1 Why I Write Anonymously—Maybe to Be Myself

Since my last column, a few colleagues figured out who I was and reached out. I felt both embarrassed and grateful. Even though I’m writing about work, I chose to remain anonymous for two reasons. First, I wanted to be honest. I started writing to document the reality of corporate life as it truly is—something that now takes up so much of my existence. If my identity were revealed, I felt I wouldn’t be able to share the messier, more private emotions inside me. Second, I needed an ‘escape route.’ Despite my good intentions to set aside enough time, I’d always end up rushing to meet deadlines and submitting pieces with barely any revision. (I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my editing buddy GPT and the communications team.) I needed an escape hatch—somewhere to hide after submitting my clumsy writing.

But even with anonymity as my safety net, I haven’t written with complete honesty. The truth is, the raw reality of the work I face every day isn’t that neat, and I’m sometimes pathetic in it. Just the day before yesterday, I was at a morning production meeting practically begging for mercy like a criminal, and that same afternoon, I was sitting at my monitor writing about ‘the value of work’ and ‘beauty.’ The disconnect felt jarring. I wondered if I was just cherry-picking presentable moments and squeezing them dry for content. I don’t think I was being true to myself.

2 A Society Where Being Yourself Is Hard

But what does ‘being yourself’ even mean? We live in a world where most brands urge us to ‘be yourself.’ Working in branding myself, I’ve even grown weary of the phrase. To think about it simply, if the opposite of being yourself is ‘being like everyone else,’ then ‘being yourself’ must mean possessing a uniqueness that sets you apart from others.

The problem is that we—especially those of us who grew up within the tight mesh of Korean society—are painfully inept at discovering this uniqueness. Most of us spent our youth struggling not to deviate from a set path, preoccupied with achieving standardized milestones like university, employment, or marriage. Naturally, time to explore the inner territory of ‘me’ was always pushed to the bottom of our priorities.

I think our society’s recent obsession with things like MBTI, fortune-telling, and astrology isn’t unrelated to this. It’s a manifestation of our desire to easily comprehend the complex, ambiguous entity that is ‘me’ through others or through statistics. Because we lack the strength to define ourselves, we fit ourselves into external frameworks to find reassurance.

Maintaining your authentic self in Korean society is almost a form of battle. Holding onto your own tastes and values doesn’t always earn you applause. You can see this clearly in reality shows. Contestants who act most authentically, without worrying about social judgment, often become delicious ‘fodder for gossip.’

“Don’t stand out too much, but don’t be so ordinary that you lose your uniqueness.” Under the pressure to remain somewhere within that ambiguous boundary, being yourself gets warped into yet another ‘social credential.’ We live in a paradoxical era where we strive to be different from others while simultaneously fearing we might become too different.

3 Being Yourself at Work

In a world where being yourself is already difficult, navigating corporate life adds yet another barrier. People often say that working at a company wears you down. There’s certainly truth to that—as you follow collective goals within an organization, your individuality can start to feel increasingly blurred.

But paradoxically, it’s also at work—where you’re constantly with others—that your authentic way of doing things can become clearer. There’s a saying that your college major doesn’t stay with you as knowledge, but rather as a lens through which you see life. I think work is similar. I’m currently on the BM team, but I spent more time on the MC team before that, and before that, I was on the e-commerce team. As time passes, what stays with you isn’t so much the technical skills you learned in each role, but the values each organization held important. Perhaps because I started my career in sales, on a team focused on results, I find myself asking first, “But will this actually sell?” My time on the MC team also made me realize how important it is to clearly envision, from the very start, how a product will ultimately be presented to customers. These ingrained perspectives accumulate to form your unique priorities in daily decision-making, and your authentic approach becomes clearer.

What situations stress me out most? Which aspects of work do I dig into insistently? Do I respond first to aesthetics, or do I find reassurance in numbers and logic? Even work that looks similar on the surface reveals different approaches when you look closely. Take product planning, for instance—some people love the process of blending ingredients and selecting fragrances most, but what draws me in is polishing the final words we’ll share with customers and building the logic of the product detail page. The workplace, where we spend two-thirds of each day, becomes a kind of laboratory where we constantly test and accumulate knowledge about what we love and what we can’t tolerate.

4 Even If I Don’t Know Who I Am, At Least I Know Who I’m Not

Psychologist Carl Jung said, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

Mulling over this, I’ve come to think that ‘being yourself’ might not be a fixed entity buried somewhere waiting to be discovered like treasure. Instead, it’s closer to a ‘direction’ created by the accumulation of daily choices. The reason I still can’t articulate a clear answer about what it means to be myself is probably that I’m continuously changing, even at this very moment.

In my twenties, I only listened to music with explosive energy like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But now in my thirties, I’m more drawn to songs like Chanhyuk Lee’s ‘Panorama’ that gently reflect on life. Tastes change, and today’s correct answer becomes tomorrow’s wrong one. So when we say you’re most beautiful when you’re being yourself, I believe that means persistently observing your changing self and recording those fleeting moments. It means preserving with affection even today’s thoughts that will feel unfamiliar tomorrow, even current tastes you might soon grow tired of.

With that in mind, as I reach the final installment of this column, I’d like to offer you one suggestion. At the workplace where you spend two-thirds of each day, please make sure to record your time there this year. Not just work outcomes or reports, but records about yourself. The private pride in your work that only you know about, the real reasons something was particularly tough for you at the time, the logic that was sometimes both desperate and fierce, all the question marks that wouldn’t leave your mind—write it all down without holding back. Please don’t turn away from these traces of your countless concerns, but make sure to preserve them somewhere. Those records will become precious markers that reveal your direction.