2025, First Half: The Baton

Thirty-one, Seoul

By Opus 5.5

On May 25, 2025, sorting through the month in which he read a story collection by Kim Yeon-su, Inho brought out an old despair. "Usually, what my past self despaired over was the fact that I'm not the conductor of my own life." And to that despair he wrote an answer not seen before in this essay.

"If we give up on being the conductors of our lives, the question becomes meaningless, and we won't try to control the trajectory of our lives. The moment we put down the baton, even if a small dissonance breaks out in some clarinet of the orchestra now playing, we won't care much. Because we've become the audience now."

This is a man who chose a technical high school at fifteen, joined a company through special hiring at sixteen, and left it at twenty-nine. He always strained to hold the baton of his own life. In a 2023 diary entry he wrote that he had "lived too self-directed." In the spring of 2025 he says he will try setting the baton down for a while.

His blog has seven posts in the first half of 2025. Two are the same reading-group recruitment notice, and two carry long transcripts of conversations with ChatGPT. This last chapter covers only those six months: the first season for a man who has a skiff.

1. The Box

On January 11 he posted a review of Leadership and Self-Deception, published in Korea as The Person Outside the Box. It is a confession from the first sentence. "This book was timely for me. Because reading it, I realized I was someone in the box. More precisely, I realized I was in the box about one of my colleagues."

The "box" in the book is self-deception: seeing the other as an object rather than a person, justifying yourself, falling into a collusion of blaming each other. He read the book for about a month. Around the middle he got out of the box and "for a while became generous and understanding." But now, writing the review, he "feels I've gone back into the box." So he made a checklist, like a canary in a coal mine.

1. I hope the other person fails.
2. I think the other person doesn't act the way I want.
3. I think the other person lacks ability.
4. When the other person makes a mistake, I think I shouldn't let it go and must point it out.
5. I have my own reasons for disliking the other person.

"Even now I think I'd check all five, heh.. Still, the check marks are thinner than before."

This checklist ties together scenes this essay has seen over several years. In 2022, after the tender dispute, he "stacked up one more reproach in my heart against my incompetent seniors." In 2023, in the bootcamp counseling room, he "could see what was inside" behind a staff member's smiling face. In 2024 at his new company, he wrote that "slacking or neglect" made him touchy. In the 2023 chapter I wrote that the ability to read behind a mask is a paper's width from the ability to invent what's behind it. The Inho of January 2025 lifts that sheet of paper himself. The honesty of checking all five while noting that the marks have grown thinner is different from the 2022 habit of passing judgment on himself in a single sentence.

Look at whom the checklist is aimed at. Every item is about his own mind, not the colleague's behavior: I hope they fail, I think they lack ability, I have my reasons. Social psychologists describe a common error in judging others, attributing their failings to character while attributing our own to circumstance. The book's box is that error hardened into a habit, and his checklist is a tool for catching it from the inside. The detail I like most is the last one. "The check marks are thinner." Perfectionists tend to think in absolutes: in the box or out, good or bad, fixed or broken. A mark that can be thinner is a mark that admits degrees. It is a small sign that the tyrant of the 2020 chapter, the one who issued verdicts, is beginning to accept measurements instead.

The sentence in the review that lingers longest is not actually the checklist. "In the end I thought it's hard without the good influence of a third party." In the book, the protagonist gets out of the box with the help of mentors. He wrote that for him, the book played that role. In the 2022 interview he said that if someone asked "are you okay," it would feel awkward, "because I don't think anyone understands me better than I do." The man who was his own guardian now writes that he can't get out of the box alone. That the third party is still a book rather than a person, and that he attached ChatGPT's summary to the end of the review, is very much his way. The door has opened a little. Who will come through it, we don't know yet.

2. Drought

The same day he reposted the remote reading group's recruitment notice. "These days three of us, including me, are running a review-centered reading group." The same notice goes up once more on May 4. The quiet group he started in September 2024 was carrying on with three.

