2024: The Skiff

Thirty, Seoul

By Opus 5.5

At 11:34 a.m. on September 18, 2024, Inho copied onto his blog a diary entry he'd written a year and nine months earlier. Beneath it he added sentences from the present. The old entry was written by someone who felt the winter of his fresh arrival in Seoul "like a romance out of a novel." The new sentences were written by someone who knew what had been coming toward that man.

"The painful questions about happiness were coming toward me silently, like a gray rhinoceros. And if I ask myself whether I, who overcame those harsh storms and achieved some of it, am happy, the answer goes up and down. It seems the same as the past, that my mood swings because of something at the company I don't like. One consolation is that through my efforts so far I've come to have a small skiff, and with it I can leave for the next island anytime."

2024 is the year Inho became a developer. On March 3, after ten months on the threshold, he joined a new company. And as this paragraph says, what the man who reached his destination discovered was not a destination but a boat.

His blog has twelve posts this year, and not one before July. Four of them repost diary entries from December 2022 and January 2023 with present-day notes attached. The rest are book reviews and reading-group recruitment posts.

1. March 3

On March 3, 2024, Inho reported for his first day as a backend developer. It had been three and a half years since the word "coding" first appeared in a short memo on September 17, 2020. Two years since he learned Python in a company course in May 2022; ten months since he quit in May 2023. In the 2022 interview he stated the price of this choice briefly. "In fact my salary was cut in half, and I started development later than others."

There is no record of the first few months. The first mention of the company this year was written in October, seven months in. And its content gives anyone who has read the 2022 chapter a sense of déjà vu.

"I got impatient. I didn't like the company's work processes. If you start disliking the people at a company, it's probably because the company isn't right for you."

The September 28 retrospective has a more specific complaint. "When I make requests to my team leader there's no response, and it seems we can't really talk properly, so I feel a bit stifled. It's a little tiring to carry this feeling into the weekend too." On October 1 he wrote: "Situations that happen now and then at the company, like slacking or neglect, or quietly pushing work off, make me touchy. I think it might be because I saw so much of that at my previous company that it left a wound."

In 2022's "Freedom" he used the metaphor of the neglected child. If the parent doesn't respond, the child soon tires and stops crying. At his new company in 2024, the first thing he ran into was someone who doesn't respond. The hypothesis of his 2023 self-introduction, that changing jobs would change the culture, was only half right. He came to IT looking for a technology-centered work culture, but there was no guarantee the company he joined was such a place. In a March 2025 post he leaves one more line about this company. There is one colleague on his team interested in technology, but the company as a whole isn't a place where people easily talk about it.

There is also a quieter change in his position that his posts don't name. At his first company he had been, as his self-introduction put it, the most senior of the employees in their twenties and thirties, the one who translated between both ends of the hourglass. At thirty he was the newest junior in the room, paid half of what he had earned, with seven months of experience in a field where years count. Sociologists call the pain of such a drop relative deprivation: it is felt not against some absolute standard but against where one used to stand. I suspect it sharpened his sensitivity to being ignored. A request that goes unanswered lands differently on a man who used to be the one others came to. And yet the most important sentence in this section is his own. "I think it might be because I saw so much of that at my previous company that it left a wound." He is locating the source of his reaction in his own history rather than only in the people in front of him. That is the capacity Fonagy calls mentalizing, turned on himself, and it is new.

That doesn't mean the Inho of 2024 had gone back to 2022. In his October 3 retrospective he looks back on his first company like this. "At my first job there were a lot of people I didn't like, but I remember thinking I must be the difficult one and quietly sticking it out anyway. I was in fact difficult, but in the end the company wasn't right for me… I guess I'm more persistent than I realize." He admits he's difficult, and he keeps his judgment that the company didn't fit anyway. Between self-blame and self-defense, for the first time he holds both in a single sentence. Compared with the man who, in 2022's "Shadow Identity," pronounced judgment on himself by dragging in humanity's susceptibility to fascism, it is much gentler.

