Around Thirty
Living through thirty years has taught me many things. I keep learning, and I remain grateful for the excitement that comes from simply feeling alive. Looking back, the biggest lesson is that life is shaped less by comfort than by the way we face problems. From the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep, we are always confronting something: a dream we want to pursue, a project at work, a financial worry, a relationship, or even the small question of what to eat for lunch. Problems change things. More importantly, the perspective and attitude with which we face them reshape not only our own lives but also the lives of the people around us.
The first time I vaguely understood that was when I was seventeen. A long adolescent crush had ended, and through an older student I encountered Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death. What remained with me was not some romantic sadness but a harsher realization: people do not collapse simply because they are hurting. They collapse because they surrender inwardly first. They fail because they despair first. Despair, before anything else, becomes the illness that spreads through both mind and body. That idea stayed with me for a long time.
Later, after college and military service, I reached another turning point when I chose to change my major toward fashion design. At that moment, a short conversation with my mother changed me more than any formal lesson. I complained that if things were going to end up this way anyway, I should have been sent to an arts high school much earlier. She answered with a sentence I still carry: if I had possessed back then the same determination I claimed to have now, nobody could have stopped me. She was right. Dreams are not fulfilled because someone else prepared the way. They are fulfilled only when the will to pursue them becomes unavoidable. That lesson taught me to look at frustration less like fate and more like something I still had responsibility for.
When I look at designers, or at people who spend years regretting what they did not attempt, I often hear the same repertoire of excuses. Their family situation was difficult. They could not enter the school they wanted. They gave up too early. Yet some people become designers anyway, while others carry the regret as a private wound for years. I do not say this to dismiss hardship. I say it because the difference often lies in whether a dream remained ornamental or became something necessary enough to act on. At twenty-four, I still had only a vague ambition: I wanted to create a global brand. The target was vague, and the purpose was vague too. But one thing was clear. I wanted something real, without bluff, decoration, or empty posturing. That was when normalstory, awkward and not especially normal, began to take shape.
At the time, the normalstory I wanted to build was not just a product line but a brand with its own worldview. Before becoming global, though, it first had to become a real brand at all. The reality around me was not generous. I was a student at a regional university from a family that was not comfortably middle-class but closer to the lower-middle tier, living day to day. On top of that, I lacked many of the conditions the Korean fashion industry treated as basic qualifications. I also realized that design alone would never be enough. Survival required knowledge of finance, taxes, income reporting, marketing, manufacturing, distribution, and service. In other words, if I wanted to make something lasting, I would have to become more than just someone who could sketch clothes.
That realization led to my first real round of problem solving. I had changed majors and entered fashion and branding relatively late, but I discovered again that liking something and knowing how to do it are entirely different things. So I decided to widen my field on purpose. I considered double-majoring in trade or marketing, but instead I began taking classes across painting, sculpture, and visual design. In the end I even completed a second major in Western painting. My conclusion was simple: while I was still young, I should invest fully in expanding my possibilities. I also believed my first years in society should not begin at a desk memorizing theories of planning and marketing. Those disciplines had to be tested against reality. Books could wait. I wanted to face the field first and then return to planning and marketing with lived experience rather than abstract certainty. At twenty-four, that became my first ten-year plan.
After graduation, work began, and not long after I found myself dissatisfied again. I admired certain brands and could not understand why so much energy went into safe, ordinary designs aimed only at immediate sales. Proposals about branding or marketing were dismissed as too costly, or as a waste of time and labor if they did not produce immediate revenue. Eventually I reached the point where I thought: then I will do it myself. That impulse led to the idea of building a multi-shop space in Daechi-dong.
The second major round of problem solving began there. How was I supposed to start a business? Where would the money come from? If it involved a cafe, then there was interior work, coffee machines, antique furniture, sourcing, and training. I knew almost nothing about coffee. But at least one thing was clear: I knew exactly what I lacked, and I knew what I needed. So I started from the ground up. I worked part-time in a roastery and learned coffee through labor, taste, atmosphere, and repetition. Later I worked weekdays at Pascucci to learn more systematically, while on weekends I worked without pay at a furniture shop in Hongdae to learn about handmade furniture, materials, cost structures, and pricing. Before or after work I conducted market research. I walked through neighborhoods in Seoul, mapping store locations, local traffic, housing patterns, customer demographics, and the atmosphere of entire districts. I researched interiors, raw wood, installation costs, and logistics. If I did not have capital, then I would replace it with legwork.
