I wrote this a few months after leaving Yonsei, in 2019. I was scared, and I pretended I wasn't. Seven years later, I run a hotel brand and I've built three AI tools alone — and dropping out is still the best decision I've ever made. The fear in this essay was real. And the fear was right.

Something pressed against my chest. Standing in front of the administrative office, holding my withdrawal form, my legs stopped first. My mind had already decided. My body was still afraid.

Ten years. Ten hours a day, every day. Roughly 36,500 hours.

That's how much time I spent getting into one of the top three universities in Korea — the SKY schools, as we call them. Samsung, Korea, Yonsei. The trifecta. The brass ring. The thing your parents cry about at the acceptance letter and your entire neighborhood remembers forever.

Five years. That's how long it took for my values to completely invert. Five years inside the institution to realize I needed to walk out of it.

Last summer, I withdrew from the school that had been the only proof of my worth. My version of finishing college. Not the version with a ceremony.

The reason I dropped out was simple.

I had no reason to stay.

Before I made the decision, I asked about ten people I deeply trusted — seriously, earnestly — why a university diploma was necessary. The answers varied, but with one exception, the consensus was: "You still need the degree." But when I pushed with why? — nobody could articulate it. For Samsung, they said. For a promotion later. When I told them I had no intention of working for a corporation — silence. The best they could offer was: "You just need it." A should, not a reason.

Sure, a diploma would be nice to have. But when you factor in four years, thirty million won — more in my case — and the time and energy invested, shouldn't you at least know why you're there?

Of course, the counter-voice showed up on schedule. Just show up and pay tuition and the diploma arrives — what's so hard about that? Aren't you just running away? Aren't you just lazy?

But that's absurd. Dropping out is harder than staying. People who drop out of elite Korean universities fall into two categories: those who have no choice, and those who are stubborn enough to be slightly deranged.

I was a bit of both.

Not broke, not failing academically — I just have a vicious personality trait where if I don't understand why I'm doing something, my internal circuitry overheats and I self-destruct like a sunfish. Quietly, completely, from the inside.

For years I'd endured the not-knowing. Why this lecture. Why this assignment. What this knowledge is even for. The endurance was justified by borrowed purposes — "for a successful life," "for a good career" — but those purposes weren't mine. They were scripts I'd been handed at birth and never questioned until I was twenty and had already internalized them so deeply they felt like organs.

Between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, I held four jobs, started two businesses, and ran a handful of side projects. Each one taught me the same lesson: school was useful for none of this. Not for the work, not for the life I actually wanted.

And the people I met — founders in Seoul and Singapore, freelancers in Bali, digital nomads building entire businesses from laptops in Chiang Mai — they taught me something else. There are more ways to live than the three paths a twenty-year-old SKY student in Korea is offered:

1. Join a conglomerate.
2. Become a professional (doctor, lawyer).
3. Marry rich.

I found all three viscerally repulsive. Not philosophically — I couldn't feel my way into any of them. I'd seen how the "successful" people around me lived. I'd watched my parents' generation. The evidence was clear enough: that wasn't the answer.

The shift underneath everything was this: my definition of success changed.

In Korea, you don't get time to think about what success means. Thinking is a competitive disadvantage. If you have time to reflect, you're already falling behind. The system runs on momentum, not meaning — keep your head down, keep performing, and the rewards will come.

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The rewards came. I got into SKY. And the reward was: an enormous amount of free time and the terrifying question of what to do with it.

I started writing down what I didn't want:

1. I didn't want to save every penny until fifty and then comfort myself with resort vacations.
2. I didn't want to dedicate my life to a company that would discard me at forty.
3. I didn't want to depend on someone else's money.
4. I didn't want to be buried in a lab or a textbook forever.

Then I wrote what I wanted:

1. Work I chose.
2. People I chose to work with.
3. Travel while I was young enough to carry a backpack.
4. A place where being myself wasn't a liability.
5. Space to use my full capacity — not 10% of it in a role designed for compliance.

People told me — even my international friends — that this was "very millennial." Translation: idealistic and unrealistic. And in Korea, they were basically right. The system doesn't accommodate these wishes. It was built for a different kind of person, or maybe it was built to produce a different kind of person, and I was the defective unit rolling off the assembly line.

So I asked the only question that mattered: What if not Korea?

I left the country with one bag and an overdraft account. What happened next — that's a story for another essay. But the leaving started here, in the administrative office, with a form in my hand and legs that didn't want to move.

It took 36,500 hours to earn my place. It took five years to leave it. And those five years were heavier than the ten.

The heaviest part wasn't the decision. It was the silence afterward — the space where a future was supposed to be, and wasn't. I'd torn up the map, and for a long time there was nothing underneath it. No alternate route. No backup plan. Just the ground, and my feet, and the fact that I'd chosen to stand on my own even though standing on my own meant standing on nothing.

Seven years later, I know what that nothing became. But the girl in the administrative office didn't know. She was just scared, and stubborn, and holding a piece of paper that felt like it weighed more than everything she'd ever studied.

She signed it anyway.

How long have you been enduring something without knowing why?

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I write about freedom, healing, and building alone. The full archive is at soulin.co.