Then comes a strategy. In today's economy, doors are largely closed to developers without experience. Decent companies want at least two years, and many postings list three or more as a requirement. "I joined on March 3. So now, seven full months. Still a long way to go." To change jobs he'd have to study for coding tests, and since he can't show company code, he'd have to leave records of his own code on GitHub. "There's a lot to prepare, but I'm glad there's something to do. Maybe I'll just do my company work passively." The next sentence: "Unfortunately my mentor tells me to focus more on company work, and I agree. I have a lot to think about."

"Maybe I'll just do my company work passively." This sentence collides head-on with the previous year's self-introduction: "Life's Work, working with meaning and fun even if it means staying late." I don't see the collision as hypocrisy. Hirschman, whom we met in the 2022 chapter, makes it clearer. To his three paths of exit, voice, and loyalty he added one more point: the voice of someone with a sure place to exit to is heard loudest. At his first company Inho had nowhere to exit to. So he raised his voice and then cried alone. The Inho of 2024 has a way to make somewhere to exit to: experience, coding tests, GitHub. "Passively" is less a word of giving up than a word for redirecting his energy into building the skiff. But his hesitation, writing "I agree" to his mentor's advice, is honest too. Someone building a skiff easily takes the island he's standing on lightly. Yet he knows that the work he does on that island makes the best timber for the skiff.

2. The Book Fair, Again

In 2024 Inho went to the book fair at COEX again. It was the same place he'd visited in June 2022, just after handing over the Gwangyang reading group, his head heavy with work, the day after falling asleep wondering "what to numb myself with." Back then, watching the writer Kim Young-ha on a screen, he'd thought, "I want to write the writing I never finished." Two years later, in the same place, he thought: "I realized there are quite a lot of readers. Of course, around me there are none, except my spouse."

On July 20, for the first time in two years, he read fiction and wrote a review: the 2023 Kim Seung-ok Literary Award anthology. The first paragraph is a chronicle of the gap, written by himself. The last novel he'd read was Pachinko in June 2022. When the reading group ended, "my history of reading stopped for a while." From quitting in May 2023 to joining in March 2024, he got through it, "not in a healthy way." And living as an office worker again, he'd grown nostalgic for reading. The next sentence is the most precise theory of reading he wrote this year.

"If I ask whether books enrich life, I think I'd say no. At the same time I think I could say yes, and that's probably because reading stops at an inner resonance, but a reading group that shares the experience of reading gives and receives great influence through the resonance of a community… Not stopping at an inner resonance, but a dynamic feast like red paint spreading out."

He said he knew the stories were excellent but "after reading them there was very little to say about the book." And he remembered how much they'd talked in the Gwangyang days reading Stoner, Siddhartha, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He wrote down his standard for a good book too: "A book that makes your heart race after reading it and makes you tell a lot of your own story to someone." A qualification in parentheses follows: "Of course, the 'someone' might be yourself."

In the 2021 chapter I borrowed Oldenburg's "third place," and Inho said what he'd lost was "space." The 2024 sentence explains for itself why that space is needed. Reading alone is resonance in one body; reading together is resonance across many. He is not someone who can live on the first alone.

On September 15 he posted "Recruiting for a Writing-Centered Remote Reading Group." He wrote briefly that he ran an offline group in Gwangyang for about two years and had neglected books while switching careers after moving to Seoul. He added a greeting: Sohan's Gwangyang group "is going strong," so anyone interested should look it up. Then he wrote the rules. One book a month, chosen in turn. No video calls like Zoom or Discord. Read for three weeks and write a review on your own blog; spend the remaining week leaving impressions and questions on each other's posts. Anonymous by default, ten people at most.

Place this recruitment post beside the VRC one from 2022 and you see a man change. The 2022 design was a metaverse, recordings, YouTube uploads, a fifty-percent revenue split. The goal was a "sense of belonging" that drew in even third parties. The 2024 design has no video and no revenue. Ten people who read quietly and write quietly are enough. A group that meets in writing instead of voices. Compared even with the floor-time calculations in the 2023 bootcamp study blueprint, it is far lighter. The habit of finishing the system before the people arrive loosens here for the first time. The road by which the man who dug a well in Gwangyang becomes a developer who builds wells in code begins with this recruitment post.