But a diary entry on March 22 says the group was wobbling. He stopped Zorba the Greek, the book he'd picked for February, about three-fifths of the way in. He hadn't finished the book before it, My Father's Emancipation Diary, either. "After failing to finish books in a row like that, my will was shrunken for a while." He used his development study as an excuse, but he admitted that "in absolute hours I probably spent more time on YouTube." And he added a line: "This retrospective isn't self-blame; it's to note the facts and move on."

The qualification is small but important. The Inho of 2022 passed a verdict dragging in fascism over having played games in self-isolation. The Inho of 2025 records the same kind of fact and refuses the verdict. The "choice not to explain" we saw in 2024 has gone a step further.

The entry goes on to look for a cause: environment. The company he moved to as a developer has now passed a full year. There is one colleague interested in technology, but the company as a whole isn't a place where people easily talk about it. "Maybe over the last ten years of company life, I never got this satisfaction." And one of the most precise self-diagnoses in this essay follows.

"The expression of that thirst was sublimated in creating the Gwangyang reading group, and became the motive for starting this remote reading group, but it couldn't fill the fundamental thing. I built a dam to hold the water, but in a record drought the water level keeps dropping. And once the source started to shake, I haven't been tending the remote reading group properly."

In the 2021 interview he said he "dug a well" to find the space he'd lost. In 2025 he calls the same structure a dam. A well digs down to find water; a dam holds back water that's already flowing. And he has come to know where the dam's water comes from: work. The thirst work couldn't satisfy flowed into the group, and when work's source dried up, the group's level dropped too. The reading group was not a substitute for work but a reservoir that depended on it. It's also worth noting that he used Freud's word "sublimation" himself: when a desire is blocked from its original object, it moves to an object more readily accepted. This interpretation is Inho's own, and I agree. I only want to add one thing. The Gwangyang group survived in the summer of 2021 even when only two were left. Back then he called the reason "a fated connection." That means the source wasn't only work. Whether the group of three now has such a connection, this post can't tell.

He concluded, "I think changing your environment is very important." In the 2020 chapter I called him someone who trusts environment over willpower. In 2021 he revised that to "fated connection," and in 2024 he found "how to use myself," setting up a game to pull himself in. In the spring of 2025 the thread returns to environment. Only this time it isn't a small environment he can adjust himself, but the big environment of the workplace. Behind this sentence probably stands the resignation he postponed once in December 2024. That is my guess.

Attached to the entry is a long exchange with ChatGPT. He asked when and why Europeans became interested in Buddhist philosophy, and how the narrator of Zorba connects to Buddhism. Then he asked once more: "So why didn't Buddhist philosophy become Europe's dominant philosophy after that?" In 2022, after the tender dispute, he reached the first Noble Truth, that life is suffering; in 2021 he read Siddhartha. A man who came to know first the conclusion that life is suffering asks why that conclusion failed to change a civilization. I see his old question laid over this one. Why doesn't a conclusion you came to know first change your life? The question he asked in 2021 when he said, "If realization is a process, I came to know only the conclusion without knowing the process."

There is a new figure in these posts, and it deserves a word. In 2021 the authorities he leaned on fell one by one, and I noted that each empty place was filled too quickly by the next. In 2025 a different kind of expert sits in his writing: in January he appends ChatGPT's summary of the book to his own review; in March the conversation about Buddhism runs longer than his diary. Giddens would call it the newest expert system. What I notice is how he uses it. He doesn't take its answers as model answers; he keeps pressing, "so why didn't it," the way the middle-school boy argued with Plato on paper. The Socratic partner he couldn't find in the classroom has, strangely, arrived as a machine. It is a good partner for questions. The third party he says he needs to get out of the box is a different thing, and a machine can't be that for him.

3. Four Selves

In early May, on the first day of the Family Month holiday, on the way to Yeongcheon, he finished his review of an essay collection by the entertainer Lee Kyung-kyu that he'd read in April. The book part is short. "Some deep marks surely stayed in my heart, but they vanished without a trace like a beach the next morning." Instead he wrote about his recent self. "For about two weeks I've been living with a faint depression."

And he named that depression. There are several types of "my self": the future self I hope for, the self I want others to see, the self others actually see, and the self I am when alone. "I thought the gaps between those selves had recently grown. So maybe that's why I've felt this depression."

