[Current & Culture]Aligning My Work, Life, and Education

If Work and Life Can't Be Separated,
Merge Them as Much as Possible
To Align Parenting with Work and Life,
Show Children What a Happy Parent Looks Like

I started writing back in middle school, but I began writing as a means of making a living just after I turned thirty. For a while, I lived with the anxiety of how to sustain a family through this work. After a few years, I came to the conclusion that to continue living by writing, I needed to align work and life. This was around the time when the term "work-life balance" was all the rage. I wanted that too, but writing is usually intertwined with life. My life becomes my work, and my work becomes my life again. In the end, if they cannot be separated, I decided to try to merge them as much as possible. Because everyone lives differently.

Currently, I am engaged in five different jobs: writing books, producing books, selling books, giving lectures, and working as a designated driver. To summarize, I am a writer, a publishing company CEO, a bookstore operator, a lecturer, and a designated driver. Sometimes I wonder if I can do all these or do them properly, but now these five jobs are interconnected. First, the foundation of all my life is writing. After completing a book, I receive various collaboration requests. For example, institutions, bookstores, and reading clubs often request lectures. If I do well, such requests increase. Writing and speaking are connected this way. When I travel to lecture venues, I use a designated driver application (app). In the morning call list, calls heading to the area where I have to lecture often appear with high probability. These are mostly long-distance calls for transporting used cars to other regions. While giving about 40 lectures a month, I drive about 10 times, mainly on long-distance calls. Instead of spending on transportation, I earn about 1 million won a month. Meanwhile, I read someone’s writing. Among the submissions to the publishing company, some are edited for commercial publication, others for independent publishing. The books published this way are displayed and sold at the bookstore I operate. Recently, institutions where I lecture have requested book deliveries from the bookstore I run. Ultimately, all these five jobs are linked.

My current concern is not about work and life but about education. The words we commonly call parenting, childcare, and discipline. These are actually hard to align with anything else. I am raising two children, aged 10 and 7. Honestly, I am not very interested in what kind of work they will do in life. They will find their own path. But I am curious about the attitude with which they will live. The education I can provide is not about mastering subjects but about shaping an attitude for lifelong living. These days, in addition to work and life, I want to align education with them. To make children happy, separating work, life, and education inevitably leads to parental sacrifice. But if parents show a happy attitude, won’t children naturally follow? The attitude parents have, the world they create. Honestly, I still don’t know exactly how to do this. But I have built a small part of a world where I can live happily, and now I am thinking about what comes next.

Kim Minseop, Social and Cultural Critic

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.