Five Corny Reflections on Happiness

If you've read my blog or know me personally, you know I think about a pretty wide range of topics. That isn't just intellectual vanity, though. I have a clear goal.

I'm always seriously thinking about and exploring what the secret to a better life might be. I try to borrow those secrets from the past (history) or from other settings (other countries and cultures), apply them to the present, and keep upgrading little by little.

In other words, I suspect that other times and places might hold good moves I'd never come up with in my own life, so I keep checking through all kinds of content and experiences.

Anyway, I think about this kind of thing a lot, and for the first time in a while, I'd like to share a few thoughts I've been sitting on for a long time.

1. What Korea really lacks is organization

In a country like Korea, which puts so much weight on unity, you probably don't often hear that we lack the ability to organize ourselves as a group. If anything, people would say we have too much of it. But if you look at it from a different angle, it may start to make some sense.

I spent my school years in the US and came back to Korea after a long time away when I got my first job. You know how people say Americans don't know anything about countries other than America? That's very true. As a Korean, I was always interested in Korea, but honestly, I almost thought no other countries existed besides the US and Korea.

It was only after coming to Korea that I gained a kind of third eye and got interested in places like Southeast Asia and Europe. Along the way I had the naive realization that there are countries with values and daily habits quite different from America's or Korea's.

Anyway, living in Korea has actually made me study and learn more about what America is. (In the same way, people who have only lived in Korea may not know much about what makes Korea distinctive, and Koreans living abroad may end up studying Korea more by comparing it with where they live.)

If I compare the two, America seems like a country that runs on systems and organization, and Korea seems like a country that pushes individual ability to the limit. This may sound completely out of nowhere to some people. If you think about each culture, you might picture America as the ultimate in individualism, a country driven by a small number of geniuses at places like NASA and Silicon Valley, and Korea as a country that gathers people through big conglomerates and a rote-learning education system and runs itself as a community. But let me give you a few examples.

In the US, I went to middle school for 8th grade and then on to high school and college. In 8th grade I lived in a dorm. Every day we got up at 6:30 to raise the flag and clean the school in the morning, and in the evening every student had to take part in lowering the flag, folding it, and putting it away. We were told that under American law, if the flag touched the ground it had to be burned, so they told us very seriously to handle it with care and never drop it. There were even rules for exactly how to fold it, and I remember having a hard time learning them. (If you folded it sloppily, a teacher would check and make you fold it again.)

Every morning the whole student body also gathered outside to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, a bit like the flag salute ceremony in Korea. Thinking back now, it's a little ironic that the international students were pledging to the American flag too. But as we all know, America instills patriotism very strongly, in daily habits as well as in its movies.

When I was in school, I also heard teachers say a lot, almost in passing, that we should study hard, become very successful, give generously to the school, and above all serve our country. As you know, in America every student is told "You're special," and teachers try hard to find and grow each kid's talent. But I think we deeply absorbed the idea that the end goal was for all of us to succeed for the sake of our community (our school, workplace, or industry) and, in the bigger picture, for America's prosperity.

So I suspect the more prestigious the school, the more pressure there is to be patriotic, even without people realizing it. That may be part of why well-known American business leaders say things like "We have to work and research harder for America's prosperity and growth." I naturally thought that I should succeed and devote myself to this country (America), and I assumed every American thought that way. (For context, I'm a dual citizen, so when I was in the US I thought of myself as American. Of course, when I needed an excuse, I said I was Korean.)

After I came to Korea, though, I was talking with someone very close to me. They'd graduated from the most prestigious university in Korea, but they said they'd never particularly felt they should use their abilities for the country. Without thinking, I said that the reason they got to go to a good school was that the country invests a lot of infrastructure and money into raising each talented person, so shouldn't they naturally give back to the country? They said they'd never studied with that mindset and had never even thought about it. I remember being honestly shocked. This wasn't just any student. They went to a top school, and they still didn't feel any special patriotism.

Later I realized this is a very American way of thinking. Then, as I thought about what the American system really is, I came to see that it quietly draws out as much individual ability as possible while building a structure, from childhood on through education and culture, in which everyone naturally contributes to the country.

For example, American universities cost more than 10 times what they cost in other countries. Private colleges probably average around 60 to 70 million won a year (some are even more expensive), and private middle and high schools cost about the same. But that doesn't mean only rich kids can go. There's a process that lets a surprising number of students get scholarships, and this whole giving ecosystem works pretty well.

It goes beyond schools, too. Walk through a neighborhood and you'll find park benches funded by donations with the donor's name engraved on them. Quietly, a lot of capital gets spread around in a virtuous cycle and ends up going toward making the American system more advanced. (If a park had to run entirely on government funds, there'd be a limit to its quality. But if ordinary people can donate and help build a single bench, the park gets better and private citizens get to make their mark too.)