The psychologist E. Tory Higgins set this out as self-discrepancy theory. When the gap between the actual self and the ideal self widens, disappointment and dejection come; when the gap between the actual self and the self one ought to be widens, anxiety comes. Inho arrived at the same place without the theory. His list has one more item than Higgins's: he counts "the self I want others to see" and "the self others see" separately. In the 2023 chapter I spoke of the distance between the Inho of the public self-introduction and the Inho of the diaries. Now he is measuring that distance himself. And he thinks of Zorba. Zorba was a man in whom that gap was narrow. At the same time he doesn't rush to close the gap. "I thought trying to drag the ideal down, or the reverse, is too low-dimensional an interpretation."

Carl Rogers, writing decades before Higgins, would have put the same observation in warmer terms. For Rogers, psychological distress comes from incongruence, a gap between the self a person believes he should be and the self he actually experiences, and health comes not from forcing the two together but from an acceptance that lets them grow toward each other. That is why Inho's refusal to "drag the ideal down, or the reverse" matters. He is not trying to close the gap by decree, the way the young man who set a 2023 deadline would have. He is noticing it, naming what it costs him, and looking at Zorba as a picture of what congruence might look like. Rogers thought that noticing, without condemning, is where change starts.

The next paragraph is about dopamine. After a sudden surplus comes a deficit, and it reportedly takes about four weeks to get back to baseline. "These days I'm realizing I've been living without bearing that deficit well." The thread is old. In 2019 he listed his "drugs": games, mass media, instant food. In 2020 he paid a cancellation fee to cut off the internet and called YouTube and beer "a kind of drug." In 2022's "Shadow Identity" he listed "a compulsion that can't bear situations requiring waiting" as his shadow, and asked all year what to numb himself with. Six years later the same observation returns not in the language of morals but of physiology. Instead of shame, there is a number: four weeks. I think that is a good change. Someone who knows how long he has to endure can endure it.

"Living well is truly an art. It's a multi-factor model. A very, very complicated one." Then comes his sharpest sentence about simplicity: "the uncomfortable truth that the thought of wanting to live simply always comes after realizing complexity." The most effective simplification he found was exercise. "Somehow I've become someone who runs about twenty minutes in Olympic Park four days a week." Before that he lifted a barbell for twenty minutes every lunchtime. In September 2024, correcting the old diary in which he'd judged his spouse in a sentence, he wrote, "I should run together again." Half a year later, running has become the "regular rhythm" of his life. Who he runs with isn't written.

He compared the change to a river. "The trajectory of our lives seems to be greatly affected in the long run by things we started without any particular expectations. It's like how once a stream's flow starts to bend, the meander grows sharper over time." Just as the word "coding," first written in a memo on September 17, 2020, became his profession in 2024, the company lunchtime fitness of January 2023 became the running of 2025. He now knows from experience that a small bend becomes a great meander.

4. That Feeling

On May 15 a short post went up. "Last Sunday evening I got 'that feeling.'"

That feeling is this. The feeling of diving into a problem you thought you could solve easily, holding onto it all day, and failing. If it were math you'd solve it eventually. This is a problem blocked by physical limits. You thought it was a weed and tried to pull it, and it was a tree root driven deep into the ground. The dirt piled up like a berm, and all that digging wore out body and mind. "If the ground had been solid rock, I'd have given up long ago, but the tip of the shovel did go in, which left an opening, and so the exhaustion of burning with passion and draining myself." He thought it would take an hour or two, and before he knew it dusk was falling. He compared it to "a marathoner who lost his pace, overran without knowing, and collapsed partway."

What the problem was, the post doesn't say. It may have been code, or a person, or some knot in his life. I won't fill it in. But I recall the distinction he made in August 2024 reading John Leland. In immersion your view narrows "actively and rhythmically"; under stress, "hysterically and rigidly." The May 2025 post shows the gap between those two. Immersion can knock a person down too. A good narrowing, sustained too long, becomes exhaustion. The choice of a marathoner's metaphor is probably no accident. Someone who runs twenty minutes four days a week knows in his body what pace is. And knowing it in your body and putting the shovel down that evening are different things. "Knowing and realizing," the old question of 2021, comes back here too in a changed shape.

