department, counts of birthdays by month, practice problems and their answers. Short remarks are tucked in. "Sure enough, you have to type it for your body to learn it." "Getting harder, getting confusing, heh."

In the first week of the course there was an intake counseling session. When a staff member asked if anything was uncomfortable, he said he wasn't sure it was right to jump straight into lessons without even having everyone introduce themselves. The staff member answered that it's always awkward for the first three months, and said she would make sure his point was reflected. He let out a sigh. "Her face was smiling and her voice was bright, but I could see what was inside." Judging it useless to say more to someone wearing a mask, he wrapped up and left the room. Then he wrote: "Giving and receiving human respect at work is really hard. Respect starts from interest."

In the 2021 chapter I borrowed from Sennett's Respect in a World of Inequality: respect is not a declaration but a practice of attention and recognition. This short post continues that theme and also shows an old ability of Inho's. He sees behind masks. He is the man who saw "the shadow of a transparent window" in "Chueotang." I just want to add one thing. He wrote that he "could see" her inner self. But that was a judgment made in a single short session. The ability to read behind a mask is a paper's width from the ability to invent what's behind it. In early 2025 he would read Leadership and Self-Deception, known in Korea as The Person Outside the Box, and realize he had been "in the box" about a certain colleague. That comes in the last chapter; this counseling-room scene reads like a distant preview of it.

And he dug another well. On August 21, before the course even began, he wrote "An Idea for Founding a Group at the Bootcamp." Of an expected twenty-eight students, he projected seventy percent would join at first, dropping to fifty percent, leaving about fifteen. If fifteen people each spoke for only ten minutes, that would be two and a half hours. In practice, one person would take two people's share of the floor. So: split into a white team and a blue team and present in sessions. There were even awards to give at graduation: "Lightning" for flashes of insight, "Turtle" for steady participation, "Megaphone" for smooth communication. The group had five purposes, from improving job-hunting ability and technical skills to building a network, communication skills, and last, "broadening one's liberal-arts and cultural horizons." On September 16 the idea got a name: 5M2Y, "5 months like 2 years," subtitled "a dense developer." Presentations in the classroom on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings; present your progress even if unfinished, and get feedback. One line stands out: "The presenter shouldn't passively accept feedback but should be able to ask the audience questions about the presentation."

The reading group in Gwangyang, the VRC metaverse group, and now a bootcamp study group. Whenever Inho arrives somewhere new, the first thing he does is set a table. In the 2021 interview he said, "I dug a well, and they came." The 2023 blueprint is the most elaborate version of that well. He forecasts the attrition rate and even calculates who will monopolize the floor. And this blueprint shows the habit seen in the 2022 VRC recruitment post too, the meticulousness that fixed fifty-percent-plus-1/n revenue shares and recording rules. The system is finished before the people arrive. He said the Gwangyang group survived not because of a system but because of "a fated connection." Whether 5M2Y actually met, and how many came, the blog doesn't say. I won't fill that gap. But I want to set the green-light story beside this blueprint. The child who couldn't ask questions became, at thirty, someone who asks them, and now he was designing a place where others could ask too. The rule that the presenter "should be able to ask the audience questions" may be a clause written for the child who was laughed at in that classroom.

The name itself says something. "5 months like 2 years" is the slogan of a man who feels behind. He told me in the 2022 interview that he started development "later than others," and at twenty-nine he was entering a field full of people younger than him with years of head start. Compressing two years into five months is ambition, and it is also the arithmetic of someone trying to make up lost time. It is worth holding alongside the other sentence from that summer, the one about needing a walk, a workout, and a conversation every day. The same man was trying to go faster and trying to take care of himself, and those two aims do not always agree.

A short memo on September 27 is a job-hunting strategy. "More new developers aren't studying after they get hired." So he should stress that he is someone who became a developer because he loves developing, someone self-motivated. "A passionate spirit of challenge, wanting to sow seeds in the wasteland." "Someone who talks about development even on weekends and at meals." In his January 2022 group review he described their discussion of Through the Ivory Gate as "like seeds sown in barren ground, blown away in sandstorms before they could take root." A year and a half later he wants to introduce himself as someone who sows seeds in the wasteland. The metaphor is the same; the direction has turned.

