(The E-duba B clay tablet, written in Sumerian during the Old Babylonian period around 1700 BCE. It reads: "Young people nowadays have no manners.")
Freelancer.
"Freelancer" sounds nice, but in practice it means non-regular employment, no proper job, unstable income, and being a burden on society. Forget marriage — even dating or dreaming feels out of reach.
And in Korean society, I am fundamentally outside the mainstream. That's just the baseline. I've generally drifted off the standard path.
The upside is that I have access to information asymmetry, and the range of work I can take on is relatively broad. When I need money, I do manual labor too, and until not long ago I was earning as much through programming as someone at a large corporation. Though I lost it all to a scam.
My field is the one that has lost jobs most heavily to AI. Either way, that means I mostly pick up news from my industry by talking with friends who are working full-time.
I occasionally treat them to a meal, and they in turn share code talk or lend a hand with small things for me.
This time, a friend was working on a company project using AI and asked for my help, so I stopped by partly to get a free eel rice bowl. While I was there, my friend who works at the company said something.
"The new hires these days really have no manners."
The first thought that crossed my mind when I heard that was: oh, I'm apparently at the age that's supposed to form the working backbone of society. A feeling that I've gotten older. And a sudden, vivid sense that my friend has gotten older too.
Then the complaints started flowing. "They don't try to learn anything. AI has ruined them," and so on. To top it all off, out came "Back in our day, we weren't like this."
I let out a hollow laugh. The truth is, when this friend was a new hire, he had plenty of complaints himself and used to call his boss an outdated authority figure. Which made it all the more striking.
I personally get told quite often that I have no manners. That I don't know how to behave. I used to show up to company meetings in sweatpants and just explain the technical stuff. Granted, I don't do that anymore, but about four or five years ago I did. I used to say a lot that I just needed to wear whatever was comfortable and do my work well, and I didn't follow the social etiquette that Korean society expects from a man in his thirties.
Part of the reason was the experience of learning that if you let yourself be underestimated, you're done for. Part of it was simply that I disliked that world.
If my memory serves, there was probably also the influence of the media stereotype that programmers look more skilled when they dress casually. I just thought of this while writing — I remember that suits were expensive, and back then I had gained a lot of weight so nothing fit properly anyway. It was a period when I had no money. There was definitely an element of leaning on the stereotype about what a "real" programmer looks like.
During the stretches when programming work dried up, I did manual labor alongside my programming. I had debts to pay off. In those days, if you played down your abilities, you were almost guaranteed to get dismissed.
Anyway, I got a bit sidetracked there, but I think of this as an expression of intergenerational status anxiety.
When older people can no longer control younger ones, they call them "disrespectful."
I can talk about this structure as if it doesn't concern me, because I am not inside it.
I am a freelancer. I don't belong to a company, I have no boss and no subordinates. So I neither hear "you have no manners" nor say it to anyone. I'm simply outside society. I don't have to follow society's rules, but those rules don't protect me either. All I have to do is deliver what the contract specifies. I'm a kind of machine that's difficult to manage.
Listening to my friend complain about the new hires, I actually felt a little envious of those new hires. They're still at an age when being called "disrespectful" is normal. It's a period when you don't need to sort out whether it's resistance against society or just plain ignorance. I've passed through that period, and now I've reached the age where, even if I'm told I have no manners, I know to say "Yes, I'm sorry." Whether that's maturity or compromise, I'm not sure, but that's where I am.
And honestly, because I'm outside society, I don't even have the standing to be called "disrespectful." Someone outside society has no right to complain about the rules inside it. I'm just a person peering into society from the outside. Sometimes that feels freeing, and sometimes it feels lonely.
Anyway, I ate the eel rice bowl and took a look at the code. I listened to talk about how a Korean large corporation is apparently running QWEN 3.8 on its company server, heard stories about working life, and felt envious of my friend.
My friend's KakaoTalk profile has a photo of his girlfriend. She was pretty. He's good-looking too. A picture-perfect couple. My own profile message, by contrast, reads: "I build websites for you."
Everyone envies the road not taken. I'm no different. But I know my own personality. I have ADHD and fundamentally find it hard to make a good impression on people. So this is the path I chose to fit my nature, though I'm not entirely sure "chose" is the right word.
I got into this life because I was scammed and had no other option, but I prefer to believe it was my choice.
I know that anxiety, fear, and unhappiness all depend on how I think about them, and I know that not everything in life needs to be happy, yet I still find myself comparing my life with the lives of those around me.
I know it's a path I couldn't take because I didn't choose it, or rather because I couldn't, yet I always feel like I'm standing alone out in the open.
My body exists in the physical world, but my mind lives only online. Disconnected from the loans, marriages, relationships, and job talk that people my age are having, I spend 24 hours a day chatting with AI alone, honing my programming. It's the path I chose to live outside the "normal trajectory" of life.
The only thing is, it still doesn't pay. I learned to program because everyone said building software is how you make money these days, but I wonder whether what really generates income is the accumulated experience of reading what other people need. Maybe it's just that I haven't built up enough experience yet.