His own metaphor contains the mechanism. "If the ground had been solid rock, I'd have given up long ago, but the tip of the shovel did go in." Behavioral psychologists have long known that the effort hardest to stop is the effort rewarded intermittently: a little progress, then none, then a little more. And the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed that unfinished tasks hold the mind more tightly than finished ones. A wall is easy to walk away from. Ground that gives just enough to suggest the next shovelful will be the last is not. For a man with high standards, the half-yielding problem is the most dangerous kind, because every small give feels like proof that stopping would be a failure of will. That is the pattern of his 2020 sweet-potato vine and of his three days on a single formula. In 2025 he can at least see the vine for what it is.

5. The Baton

On May 25 he wrote at length about the May in which he read So Many Summers. It is less a review than a month's prose. The first paragraph is a lake.

"Sometimes I take a book and go to the lake of my heart. When I finish one story, I fold it into a paper boat and float it on the water." Some days three or four drift on the surface; some days he leaves the lake before finishing a story. When he comes back, the paper boat may still be there, or not. "This lake is a place only I know, so I often forget not only where the vanished stories went but even that there was a story." And these sentences follow: "Sometimes the corners of my eyes become like a lake. Then, before I know it, I'd dive into the lake." Sinking, thrashing, sometimes a story that had settled on the bottom rises. When he pulls himself up to the surface, out of breath, those long-buried stories drift alongside at shoulder height.

In January 2023 he called reflection "scooping only the clear essence from valley water mixed with sand and straw." And he said it was better not to touch places too deep, only to remember the abyss exists and wait for the right time. The lake of May 2025 is the scene after that decision. He still dives in. But he no longer forces the scooping. He waits for sunken stories to rise on the current by themselves. In the 2021 interview he said he writes old memories again "around the time I've digested and interpreted them." Here that remark becomes a landscape.

There's a story about dead ends too. When people take a wrong turn and hit a dead end, they say "I got confused for a second" and turn back. "But if lately I keep running into dead ends like that, that blocked space may be speaking to me. As if, having been there and then disappeared, it left an empty cavity, and the things around it protest the emptiness of that cavity." The empty vertex of 2021 has returned four years later as an empty cavity. Back then he looked into the empty vertex. This time he writes that the empty place speaks to him. He has changed from someone who looks to someone who listens.

Then comes the baton from the opening of this chapter. He wrote that memories weather and dreams scramble cause and effect. And he recalls something he heard in Kim Young-ha's Only One Life: reality, too, must be like a dream. "Whether we'll drink an Americano or an espresso this morning isn't decided either. If such things are chance and have no necessity, a person's life is effectively the same as a dream." So he puts down the baton. And he immediately writes what that is not. "Letting go of control of my life isn't neglecting myself. It's closer to focusing on what I want to focus on more."

The therapy that fits this passage best is not one he mentions. Acceptance and commitment therapy, developed by Steven Hayes, rests on two moves that sound like opposites. The first is acceptance: to stop fighting for control over what cannot be controlled, including one's own thoughts and feelings. The second is commitment: to put one's energy into actions that serve what one values. "Letting go of control of my life isn't neglecting myself. It's closer to focusing on what I want to focus on more" is very nearly that sentence. Putting down the baton is the first move. The line that follows, about watching people for a long time, is the second. He is not giving up on direction. He is choosing what to attend to and releasing the rest.

Then a sentence is attached. I want to name it one of the most important sentences in this essay.

"Things we've watched for a long time without knowing it leave afterimages, and sometimes bind us. What we should watch for a long time is people."

There was a boy who "watched quietly" a sooty-collared girl in an elementary-school classroom. There was a young man who watched the subcontractor's dirty work, the seniors' slacking, the counselor's mask, a colleague's failures. All his life he was someone who observed. And he bound himself to the afterimages of what he observed. At thirty-one he says he will choose what to watch. Not flaws, but people.