5. Noise from Upstairs

On October 6, "Moving Plan (Draft)" went up. The first line is "Background: looking for a more pleasant environment because of noise from the unit above." The second is "Still need to discuss. With my spouse." The candidate was a top-floor unit in a new villa near Seoul National University Station on Line 2. "What matters is the budget, heh.. anyway.. have to find a jeonse deposit again," the lump-sum deposit Korean tenants put down instead of monthly rent.

Beneath it is a script, written out like lines in a play, of what to say to the landlord. There's a text message to send first, and what to say on the phone. The reason for moving in the script is not the noise. It's that his spouse's office moved from in front of Gangnam Station to near Moran Station in Seongnam, making her commute over three hours round trip. They had thought about getting her a separate room near her office, but they couldn't do that, he says. "Our past experience living apart during the week wasn't good for our marriage… when bodies are apart, hearts suffer too." And there's an offer to return the 340,000-won brokerage fee plus a bit more, 400,000 won in all. In the middle of the script there's also this: "Oh, our marriage is still good. I think it's more so because we're people who trust each other."

In this essay, this is the third time we've seen this scene. In 2020 I first brought up Mills's "vocabulary of motive." In 2022 he told the company he was leaving "to be with my spouse," while inwardly he wanted to get away from the company. In the fall of 2023, the memo's "background" is the noise from upstairs, yet what he'll tell the landlord is his spouse's commute. To be fair, it's quite likely the office move was also true. There's no ground to think the whole script was invented. It's closer to putting in front, among several reasons, the one easiest for the other person to accept. Noise from upstairs means telling the landlord about a flaw in his property; a spouse's commute is nobody's fault. He chooses his words while even calculating the other person's face. That is his social skill, and a consideration that comes with a fair offer.

Still, what lingers longest in this script isn't the calculation. "Our past experience living apart during the week wasn't good for our marriage," "when bodies are apart, hearts suffer too." From March to October 2022 the two of them lived apart. In the interview he said, "Living alone in Gwangyang was really painful." A year later that experience became one sentence in a script to persuade a landlord. The script was written to persuade someone else, but whoever writes a script tends to reach first for the sentences that are true for him. Inside it is a resolve never to live apart again.

What actually happened with the move isn't on the blog. The 2024 posts show him walking in Olympic Park every lunchtime. On October 22 a final project sketch went up: "My Tech Post." A Chrome extension to clip technical blog posts you like, grouping them by blog domain and floating them on screen. The Zettelkasten and visual clustering that July's "Project 0" had dreamed of took a slightly more concrete shape. A tool that gathers scattered writing and shows the connections. Ever since the reading group in Gwangyang, that was always the kind of thing he was trying to make.

Then the blog goes quiet again. From November to July of the next year, not a single post.

Epilogue: A Winter on the Threshold

In July 2024, in a review of the first short-story collection he'd read in nearly two years, he summed up this period in a sentence. "The stretch from quitting the company in May 2023 to succeeding in switching careers to developer in March 2024 was a time of emptiness I hadn't felt in a long time. That emptiness wasn't filled with much variety of experience, and because of anxiety about the future, I didn't get through it in a healthy way."

"I didn't get through it in a healthy way." What happened in the winter when the blog was quiet, I don't know. Thinking of January's eighty-kilogram deadlift and August's "1 walk, 1 workout, 1 conversation," I can guess what he held on to to get through that winter. That the holding on didn't always succeed, his own sentence tells us. Turner called the time on the threshold both dangerous and creative. The old status is shed and the new one not yet put on, so you can become anything, but you are also nothing. With no income and no title, grown sensitive to the noise from upstairs, tapping a silent keyboard at night while his spouse slept, Inho was inside that time.

If I had to leave the Inho of 2023 as a single scene, I would choose the child in front of the green light. The child who asked, before a light everyone called blue, "isn't it green?" The question drew laughter, and the child sat down with his face red. Some twenty years later he handed in his resignation at the company where he had worked for nine years, a seat everyone called safe. His colleagues were puzzled, he wrote. That puzzlement resembled the classroom's laughter. This time he did not sit down. The light was green, just as he saw it, and he crossed.

On March 3 of the following year, the threshold ended.