People say Korea has a strong community mindset, but I actually think ours is much weaker than Americans'. So I think Korea got this far by pushing individuals to the limit and grinding themselves down through hard work. For the next leap, I think we need to spread this kind of organizational strength all the way through our society, culture, and education, more than we need individuals to burn themselves out even harder.

Because of the country just north of us, patriotism can look like it's been twisted into something ugly. Even so, I think it's good for everyone when we join forces for all of us and when everyone cares about and works together for the country's prosperity. If people call that totalitarianism or whatever, I think it's because the images of China and North Korea make us see it so negatively. I see it as organization. In the end, that's how we create a system where every one of us can be happier and live better.

The detailed methods are for scholars, policymakers, and business leaders to work out. But my conclusion is this: if people with Korean citizenship adopted that more American way of thinking, where you put your energy toward Korea's development and come up with ways to improve it, and the richer and smarter you are, the more you do it, I believe our country could make the next leap.

2. Realizing the "privilege" of being born where I was

This probably isn't something most people would ever think about either. I don't mean forcing a comparison with North Korea and telling yourself, "Lucky I was born in South Korea and not the North." I mean that hardly anyone sincerely asks what it means to have been born in Korea, or thinks deeply about what life would have been like if they'd been born and raised somewhere else.

When I studied in the US and when I came back to Korea and started working, the lifestyles I thought about most were probably those of Korea, the US, and maybe other developed countries. Or whatever country I happened to be traveling to.

Then, by chance, I traveled around the world for 10 months and felt how many different cultures there really are. We're all people with the same desire to make a living, succeed, and be happy, but I learned how huge the differences can be in the infrastructure, education, and culture you're born into.

It isn't simply a matter of which places are more or less developed. I learned that different values form naturally in those different environments. If we don't pay attention, we have no way of knowing that and no reason to even think about it.

I also recently went to a big conference in the US and became fairly close with someone from India I met there. Something they said stuck with me. They said, "The Americans here don't know how privileged they are." At first I thought they were just poking fun at Americans' complaining, but the more I chewed on it, the more I realized they meant it.

For one thing, Indians need a visa to come to the US, and my friend said it took them several tries just to get a tourist visa. And as we often see on YouTube, living conditions for ordinary people in India can be really rough.

Of course, working-class people in America can have it hard too, but compared to developing countries, the infrastructure is probably much better. The same goes for Korea.

I'd never once thought about how people in developing countries live, or how they think and hold on to hope. After hearing what they said, I thought about it a lot.

Working in Korea is hard in a lot of ways, and whenever I've felt anxious about the future, I've thought, "There must be people living a much harder reality, on a whole different level." I don't mean that I pity them. It was a moment that widened my view, and I saw that the world holds far more kinds of environments and ways of living than I'd imagined.

We met at that conference, got close, and talked, but in the end we each went back to our own countries, and we're each fighting our own fight in our own setting. Meetings like that didn't make me more competitive or eager to climb higher than other people. Like I said earlier, they made me want even more to experience different perspectives and different parts of the world so I can get to know myself better. In the end, experiences like this have helped me a lot in growing and becoming happier as I go through life.

3. Startup life and big-company life

I couldn't come up with a good subtitle for this one, so I'm going with this for now. What I want to talk about is the difference between a startup life, which is wilder and leaves you thrown out into the world, and a big-company life, which comes with a more established structure and ecosystem. (Put simply, "startup" and "big company" are just metaphors here.)

Up through college and the early part of my career, I lived a big-company kind of life and thought that was the only option. That's because I'd lived my whole life without straying very far off track.

But then I figured out that I didn't actually long for that life. I don't think it's something in my DNA. In high school I listened to a lot of rock and hip-hop, and I especially loved Seo Taiji (the musician who reshaped Korean pop in the 1990s) and Tablo (the rapper from the group Epik High). I admired their life stories as much as their music. Both of them seemed like model students and rebels at the same time, in both their mindset and how they acted, so I think I naturally wanted to imitate them and learn from them.

So when I think about it, of all the people I went to school with, I may be the one living most like a rebel while wearing the mask of a model student. For example, I got married and had a kid the earliest of anyone and built a stable family, while at the same time taking risks at a startup. Sometimes I make music or write blog posts as a hobby, which to some people might look like a pointless detour.

In the end, I'm very happy with this life, and I think things are going very much to plan. Of course, there have been plenty of times along the way when I had regrets or had a hard time. To give a very small example, there are times when I really have to hit the pavement and do physical work, and there have been times when I put so many hours into work that I felt my health slipping. That makes me a little sad, but on the other hand it feels like a badge of honor.

Maybe my friends living the big-company life are physically healthier than me or enjoy better work-life balance. The ones who wanted that kind of life are doing just fine, of course. But if someone with values like mine were living that life, I think every day would feel miserable, like living in hell.

Most people, though, don't usually get a choice. Whether it's the startup life or the big-company life, you don't pick it. Life just flows that way. I wrote all about my own process on my blog. Because I wanted to live without regrets and be happy starting as young as possible, like I am now, I thought about it very seriously, made careful choices as a result, and designed my life up to this point.