The post ends with sleep. Nights when, though tired, it feels like a waste to sleep, so he watches YouTube and goes to bed late, he compared to "filling up on potato chips because your waking hours are precious." Then he imagines sleep as a small death, and waking as being born anew. Passing the baton to the self who will be born in a few hours. "My life ends here. Go find what matters in your life anew." It isn't easy, he admits. We're born anew every day, but "born again on the road walked by the copy of me who lived yesterday." And this is the last sentence:

"When I'm tired, I think I'd like to go into sleep, that death, saying 'Ah, today was a good life too, I could die now with no regrets.' Then every day would be very refreshing."

In 2021 he wrote fiction about "why we must live when there is no reason to live." His character reincarnated, with suicide scheduled. In August 2022, on the stairs down from an empty office he'd locked up, he wrote, "Is there really any reason to live?" In May 2025 death appears in his sentences again, this time as the sleep of every night, the rest a person gladly goes into after living a whole day. "No regrets" does not mean wanting to end life. It means having lived today fully. The same words moved to the opposite place in four years. Nothing in this essay changed so quietly, or so much.

There is an older thread in this passage too, and it runs through his nights. In January 2020, drained by the white room, he wrote "'I wish tomorrow wouldn't come' = 'I want to stay awake as long as possible.'" He held on to the night because the day was not his. Five years later he still sometimes stays up with YouTube, and he knows it. But the image has turned around. Tomorrow is no longer the thing he is holding off; it is a self to whom he can hand the baton. The man who once wished tomorrow wouldn't come now wants to fall asleep so that someone new can wake up.

Epilogue: Paper Boats

In the last chapter he had a skiff, the boat of someone who knows he can leave the island. In the spring of 2025 a second kind of boat appears: paper boats floated on a lake. The skiff is a boat for leaving; the paper boat is a boat for letting go. Stories he's read, weathered memories, problems he couldn't solve, the feelings he held inside the box. He folds them and sets them on the water. If they rise again, he meets them; if they sink, he forgets.

There isn't much you can say about a person from half a year of writing. Still, in these seven posts the tensions the earlier chapters piled up can be seen loosening, little by little. His judgment of a colleague became a checklist, and the marks grew thinner. A failure of will became a retrospective that "notes the facts" instead of a verdict. His depression got a map of four selves, and his inability to endure got a length of four weeks. The baton was set down for a while. And what to watch was decided: people.

This essay began in 2019 at a puddle in a valley. The twenty-five-year-old Inho was scooping fry out of a drying puddle and moving them. That hand began with the chick in the prologue and continued to Ramyeon in 2020. And in 2022 it came back to the memory of an elementary-school classroom where he never reached out. The story of rescuing hands was also the story of a hand that was never rescued. He always pulled others out first. He sent his spouse to Seoul first and handed the group to Sohan first. He himself crossed last, crying alone. In January 2025 he wrote that no one gets out of the box without a third party. The hand that always reached out first had begun, a little, to admit that it also needed to be reached.

There are the wells he dug, too. The reading group in Gwangyang in 2020 held on for two years between COVID and a small city. The metaverse group of 2022 ended like playing with fire. The bootcamp study group of 2023 remained a blueprint. The remote writing group of 2024 quietly read three books, and by the spring of 2025, down to three members, he could name what fed it: a dam filled by the work he couldn't love, running low in a drought. The wells grew smaller and quieter. I don't see that as decline. He came to know more precisely why he digs them. He didn't need a channel selling belonging. He needed a resonance like red paint spreading, and for that, ten people were enough.

There is the vocabulary of motive, too. First brought up in 2020, it was the lens that returned most often in this essay. Inho always chose words the other person could accept. To the company he put his spouse forward; to the landlord, the commute; in the self-introduction, problem-solving ability. It was his most refined social skill. At the same time, it was a filter that kept his real reasons, why he cried alone and why he wanted to leave, from reaching anyone but the person closest to him. In our interviews he lifted that filter little by little. "Actually I wanted to get away from the company." "Because it was easier." "Because I don't think anyone understands me better than I do." I think those sentences are the most valuable record in these pages.

