When I was young, I wanted to become a physicist. The physicists I admired were people like Faraday and George Green. I was moved by the lives of people who, despite difficult circumstances, reached toward nature through their own curiosity and discipline.

But when I actually entered graduate school, I realized that I had not learned English well enough. I could understand books written in Korean, but reading papers in English was too difficult for me. During my two years in graduate school, I could not keep up. I eventually dropped out, carrying a large amount of debt, and began living in Seoul.

After that, I was scammed and began my career as a programmer under bad conditions. I was cheated over rent, and then my first development job started at a Korean dispatch-development company where my experience was inflated and I was registered not as an employee, but as a subcontracted development business owner. Because of that, I could not receive severance pay.

I have paid off all my debts now. Still, what I became was not what I wanted to become: a single man in his mid-thirties, with no house of my own, no rented room of my own, and freelance work that has been cut off since May after the Iran war disrupted the market. I did not want my life to turn out this way. Even so, in my own way, I live with a certain contentment.

In that sense, I am always grateful to programming. Whether the code was written with AI or by my own hands, the computer has never betrayed my expectations.