I recently watched a YouTube video called “희열의 순간.” It featured Yoo Si-min, and there were a few things in it that stayed with me. The line that struck me most was this: “What matters is not the labels other people put on me, but the meaning I give to my own life.” It sounds obvious, but it’s the kind of truth we forget all the time. It’s so easy to compare ourselves with other people, to rank ourselves by salary, and to act as though our employer’s prestige were the same thing as our own worth. That foolish attitude is contagious too.
That’s why I think time for reflection matters. If you do not live the way you think, you eventually begin to think according to the way you live. And if I do not think deeply enough, I end up measuring myself by the foolish standards of other people’s values. I reflect that I haven’t spent enough time doing that, and I reflect again on how much I’ve neglected reading good books that might help me do it better.
Subconsciously, I thought that I had already become something and that it was difficult to acquire a new way of life. But when I think about it, I can start living a new life at any time, even at the moment of writing this article. The only thing standing in my way is the inertia of the life I lived until yesterday.