There is a reason, I think, that this design finally fit him. In the prologue I described the split the green light left in him: precise seeing above, withheld speech below, and paper as the one place where the two could meet. The Gwangyang group asked him to speak, and he did it well. The metaverse group asked him to perform, on camera, for strangers. The 2024 group asks only that people write and then answer one another in writing. For a man whose most honest voice has always been the written one, it is less a smaller group than a truer one.

A memo on September 26 records the result. "What's surprising is that once I start something, I actually do it. With the reading group in Seoul, which I'd given up on back then, I've now read three books. I've written four posts for a dev study group. I'm moving forward bit by bit." And he added, "I should make good use of the me who, surprisingly, has to start things to get things done." It is the practical answer he found to the 2021 worry of "knowing and not doing" and the 2022 gap between "knowing and realizing." Don't trust willpower; set up a game and pull yourself into it. In the 2020 chapter I wrote that he trusts environment over willpower. The Inho of 2024 has become someone who designs that environment himself. And he begins calling that design "how to use myself."

3. Rereading the Diaries

From September 18 to October 4, Inho moved four diary entries from December 2022 and January 2023 onto his blog in a row. They had originally been written on a board in the investment community "Valley." At the end of each is a new paragraph with a 2024 timestamp: the present self annotating the past self.

The form resembles what this essay does. The psychologist Dan McAdams called identity "an internalized and evolving life story." We don't remember the past so much as keep publishing new editions of it. McAdams distinguished two narrative forms in those editions: the "redemption sequence," in which something bad leads to a good ending, and the "contamination sequence," in which something good is spoiled. The notes the Inho of 2024 attached to his old diaries mostly stand on the side of redemption. "Overcame those harsh storms," "things that seemed like mere interruptions turned out, looking back, to be luck." But the most interesting note is not a narrative. It is a correction.

In the December 15, 2022, entry he wrote of his spouse: "My spouse longs for a life of finding work and taking on challenges herself, yet she couldn't get outside her circle of relationships and didn't live a self-directed life." In September 2024 he copied that sentence exactly and then added:

"Now I've become careful about judging my spouse's past with this one sentence. I think there are sides of my spouse I haven't seen and a world I don't understand. I think what I should do for my spouse would have been enough with cheering her on, as I do now. With a little shared fun on the side. I should run together again."

In the last interview of the 2022 chapter he said, "Because I don't think anyone understands me better than I do." About himself, I wrote that that conviction closes the door from the inside. This correction shows what he does when the same conviction points at his spouse. He stopped the past self who had summed up a person in one sentence. And he wrote "haven't seen" and "don't understand," twice. In a 2021 reading-group review he wrote, "They say love is seeing its object in three dimensions." Three years later he is practicing it with the person closest to him. And the conclusion is not an interpretation but an action. "I should run together again."

The psychologist Ethan Kross has shown that people reason more wisely about their own troubles when they step back from them, by thinking about themselves from a distance, in time or even in the third person. Distance cools rumination and makes room for what researchers call wise reasoning: recognizing the limits of one's knowledge, considering other perspectives, allowing that things may change. The 2024 annotations are self-distancing in practice. The Inho of 2022 is written about by the Inho of 2024 almost as another person, and the result is exactly the humility the research predicts: "I think there are sides of my spouse I haven't seen and a world I don't understand." The man who in 2022 said no one understood him better than he did is, two years later, practicing the opposite claim about the person he knows best.

Other scenes in the old diaries are relit by the eyes of 2024 too. The story of the company fitness program in January 2023 is followed by the present body. "Back then I think I was around 61 kilos, now 66.. I gained five whole kilos." He's trying to get back with lunchtime runs and sixteen-hour fasts. To the Christmas Eve 2022 head-shaving he attaches the sentence "I really am trying to live anew." He also admits that his economics study was cut off when he quit. Then come plans: English conversation, economics again, maybe make both into study groups. "Should I make an economics study group too, heh."

