Preface - The Future Is Already Set

Before the alarm went off, I lay there for a while with my eyes open, staring at the ceiling. The border between night and morning is always vague. And in that vagueness, thoughts drift by like ghosts. The rich getting richer, the poor staying poor. Korea's widening divide. Piketty. The people who woke up one morning to find themselves suddenly poor. The words slid through my head like the static you hear when a radio can't quite find its frequency. They still carry meaning, and yet they've been said so many times that they've worn thin.

Here in 2026, our society has come to hold something like a settled future. It hasn't arrived yet, but it has already changed the way people carry themselves, the way they walk, the length of their silences. The future used to be a question. Now it feels closer to a precondition. Words like ontology and robotics are the same. They no longer sound like something you'd find in a conference deck a few years out; they feel like nameplates on doors we'll soon have to open.

It all happened too fast. It's the feeling of sitting in a car pushed well past the speed limit on the highway. Some people tightened their seatbelts. Others had already changed lanes. The ones who noticed changed their strategy about money. It wasn't loud, the way a declaration is loud. If anything, it was quiet. For individuals and for companies alike, the jackpot carnival train had already vanished down the line. Miracles, as always, don't stop at the next station.

An age is coming when money is no longer money, and work is no longer work. It used to be that if you saved up passion and persistence, the way you put money in the bank, you could one day trade them in for a balance in an account or a title on a business card. But now it seems the exchange window is about to close. Passion is handed back to you as self-satisfaction, persistence as something like a personal hobby. The change is quiet, but there's no undoing it.

And so I find myself thinking of the word positioning. It sounds a little like a military term, and a little like a piece on a chessboard. What if, ten years ago, I had looked just slightly earlier at the current of change. If I had become an employee of Hynix, or bought its stock. If retirement had required, say, a billion won in present-day terms, I might have reached that number before turning thirty.

When I picture the deputy managers and department heads who spend their days worrying about being let go before they even turn fifty, it strikes me that this is less a matter of personal failure than the outcome of a promise society made without ever saying it aloud. For our families, to protect ourselves, we clung to the smallest scraps of positioning. To survive, we focused on politics rather than on substance, and the politics became the everyday. Perhaps that is one of the reasons the growth of Korean society came to a stop.

Now people have begun to step outside the old shape of their lives and imagine other kinds of work. The end of the knowledge worker will come first, and the end of the manual laborer will follow. Within three years, most likely. So what is a person to do, someone tamed inside the existing system. What might let us survive just a little longer.

Again, it comes down to positioning. If you take a job, take one at a company that can survive; if you invest, invest in a structure that can survive. It is neither optimism nor pessimism, but something closer to a posture. And more than anything, while I'm still alive as a human being, before the robots and the algorithms take the seats completely, there's a certain greed in me to leave behind something of worth. The reason I'm writing this, I suppose, is that same greed.

The future may already be set. But where we choose to stand inside it, that much is still ours to decide. I've decided to believe that. Very quietly.

This piece is part of the "Korea Value Chain" series and is an original work. It is an analysis based on public data and industry sources; some figures and assessments are estimates. It is not intended as a direct basis for investment decisions.

By Alexandro Lee · July 2026