Why a cafe? People sometimes ask that as if the answer should be obvious. For me, the cafe was never only about coffee. Through fashion and later through IT, I learned that cafes reveal people more accurately than department stores do. Where do people go when they have free time? Where do they meet friends? Where do they study when they want something less oppressive than a library? Where do they go when they want to be alone, but not isolated? In roastery cafes I also began to understand lifestyle in a different sense. It was not about pretense, luxury, or performance. It was about ordinary daily rituals, repeated quietly. I wanted normalstory to become that kind of everyday artistic space: easy for anyone to enter, light enough not to intimidate, but still capable of helping people notice and care for their own lives.
That desire shaped the space itself. I did not want an ordinary clothing store. I wanted a place where conversation, making, learning, and exchange could coexist. There was no flashy signboard and no expensive promotion. Instead, I left short texts outside the cafe for people to pick up, ran small online communities, talked with customers, argued about politics and real estate, listened to students talk about entrance exams, and shared stories with professors, office workers, and strangers. The point was not polish. The point was to create a space where everyday life could be expressed without embarrassment. Together with people around me, we organized parties, took photographs, shared information, ran tiny study groups, planned a web magazine, sold indie music, experimented with self-publishing, and even held small weekend flea markets. Not every project ended cleanly or successfully. But some people changed through them. A woman who had been battling depression began selling accessories under her own brand. A high-school student made her own hip-hop album. An indie creator started freelance work. Others restarted relationships or found the courage to begin again. Experiences like that made me think that maybe this too was what a brand could be.
Over time, though, another hunger kept returning: the need for collective intelligence. This phrase can sound sweet or exaggerated, but I came to understand its necessity very sincerely. To run a business, money is not the first priority. Of course money matters, but not in the simplistic sense people often imagine. Many people around me said they would work ten or fifteen years at a high-paying company, save enough, and then start a business. I never really believed that was the core issue. Youth can also be wasted while merely accumulating funds. What mattered more was whether I belonged to a group that genuinely shared a direction, divided up everyday effort together, and thought through the same problems side by side. As I went through different projects, I felt more and more clearly that I was still only a frog in a well: not a visionary entrepreneur, but simply a young cafe owner who needed to grow far beyond his current limits.
Eventually I closed that chapter for a while and moved to a small research institute in Daejeon. It felt fast, ahead of its time, and close to the direction I had already been thinking about. I had long believed that once the environment for smartphones and mobile services matured, the market would expand tremendously. In 2010 I joined the institute as a 3D designer and UI designer. Since 2008 the team had been pursuing a government project related to mobile commerce, location-based services, 3D UI, barcode interaction, and on-site payment. The structure was incomplete, but I felt the future in it. For a brief moment it felt as though I had finally arrived somewhere aligned with my thinking.
That hope did not last untouched. Within a month I became aware of internal conflict. The company was divided not only over the practical question of whether the mobile market was truly viable, but also over whether the services under discussion were realistic to implement. Tensions formed between leadership and staff. Three months later, both the deputy director who had recruited me and the institute head who had led the project left the company. Once again I faced a familiar question: should I leave too?
I decided not to. It felt cowardly to say that something could not be done only because of someone else, or because the right person had gone. The people who left cursed the company on their way out, but the person who had still been carrying salaries and keeping things alive was the CEO. So instead of resigning, I began doing what I could from where I was. I studied the mobile market more directly, attended seminars, wrote business plans, built samples, researched QR codes, published design-related material, gave small lectures, promoted the company, handed out business cards at related meetings, created brochures, opened a blog, and kept persuading the remaining staff and the CEO. Gradually we were able to secure related business, and interest in mobile services inside the company slowly began to grow. I wanted even the office culture itself to become a kind of design project. That too, I thought, was part of what UX should mean: not only the look of the product, but the process through which it is conceived, made, sold, experienced, and shaped by the values of the people who create it.
Looking back on these years, I realize that I once wanted to be the visible right hand, the person whose name stood clearly on the project. Over time I became more drawn to the role of the left hand instead: the hand that stabilizes direction before the strike, the one that supports balance, the one that makes a team work without always being seen. In real life, that kind of role can look clumsy. People ask what exactly you do, what your major really is, why you seem to stand in the middle of everything without belonging entirely to one category. Those questions are fair. But I believe this too is one of the many problems I still have to solve. What matters is not only what I do, but how I do it. If the situation is not truly extreme, then environment alone is not an absolute wall. What often looks like a poor environment is sometimes a poor attitude toward the problem itself. Around thirty, that is the conviction I have managed to earn.