I still have a long way to go, but all I want is to keep designing a life that fits me and to live it out without giving up for a single moment. I believe that courage will end up making me and the people around me happy.

4. Be someone people like to be around

When you apply to an American consulting firm, there's a joke that you have to pass something called the "Airport Test." It isn't a real test. Consultants travel so much that if a manager is on a business trip with a team member and the flight gets delayed, the question is whether they could spend four hours shooting the breeze at the airport with that person without it getting awkward.

There's actually a lot packed into that. When I was younger, I heard that the higher up you go, the more sales and networking matter. Even so, I believed that people with real ability got more recognition. Only now do I understand what it meant.

The idea of "someone you like being around" is so abstract that I didn't really get it. You don't want to be around someone just because they're nice, and you don't want to be around them just because they're capable. It's hard to put into words, but we all have one or two coworkers we want to be with, people we can spend a long time with without any awkwardness or discomfort, people we just click with. And people like that probably get good reviews from all of us, me included.

Some of it is just being born with a good personality, of course, but there's one secret I've been noticing lately. I think it comes down to having some room to breathe inside. Hear me out, because this isn't some stale platitude.

First of all, it's hard for any of us to have that kind of inner slack. Even when we have it, we try to fill it up. The problem is that this wears you out, and it also leaves no room for the person next to you to squeeze in. I'm really lacking here myself, but I've noticed that at times when I have a bit more breathing room, my ability to notice and look after the people around me goes up.

I realized that once you have that room, you stop being trapped in the old thought that "I'm not enough," and you can use that space to make room for the people around you. I think that may be what leads others to see you as "someone who's comfortable and good to be around."

Honestly, I don't know exactly how to do it. Everyone will have their own way, but I think that's the big picture, and I'll keep working at it and looking for ways myself.

5. Maybe Korea doesn't want to be a happy country

This may clash a bit with what I said above. Koreans coined the self-mocking term "Hell Joseon" (Hell Korea, using the name of Korea's last dynasty), and over lunch we tear ourselves down for having low happiness scores and a low birth rate. There's a ton of content like that, too.

And there are plenty of people like me who spend day after day studying "what happiness is" and "how to achieve it," and sharing their thoughts. But I believe this reality will never change, and if I may be so bold, I wonder whether we truly want to be happy.

If our country were really suffering that much conflict and unhappiness because of all this, I think people would have done something as a natural human reaction: emigrated, withdrawn from society, rebelled, anything. To put it bluntly, they'd have started something like the French Revolution, overthrown the government, and created a new system. If this were a way of life people truly couldn't stand, I think we'd have seen that kind of thing on a large scale, hard as it would be.

Instead, we turn the way we live into dramas, documentaries, and social media content, and use it as material. If it were truly that stressful for me, I think watching that content would give me PTSD. But people relate to it, love it, and consume it. You could see that as a form of comfort, but I'd venture that it's because we haven't yet passed the boiling point.

Also, in Korea, when someone asks "How have you been?" as a greeting, people never say anything good. It's polite to answer something like, "Eh, not bad." If I answered the American way, "Yes, I'm doing great," I guarantee the other person would think I wasn't living life properly or was missing something, and I'd probably grumble a little just so I wouldn't come across that way.

You could call it Eastern modesty, but either way, we're always chasing a life that's more tightly bound, with no slack, packed full and busy, even though we know it makes us less happy. At the same time, we long for a happy, storybook life like the one in the Nordic countries.

So my conclusion is that Koreans may not want a happy life. This may be controversial, but I think that for us, happiness wouldn't feel like a destination. It would actually stress us out more. For Koreans, living a slightly unhappy life may feel more comfortable and familiar. (Not everyone, of course. Some people really do want happiness and emigrate or try a life that's different from the usual path.)

The definition of happiness can differ from person to person. Maybe my definition and yours are different. Maybe for me, too, the happiness is in continuing to explore and study happiness the way I do now, and if I actually reached a truly happy state, I'd get anxious, feel like I was missing something, and end up unhappy.

This really feels like a paradox. But since I keep writing on my blog about happiness, I can feel how uniquely Korean this is. Korean dramas and webtoons are full of content about very everyday but complex and varied emotions. When it goes well, it grows into Korean Wave content and makes money, too.

When I think about why Korea became such a content powerhouse, I think it's because Koreans live this paradoxical life. Some people are fully unhappy and some are fully happy. We live somewhere in the middle, neither one nor the other, and long for the opposite side.

Sometimes that drains the life out of us, but looked at positively, it's what makes us more unique, and from a business point of view, it's also what makes us more "sellable." It's sad, and it also seems to be our fate.

Those are the five insights that come to mind right now after a lot of thinking lately. I'll be back with more next time.

Originally written in Korean on Brunch, October 19, 2025.