It was a morning after spring rain. Rain that had fallen through the night washed away the city's dust and left a thin film of water on the streets before departing. When I opened the window, damp yet refreshing air pushed into the room. The smell of wet asphalt, the smell of earth exhaling, and the smell of grass just beginning to bloom somewhere were mixed together.
I rested one hand on the windowsill and stood for a moment. Air that was neither cold nor warm. Exactly in between. As if the season were postponing a decision.
"Still... it's hard to say it's clearly spring."
It was a murmur that sounded like talking to myself, but in fact it was also a sentence describing my own state.
Morning flowed busily as always. Choosing a shirt, tying a tie, putting on a coat, placing a watch on my wrist — those repetitive motions. My body moved familiarly, but my heart kept stopping.
"Why am I thinking so much lately..."
The me in the mirror was no different from usual. A neat white dress shirt, organized hair, eyes carrying appropriate tension. Yet somehow it looked subtly different.
Perhaps because it's not the outside but the inside that's changing.
The subway platform was still full of people. Hurrying toward their own destinations, lost in their own thoughts looking at smartphone screens.
As the train arrived, the wind came first. I stepped forward one foot into that wind.
The doors opened, and I mixed in among the people. The inside of the subway was as always filled with quiet noise. Small movements of people wearing earphones, the sound of fingers swiping screens, someone's cough, and distant announcements. All of it combined to become a single background sound.
I held the handle and stood, watching the darkness of tunnels passing outside the window.
And suddenly, a thought struck me.
"Where are we... right now?"
That was not simply a question about physical location. It was not a matter of which company one belongs to, which industry one is in, but a question about what state we are in right now.
'Are we moving, or are we stopped?'
'Are we alive, or are we gradually solidifying within familiarity?'
These days I travel to various companies doing AX transformation-related corporate consulting. Moving between meeting rooms, asking similar questions, repeatedly hearing concerns that are different yet similar.
"We know AI is important, but..."
"We know we should do it too, but..."
"The risk of changing right now..."
The words differ slightly, but the texture within them is surprisingly similar.
The premise that 'we're still okay for now.' And clinging to that premise, change is always pushed to the next quarter.
Not long ago, one day I came out through Exit 4 of Jongno 3-ga Station. That place used to be quite a symbolic space. Filled with people at lunchtime, laughter and noise mixed in front of bars at quitting time. The lights were always bright, signs competed to shine even more brilliantly, and the streets overflowed with the energy of 'here is alive right now.'
But the recent scenery was far too different from then. People were still there, but somehow it felt sparse. Empty spots caught my eye. And those empty spots looked larger than expected.
A building caught my eye. Once clearly a café, and next to it a restaurant, and on the upper floor offices had been installed.
But now all the signs had been taken down, inside the glass windows was empty, and what remained in that space was just one thing.
"For Lease"
White background with black letters. Large, direct, and somehow feeling cold. It was not just that building. Turning my head slightly, similar scenery repeated.
Another 'For Lease,' another empty space, another disappeared trace.
It was as if someone had quietly removed only the time from this street. I stopped walking for a moment. And quietly looked at that scenery.
Old scenes overlapped in my head one by one. In 1999, as a college student I walked these streets without a care. Time when the world was sufficiently wide and full of possibility for the single reason of being young. In 2002, after being discharged from the military, I passed this path countless times commuting to YBM academy. A time when impatience at needing to start something again and vague hope that it was still not too late were mixed. From 2006 to 2008, studying for exams, I frequented coffee shops around here for study groups. Faces gathered toward the same goal, each harboring their own anxiety and hope, and within that I too was constantly wavering. And from 2008 to mid-2010, as a fresh professional, I moved through these streets more busily. Learning work, meeting people, striving to understand the world. These streets of that time were always bright, noisy, alive. All those times, like layered film, overlapped before my eyes.
The afterimage of streets that once shone so brilliantly, and the empty void unfolding before my eyes now existed simultaneously in a misaligned state.
And I was standing somewhere between them. And at that moment, the question that had struck me earlier came back.
"Where are we... right now?"
This was not simply a matter of economic recession. It was not just the story of consumption decreasing, sales falling, and shops closing. Deeper than that, something is already changing but we haven't noticed. No — perhaps we noticed but chose not to see.
In a rice jar, when there's rice, it's warm and comfortable. Comfortable enough to forget that eventually the rice will run out.
And the moment the rice runs out, the jar that was once safe and warm becomes a trap. What seemed to be a space of survival has become a space of death. The mouse in the rice jar believed it was affluent, but was actually existing dependent on an external system.
Many companies and organizations right now are in similar situations. They know AI is important. They know they should change. But they don't move. Because right now it's still comfortable. Because there's still rice.
But rice doesn't last forever. And the jar is already sealed.
Perhaps life — and organizations' lives — is not about avoiding the rice jar, but practicing breaking the jar oneself. Before the rice runs out, before the jar becomes a trap, breaking it ourselves. That is the only way to truly survive.