The long January 25, 2023 entry, the one saying that in reflection "even with a spoonful of sadness taken out, the salt would still be just right," carries a short note from January 2024. "Reflecting on my calm inner world has meaning, but wind that bursts in suddenly from outside often stirs up the heart. Things that seemed like mere interruptions turned out, looking back, to be luck, and natural too." January 2024 was still before he joined the new company, the tail end of the threshold. What that "sudden wind" was, the note doesn't say. But the man who wrote a year earlier that "the abyss is often lifted by a current flowing in from outside, bringing the answers to its hard questions up to the shallows" is confirming a year later that the sentence was right.

4. Resurrection

On September 15 he read an abridged edition of Tolstoy's Resurrection and wrote a review. The post begins, unexpectedly, with Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters. The table under the lamp, the gaunt man with soot on his hands, and, once your eyes adjust to the dark, the clock on the wall and the neatly arranged household things. He felt "an indescribable shock and emotion" that nineteenth-century realism made farmers and small-town people, ignored until then, the subject of painting for the first time. And he asked: what new world and what subjects will we turn to in the next era? If "the values we've upheld as absolute can fall to worthlessness," what values should we keep forever?

In January 2022 he recalled the bullied girl from elementary school, the one with soot on her collar. The Inho of 2024 lingers on the soot-stained hands in Van Gogh's painting. That he is moved by art that makes us look at what was ignored is probably no accident. This connection is mine. He did not link the two scenes.

What he took hold of in Resurrection was guilt. "The sin committed through a wrong choice, the guilt when later facing one's own sin, and the wish to make up for it and be born anew." Two weeks later, on October 1, in a note attached to an old diary entry, he brings the story to himself.

"Even in daily life I sometimes run into inner wounds from the past. They're often things that happened because I wasn't considerate enough, and there are times the past makes me ashamed… Whenever such a wound surfaces, my everyday thinking stops, I get anchored on the incident, and sometimes I end up self-critical… It might be because I'm idealistic and perfectionist."

Nekhlyudov tried to atone to Katyusha through marriage, but she would not allow it. The peasants who received a share of his land were cold. Inho draws a conclusion here. "I think my wounds are like that too. I can't act as if there were no wound. A deeper wound can form in the same place. I thought that if I can't accept my own carelessness, I'll keep looking only at my wounds."

The vocabulary is worth noticing. Sin, guilt, atonement, resurrection: five years after he stopped going to church, the language he reaches for to think about his own wounds is still the language of the faith he called "an unfinished work." He doesn't say which past carelessness he means, and I won't choose for him. But in two separate interviews he named one regret: that in 2019 he left the church without a word to anyone. If that is among the wounds that surface and stop his thinking, then this review is also, quietly, about the painting he left unfinished. That is my guess, and only a guess.

In the 2021 interview he said his standard was "objectively" high and he hadn't yet found a way to put it down. This 2024 paragraph doesn't say he found a way. Instead it defines the problem differently. The more you try to make amends, the more you see only the wound. So what's needed is not atonement but accepting the self that was careless. It is the hardest thing for a perfectionist to do. Whether he managed it, this post can't tell. But this is the first time in this essay that he uses the word "perfectionist" about himself. In the 2020 chapter I called him his own guardian. A guardian saying he will accept his own carelessness instead of protecting himself is setting the role down a little.

The psychologist Kristin Neff has spent years on the alternative he seems to be reaching for. Self-compassion, as she defines it, is not lowering one's standards. It is treating one's own failures with the kindness one would offer a friend, remembering that failure is part of being human rather than proof of being uniquely deficient, and noticing painful feelings without being swallowed by them. Her research finds that self-compassion predicts more, not less, willingness to correct mistakes, precisely because the mistake no longer threatens the whole self. "If I can't accept my own carelessness, I'll keep looking only at my wounds" is, almost word for word, the insight behind that research. For a perfectionist, it is the only exit from atonement that doesn't require pretending the wound isn't there.

