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Slow Days·back No.32

Flipping Through a One-Year-Old Diary, I Find a Me Who Was 'Just Being Lived'

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This week I tidied up my room and shifted things around a bit.

I sorted through the piled-up notes and thoughts, and re-organized the data scattered across my external drives.


Really, I had to stay holed up at home for two straight days.

But the small comfort was that I found things I had lost.


It must have been around June or July of last year.

Up until the moment I started Design Dive, I had been living an anesthetized “being lived” life — 

something I could only recognize belatedly while looking at the scheduling pages of my old diary.


The densely written schedules, the times when I did anything I could to change my environment — running around, meeting people, learning…

And then at some point, voices of blame began taking up more weight than action, I think.


While reading How to Live as an Existentialist and watching the Doh-ol lectures recently, I’ve been deeply reflecting on my own bad faith,

but I hadn’t been able to find the answer… no, the problem, until now.

While sorting through old diaries I could look back on how my thinking changed, the criteria I used to judge, the responsibility or attitude I had toward those judgments, and how my needs, demands, and desires shifted.




* What I want.

  : Health, skills, foreign languages, a concrete BM, service design, normalstory, money.


* Change the environment: a sense of purpose for life — and where can I make it concrete?


* Recognize the problem: 

Do I know, right now, “what” kind of person I am, what kind of person I should be?

Who am I, where am I going, what does it mean to “go somewhere”?


* Be clear about what you want.

  : Eddie, Unitas Brand, Baedal Minjok, Strawberry Fields, Metro Single, graduate school (Yonsei, KAIST).



As an aside, I’m listening to my own voice of self-reflection.

A meeting, or collaboration, is not a speaking contest. 

It is not a battle with winners and losers.




Others’ gazes, problem-solving ability, risk factors… 

In the end I’m just sorry for the youth that asks why things must be done this way, and for the one that can only do them this way.

This English version was translated by Claude.

친절한 찰쓰씨
Written by
친절한 찰쓰씨

Pleasant Charles — UI/UX researcher at AIT. Keeping notes on design, planning, and slow days here since 2010.

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