Author's Note: Goody Jeanne d'Arc

When I want to clear my head, I often watch nature documentaries. The big cats go after the youngest and weakest in a herd of grazing animals. The dedicated hunter of swift prey like the Thomson's gazelle is the cheetah. Once it starts a hunt it sprints faster than the cars on the expressway. Ten-odd seconds at most; run any longer and the strain on its heart could kill it.

One day, after I had stopped drawing a salary and was preparing to start another company, I felt something wrong in my body. My chest was tight and I couldn't swallow. Later it got to the point where I was afraid I would die because I couldn't breathe. A friend who is a doctor told me it was stress, and that he had it too. Plenty of IT workers suffer from burnout, plenty of entertainers speak of panic disorder, and plenty of business owners live on alcohol and cigarettes because of hwabyeong, the illness of pent-up rage.

We start competing the moment we are born. At a few months old we have to roll over, and we have to learn Hangul faster than the baby next door. The ranking of universities, recited in the four-beat meter of a classical sijo, Seo-Go-Yeon, Seo-Seong-Han, Jung-Gyeong-Oe-Si, Geon-Dong-Hong, is the climax of that competition. Those who come through the hell of entrance exams, educated in an identical mold, must now prove their creativity. They line up at interviews to get onto the conveyor belt of the big conglomerates. They have to get into a better company than their classmates, and raise their salaries and titles faster than the people they were hired with. Live like that long enough and the body breaks down.

Workers who go to the hospital with digestive trouble, headaches or allergies already know both the doctor's diagnosis and the prescription. It's an illness caused by stress, so rest and keep a regular routine. But rest and a regular routine are both impossible. To make the interim payments on the apartment, the credit card bills, the children's tuition and the insurance premiums, you cannot stop sprinting. Drop out of the race and it's over. You run and run until you can see the nape of the gazelle's neck, and then the lions or the pack of hyenas come slowly closer.

Everyone keeps telling us that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will change our future. There is no time to discuss the lessons of the first three. Busy, busy. We have to do a quick review of the service Silicon Valley launched yesterday and benchmark the maker spaces of Shenzhen. If you don't speed up you fall behind, and if you fall behind it's over. Employees live on pills, and the bosses who drive them are being treated for panic disorder. You hurt, so you're a patient. Everyone is a patient.

The workers who built the semiconductor industry collapsed with leukemia. Before the third anniversary of the accident at Guui Station, the one that broke all our hearts, a subcontractor installing an elevator fell to his death. If you fail to get onto the conveyor belt of conglomerates and permanent jobs, or if you fall off it, you have to live on the risks they outsource to you. Now, when we are richer than at any point in five thousand years of history, are we living well? After the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the Fifth, will there be more happy people? Is a car with only an accelerator really safe?

It was the end of August last year, on a day when the heat wave that had turned the peninsula into a sauna finally eased. After a typhoon had passed, I met Sa I-an on the ground floor of an officetel building near Baekseok Station. She was watching the rain pour down with the eyes of a grazing animal. I heard how she had fallen off the conveyor belt. Some of it was more than this book could hold. I resolved to put her sorrow and her pain into words.

In the army I worked in intelligence and operations, and later I worked at a web portal, a media-rep company and startups. Turning people into numbers and standardizing them was my daily bread. But numbers and statistics can turn people into others and strip away their humanity. Standardization mostly works against the weak. It can even serve as a placebo that dilutes the guilt of those in power when they make decisions that bring misfortune and ruin to a few.

Five springs ago, I was sunk in grief over the disaster at sea. For days I wept out loud. I saw people who could not feel others' sorrow, who even mocked it. Rage came over me, and then a sense of emptiness. And I decided to break free, starting with myself, from the long inertia of a success-driven life optimized for the operating system called capitalism. I took up the writing I had stopped long ago. I wanted to speak of people's names instead of numbers, of love and solidarity instead of standardization.

Breaking free of a long inertia was hard, and it still is. A life outside the standard means living with anxiety. The familiar insomnia will go on. Guilt and helplessness may torment me more than the joy of creating. But changing the direction and the speed of my life was truly the right thing to do, and I am content. I no longer need to compete with anyone, or compare myself to anyone.

I hope this book is read as much as possible by the weak, by temporary workers, by people in IT, by women. I hope it gives them a little comfort. I am preparing a story about some rougher people. When I write the next author's note, I hope it won't be as hard as this one.