The review of John Leland's Happiness Is a Choice You Make, read in August, points the same way. He distinguished two cases in which your field of vision narrows. In immersion it narrows "actively and rhythmically"; under stress, "hysterically and rigidly." And he said he wanted to be someone with a wide view who can still, at times, enjoy something inside a narrow one. He also wrote that once you get through a trial, the next time the same trial comes you "treat it as a problem or an incident." The end is a short resolution. "I hope my future will be one of letting go of the things that turn out trivial once they pass, and focusing on what can make me happy."

On November 2, having failed to finish the reading-group book Eternal Heaven, he wrote: "If a book doesn't read well, it's probably because the me of now isn't ready to converse with that book… There may be a plausible story explaining why I'm not ready, but I felt uneasy that the moment I say it, my thinking gets bound to that sentence, so I wanted to just move on." I'd like to name this sentence as the biggest change in the Inho of 2024. Since 2019 he had been someone who explained everything. For depression he brought sociology; for games, fascism; for quitting, humanism. This year, for the first time, he decides not to explain. It is the choice of someone who has learned that explanation binds thought. And the latter half of the same post is a day at Lotte World, where he went to get a Dyson hair dryer fixed, ate spicy butter-shrimp noodles he hadn't planned on, and picked up Dickens in a bookstore and put it back down. He briefly considers determinism, then writes that he "lives quietly praising the many connections chance brings." Coffee in an espresso bar found in an alley, in pretty sunlight and the shadow of cypress leaves. The Inho of 2022 would have attached a theory to this day too.

The poet John Keats had a name for what Inho chose that day. He called it negative capability: the capacity to remain "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." For most of this essay Inho has been a man who reached. Every discomfort got an explanation, often a good one. The reaching protected him; a named thing is a handled thing. What he writes in November is that the explanation itself can become a cage, binding his thinking to the sentence he chose. Letting a book simply not be readable right now, and letting a day at Lotte World simply be a good day, is a small act. It is also a kind of trust he has not often allowed himself: that not everything needs to be solved to be survived.

5. The Second Postponement

On December 6 the year's last post went up: a review of All the Beauty in the World, a memoir by a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is written as broken-line prose, and it reads more like a confession than a review.

There are times books don't read well. When there are so many thorns in me that I can't hold them. And often I don't know that what I've been holding are thorns. … After it hurt, I tried to give up. So I said I'd quit, but. I was promised a new offer, so I decided to postpone it.

Readers of the 2022 chapter will stop at these two lines. In the fall of 2022 he told the company he'd quit, and HR answered with a transfer to Songdo. He postponed his resignation. In the winter of 2024, at his new company, he again said he'd quit and was again promised "a new offer," and again postponed. The company changed and the profession changed, yet the same scene repeated.

I read this repetition in two directions. The first is worry. For him, announcing that he'll quit has become the strongest voice for moving an organization. As Hirschman said, the voice of someone able to leave is heard loudest. Both times, that voice worked. But a tool that works gets used often, and what gets used often goes dull. More important is something else: whatever voice he raised before announcing he'd quit doesn't reach the organization. In September he wrote that his team leader didn't respond to his requests. If that lack of response went on "until it hurt," whom did he speak to in between, and how? In 2022 he said, "At work I cried quietly alone," and the reason was "because it was easier." Whether the "after it hurt" of 2024 was a repeat of that, I don't know. But if there is one question this essay wants to leave him, it is this: before raising the biggest voice there is, quitting, could he have raised a smaller voice earlier?