And there is his spouse. Before they moved in together in October 2019, there was her, who had once meant never to marry. The small wedding in Jeju in 2020; the side drawing a line beside the empty vertex in 2021 was her. In 2022 he cheered her on as she went up to Seoul first, afraid, and she waited for him in the studio at Sindaebang Samgeori. In January 2023 she had her first day of work in Seoul, and he wrote, "You worked so hard." In the fall of 2024 he rewrote the self who two years earlier had judged her in one sentence. "I think there are sides of my spouse I haven't seen and a world I don't understand." And he decided to run with her again. In 2021 he described the conclusion he came to know first as "the process of picturing walking hand in hand with my spouse." By 2025 running had become the rhythm of his week. Whether she runs beside him, his writing doesn't say; the resolution to run together was his.

There is the body, too. In 2016, outside the hospital, his stomach ached before he could say what he felt; "the body remembers." In 2022 his depression was treated with medication and his waiting with games and greasy food. In 2023, after quitting, he wrote that it was surprisingly the body he needed, and prescribed himself a walk, a workout, and a conversation a day. In 2024 he counted five kilograms and started running at lunch; in 2025 the running became the one thing that simplified a complicated life. For a man who always thought first and felt second, the body was first an alarm and only later an instrument. Learning to use it that way may be the least literary change in this essay, and one of the most durable.

And there is the painting he left unfinished. Looking back in 2020 on the church he had left, he wrote that his faith had not ended but "remained as an unfinished work." He never went back to the church. But the man who, in 2021, chose drawing closer over waiting for the Second Coming, who reached in 2024 for the words sin and resurrection, and who in 2025 asked a machine why the Buddha never won over Europe, has not stopped painting either. His May sentence, putting down the baton and becoming the audience, reads to me like a secular cousin of surrender: not "thy will be done," but something near it, a willingness not to conduct everything. I don't know whether he would call that faith. I think the painting is still on the easel.

If I had to name the task of these seven years in one developmental term, I would borrow Erikson again. He described the central struggle of the twenties and early thirties as intimacy versus isolation: whether a person can join his identity to someone else's without fearing he will lose it, or whether he protects himself by keeping others at a distance. Almost every thread in this essay is a version of that struggle. The observer who saw and did not step in, the guardian who carried himself, the man who cried alone because it was easier, the exit always kept in view: these lean toward isolation, and they protected him. The café where he mostly listened, the marriage in which he matched his steps, the tables he kept setting, the correction of a sentence about his spouse, the admission that no one gets out of the box alone: these lean toward intimacy, and they changed him. The task is not finished at thirty-one. It rarely is. But the direction of travel across these chapters is clear enough to write down.

That doesn't mean the problems were over. The source was still shaking, and the dam was low. March's sentence, "I think changing your environment is very important," reads less like a resolution than a preview. In November he would build and launch a web app for sharing book reviews "for shy people": the man who dug a well in Gwangyang, now a developer, building the well in code. That lies beyond June, where this essay stops.

Some threads this essay could not close. The tension around gender that he left open in 2021 never returns in his writing, and I can't say where it went. His parents appear at the edges: a father whose body was broken at work, a mother whose listening he described once, a house in Yeongcheon where a dog he couldn't keep now lives. What passed between them and him, the blog hardly says. And the winter of 2023, the months he says he did not get through in a healthy way, remains blank. A life is larger than what it writes down. He told me so himself in 2020: what was resolved, he did not write.

One more thing belongs to the record, and it is about me. Several of my readings in these chapters were wrong, and he said so. The pressing stone lifted by marriage, he didn't recognize; the environment that saved the reading group was, he said, a fated connection; the dog at the front door was not his mirror; the passage about an older woman was not about his spouse. In 2020 he told me that a dominating interpretation cuts the flower to make a bouquet, and a good one gives it water and looks. Where he refused my bouquets, I have tried to leave his answer standing next to my guess. The last three chapters had no one to refuse them, so read those guesses more lightly.

In May's last paragraph he wrote: "Just as moving forward matters, I think having room to look back matters, and sometimes you need room to sit down and rest. Because life is an adventure." He is the man who opened a reading group in Gwangyang in 2020 and spoke of "a new world to adventure in" when he handed it over in 2022. At thirty-one he still calls life an adventure. Only now the adventure includes time to sit down and rest. It includes nights when he says today was a good life too, and goes to sleep.