On survival, attention, and what nothing else had a reason to teach me
In my early twenties I owned a phone that held twelve hundred contacts. At the time that was considered generous — most phones held a thousand, and the extra two hundred were something the manufacturer put on the box. I filled it within about two years, and once it was full, I had to start deciding who got to stay.
The easiest deletions were people from home. If I ran into one of them again, I could always get the rest of the numbers through him — that was the logic, and it held up often enough that I kept using it. Harder were the names that repeated. At one point I needed three different Min-sus, so I started putting the city in front of each one — Daegu Min-su, Busan Min-su — which worked until I left that city, at which point the whole entry usually went, city and all. The numbers I kept longest belonged to people older than me, people still in the business, whose numbers I updated every time they changed, sometimes for years after I’d stopped seeing them, for reasons I couldn’t explain then and can’t fully explain now.
People ask me, when the subject of AI and writing comes up, what I think is actually at stake. For some reason it’s this phone I keep returning to. Not an answer. Just where my mind goes.
I started working nights when I was sixteen — downtown, in places I technically shouldn’t have been allowed into, let alone working in. This wasn’t unusual, where I was, at that time. I think I might be close to the last generation for whom that was true.
The hours inverted everything. I’d be starting as everyone else was finishing, and finishing as the first trains started running. Most of what I remember from those years isn’t any single night — it’s the general shape of them: work, then sitting somewhere afterward with whoever was still around, drinking until the conversation thinned out on its own.
I moved constantly. Mostly based in Seoul, but out to the provinces often enough that “based” might be the wrong word. In the provinces it was usually a dorm — several of us in one room, company housing, the kind of arrangement that comes with its own unspoken seating chart. In Seoul it was monthly rooms in motels, or whoever’s floor was free that month.
One of those provincial dorms, I remember a specific evening. A few of the local guys were eating together — rice, side dishes, the whole thing laid out on the floor between the beds — and I wasn’t part of it. Not invited, not excluded exactly either. Just not included, the way a room can simply not include you without anyone deciding it. I was lying on my side, facing the wall, when a senior from Seoul came in and asked if I’d eaten.
I said my stomach hurt.
I hadn’t done anything wrong. Nobody had done anything to me, not in any way I could have pointed to. But that’s what came out, and it’s stayed with me longer than almost anything else from that period — not because it was the worst thing that happened, but because I still don’t fully understand why I said it. What I understand even less is how fast it came. I didn’t decide to say it. By the time I heard myself say it, it was already there, more practiced than anything true I might have said instead.
There was a senior I liked more than almost anyone else in that world — a rapper, a few years older, with a voice low enough that people who hadn’t met him assumed he was older still. I used to cover his verses, the early ones, before I’d really started DJing myself. He talked sometimes about the years before — when DJs still used records, actual discs, before everything moved to CDs. By the time I was behind a booth myself, it was already CDs. I used to ask him about the record years the way you’d ask about a country you’d just missed the chance to visit.
It didn’t occur to me then that CDs were already, quietly, becoming the same kind of country. Someone younger than me, a few years later, would be asking someone my age about CDs the way I’d asked him about records. I don’t know if he knew that, while he was telling me. I don’t know if I’d recognize it now, about whatever I’m in the middle of.
There was a hyung — older, a former manager at one of the bigger clubs in Seoul, well known in that circle — who I owed a lot to. More than once, when I had nowhere to stay, he covered the cost of a room without making it a thing. I don’t doubt that he cared, in his way, about what happened to me.
He also used me, in ways that took me longer to recognize than I’d like to admit. Both of these are true. For a long time I thought the difficulty was figuring out which one of them was really him. I’m not sure anymore that he’s the part I haven’t figured out.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I started reading psychology books — not for school, not toward any plan. I think I was trying to make the people around me legible. Why the hyung could be generous and exploitative in the same week. Why the same handful of personality types kept turning up in every city, doing roughly the same things, as if the whole industry were being staffed from one small, repeating deck.
I didn’t know, then, that this was the beginning of anything. It felt closer to triage — a way of getting through days that otherwise didn’t add up to much.
The films came later, and more slowly. What I noticed, once I started writing about them seriously, was that it was the same activity — watching closely, trying to work out what was actually happening underneath what people said and did — except now nothing was at stake. Nobody’s mood that night depended on whether I read it correctly. I could rewind. I could sit with a scene for an hour if I wanted to, which had never been an option with an actual room full of actual people whose patience I couldn’t afford to misjudge.
Criticism, for me, turned out to be the same skill with the danger taken out. I think that’s part of why I trust it. I had it before I had any use for it that wasn’t survival.
This is close to what AI hasn’t done yet, and maybe can’t, in the way that matters here. It can probably analyze a scene more thoroughly than I can. What it hasn’t done is lie on the floor of a room that didn’t include it, work out in real time what that meant, and carry the answer for twenty years without resolving it. The attention I bring to a film was paid for somewhere else, a long time before the film.
I don’t know what AI will eventually be able to do. I’m no longer sure that’s the question I should be asking. What I keep running into isn’t a defense of the parts of this that can be described — structure, pacing, the right word in the right place. It’s that I don’t know how to hand over what’s left, and not because I’m withholding it. I don’t have access to it myself. I just know roughly where it came from.
The twelve hundred numbers are gone now. Not backed up anywhere — that phone broke, or was lost, or got left behind in one of the moves, and I genuinely don’t remember which. I couldn’t recite a single one today. Not the hyung’s. Not the rapper’s. Not even my own, from back then — I’ve had four numbers since.
The phone I have now backs up automatically. I’ve never had to decide who stays.
Whatever’s still in me from those years — the Min-sus, the hyung, the stomach that wasn’t really the problem — isn’t in there. It’s just here. I don’t know where else it would go.