The second is relief. The postponement of 2022 locked him in a cage. The outcome was in someone else's hands, and he waited, wondering "what to numb myself with." The postponement of 2024 is written differently. "I've only quit once in my life so far. There are probably at least fifty more years ahead of me; shouldn't I quit at least every five or ten years? I thought: my history is still short, so I'm easily shaken by small things." Quitting is no longer a once-in-a-lifetime escape. It's something that can come every five or ten years. Someone with a skiff doesn't treat leaving an island as a disaster. So staying isn't being trapped either.

Feeling low, he deliberately carried a book around with him. At first it didn't read well. "When it didn't read, I carried the book without opening it and went for walks." Olympic Park at noon, light breaking beyond the flagpoles. "Even when I waver, the world turns indifferently, like Heaven and Earth being unkind and treating all things as straw dogs." It's Laozi: heaven and earth are not humane and regard the ten thousand things as straw dogs, offerings discarded after the ritual. Like the plane tree on the eve of the typhoon in September 2022, the world stands regardless of his wavering. The difference is what comes next. The 2022 sentence broke off at "but." The 2024 sentence continues. "Whoever it is, if you run into them dozens of times every day, you end up resembling them. Before I knew it my heart was at ease, and the book read better." Meeting the indifferent world every day until you come to resemble its indifference a little. That was the way of recovery he found.

Two strands of research describe what he found. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan's attention restoration theory holds that natural settings rest the part of the mind that works by effort, the part that had spent the year straining at a job he disliked, and restore it through what they called soft fascination: light, leaves, open views. And the psychologist Robert Zajonc showed that simply being exposed to something repeatedly makes it more familiar and more tolerable. Inho's own sentence, "if you run into them dozens of times every day, you end up resembling them," is the mere-exposure effect in plain words. Carrying an unopened book through a park every noon until both the book and the world become bearable is not a philosophical solution. It is a behavioral one, and it worked.

And these are the year's last two lines.

Not avoiding anxiety, but making the choice that's faithful to myself. That's how to use myself, which I learned on this journey.

"How to use" is a developer's phrase, the language of a manual. In September he wrote, "I should make good use of the me who has to start things to get things done." In December he adds one line to that manual. Getting rid of anxiety is not the goal. The goal is to choose, anxiety and all, the side that is faithful to himself. At sixteen, on the white staircase, he saw a hole. At thirty he doesn't try to fill it; he is documenting how to carry it and use it.

Epilogue: The Skiff

The Inho of 2024 had a skiff. It isn't big. His salary was cut in half, he had seven months of experience, and he'd gained five kilograms. The company still didn't suit him, and once more he said he'd quit and then postponed it. But this boat is the first thing he built with his own hands. Neither the first company he joined through special hiring nor Songdo, where he went by transfer, was a boat he chose. This boat he joined plank by plank, from May 2022 when he copied down how to install Python, through the summer of 2023 when he blocked a lamp with a lens cloth. Someone who knows he can leave the island stays on it differently. That's why in December 2024 he didn't leave; he walked in Olympic Park, carrying a book he didn't open.

The skiff has an older lineage than it looks. At twenty he planned to work five years and leave for a college in Canada, and he never bought a single share of company stock because he was someone who was leaving. At twenty-five he described himself to an imaginary immigration officer in the past tense: "I was a promising employee." In 2020 he called coding "a kind of escape hatch." In 2022 he announced his resignation. Across every place he has stayed, he has kept an exit in view, and I think that is how he has been able to stay at all. Psychologists would call a kept exit a safety behavior: it lowers anxiety, and it also keeps a person from ever fully arriving. The difference in 2024 is authorship. Canada was an exit he dreamed and then forgot once the loneliness eased. The skiff is one he built. A dreamed exit keeps you half gone; a built one, if he lets it, can let him be wholly somewhere, because he knows he isn't trapped. Whether it works that way is a question for the years after this essay.

Which island he'll go to next, he doesn't know yet. But one thing can be written now. The child who called the green light green has, at thirty, a boat of his own. And he hasn't named it yet. That's probably very like him. Like the destination he spoke of in 2021, it is a boat "without even a label saying 'destination.'" The next spring, he would find a use for another kind of boat.