A book from March 2013, and a title that might have been otherwise

The notes take up Yoo Si-min’s How Shall We Live, published in March 2013. As he brought the book out, they write, he remarked that if the 2012 presidential election had gone the other way, and Moon Jae-in had been elected, he would have titled it How Shall We Die. Life and death, the writer says, are tightly bound: to think about how to live is already a reflection on how to die, and the two questions are the same and also a little different. The writer likes Yoo — the even, clear, cutting way he talks, and, most of all, a sense of aim. Yoo, they write, regretted a directionless stretch in his twenties, entered politics to change it, then, seeing himself suffer, changed the aim itself. He would live, he said, only by work that made his heart leap, and he came to call himself a scribbler.

Lines from pages 78, 7, and 37

The line that stays with the writer is from page 78: do the work that makes the heart leap, do it with more zeal and more skill than others, and earn a living by it — would that not be a successful life? They also wonder, on one side, whether being able to do such work depends a little on luck. They want to be useful to the world and to the people around them, and to be able to tell themselves, as Yoo does, that they have succeeded, even in a modest way. Change is frightening, and the path to work that excites them is rough.

On page 7, Yoo says that putting the book together was a way to look at whether a life had been run through by an aim and a principle, what that aim had been, what feelings and desires had governed the days, and whether the life had really been a fit. The writer notes that even a man they regard as a scholar, nearly sixty as they put it, was still examining a life, and that it might seem odd for someone who has not lived half as long to speak of the same thing. On page 37, borrowing a phrase of the philosopher John Stuart Mill, Yoo writes that the most important thing in a life is to exercise the right of self-determination: the will, and the right, to live a life one has designed, in a way one believes is right.

A school path, and a life of one’s own

The writer has lived, and still lives, inside a strict Korean school world. An English-language kindergarten, a private elementary school, and a press of review, preview, and work done ahead of the class left little room, they say, to look for what they really wanted. From childhood the years have been filled by one goal, the college entrance exam held in November. They still have not found the work they want. Their parents hope they will become a fine lawyer, spend private-tuition fees that are hard to bear, and give time to ferry them from school to academy and home. Yoo, they write, called happiness the joy of designing a life for oneself, finding a way of living one wants, and arriving at it through trial and error, and said that such a clear aim should be passed to the next generation as well. A life lived in one’s own way, they close, is desirable not because that way is best, but because it is one’s own. The notes leave the subject there. The same Korean report, written out more fully, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Student notes on Yoo Si-min, How Shall We Live (March 2013), and on self-determination.

Last updated 15 November 2026