The Cure for Burnout Might Be … Work?

Some of my friends and I keep an accountability tracker to help us stay on top of our goals. Most of us use it to keep tabs on our weekly freelance assignments. Sometime last year, I also started using it to monitor my reading, which is all I really do with my free time anyway. My friends couldn’t understand why these novels needed to invade our tracker—but I liked having my recreational activities on my to-do list. Although it rebranded one of my favorite hobbies as work, this seemed natural enough to me: Anything that brings joy is serious business.

This murky line between labor and leisure lies at the core of Hwang Bo-reum’s debut novel, Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop. Through a constellation of characters that orbit the titular store, Hwang explores how a person might choose to counter workism without rejecting work entirely, and how a meaningful life might be built by applying oneself to even the most pleasurable pastimes.

Yeongju, a former office employee in Seoul, is suffering from intense burnout: After a career-driven life in which she toiled through vacations and saw her husband in their corporate canteen more often than at home, she quits her job, files for divorce, and moves across the city for a fresh start. She doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life—but she loves to read, and uses her savings to open a bookshop in Hyunam-dong, a neighborhood she chooses because one of the characters in its name means “rest.”

But Yeongju quickly realizes that her new life still involves work. She is frequently drowning in book orders, accounting tasks, and inventory checks. When she’s not treading water, she’s hosting a monthly book club or running a popular interview series with authors. Sometimes she will “stew in regret” at all of her freshly assumed responsibilities, but she finds that she usually isn’t satisfied until she completes them.

Her bookshop begins to attract a group of regulars and employees who are similarly disillusioned with the corporate world. Through them, Hwang explores the different forms that hard work can take—including in the service of activities that are unrelated to making a living, but add momentum to her characters’ lives. Minjun, the store’s new barista, dropped out of the rat race after a year of job rejections and spends his days diligently studying coffee, films, and yoga. Seungwoo, a dissatisfied former programmer, is “immersing himself in the Korean language.” Jungsuh, who spent eight years as a “permanent contract” worker until “the anger destroyed [her] body,” now comes to the bookshop to meditate and crochet. Mincheol, a high-school student with seemingly little interest in life, sits riveted watching Jungsuh’s knitting needles.

Each character has turned away, in one form or another, from inherited notions of success and is looking to find their own. One night, some of them gather to discuss a book with a fitting theme—David Frayne’s The Refusal of Work. The outpouring of frustration about their careers is familiar: The corporate world held no promise of stability, even for those who played the game right; there was always another goal to achieve, without the guarantee of rest. Meanwhile, their bosses kept pressuring them to identify as a “team” or “family.”

[Read: The paradox of caring about ‘bullshit’ jobs]

As Yeongju and her friends discover, though, true “resistance to work,” undertaken deliberately, also takes work. After the bookshop’s events become more popular, Yeongju begins fielding requests to write for various publications, including a books column for a local paper; she takes “care and pride in writing each piece, even though it felt like she had to squeeze out every last bit of her brain juices.” She feels an affinity for people who “give their utmost to a pursuit” and is initially drawn to Minjun because he begins practicing his barista skills on the bookstore’s “no barista Mondays”—his off days.

Such moments underscore that Hwang’s characters don’t actually want to stop being industrious; they’re just trying to build up a more satisfying understanding of work for themselves, one that doesn’t bind their “whole identity and value” to a company. They discover, for one, the benefits of goals that are short-term, simple, and malleable. “Instead of agonising over what you should do, think about putting effort into whatever you’re doing,” Seungwoo, the programmer turned writer, tells Mincheol, the disenchanted high-schooler. Minjun “anchor[s] himself with coffee,” simply focusing on making the best cup he can. The point is not for them to clearly define what makes them happy but rather to recognize the moments in which they are. What the bookshop’s denizens come to see is that the problems with their former office environments—no matter how widespread—couldn’t always explain why they were miserable, or teach them how not to be. What they can do, as they reconsider how to spend their lives, is pay close attention to what they’re doing, and do it with care.

In doing so, they bring a different meaning to the idea of “optimizing” one’s life. They may seek to be productive, but they don’t shy away from the conviction that taking life day by day—and measuring happiness without “stak[ing] everything on a single accomplishment”—can coexist with being willing to work, not necessarily toward an end goal but for the pleasure of the moment. My mother, for one, is always engaged with projects and deadlines that she has set for herself. Though she likes to think of herself as constantly “busy doing nothing,” like Minjun with his coffee, she has slowly built herself into a formidable bridge player and a prolific crochet artist. She, too, has accepted that the external pressure of success is unlikely to be satisfying, but that each game, completed scarf, or cup of coffee is a serious achievement in itself.

By the end of the story, Yeongju has committed to keeping the bookshop open and acknowledged it not just as her place of rest but as her dream, her job, and her source of joy all at once. She takes a leave of absence to go on a tour of independent bookshops, planning to study what makes them thrive and return to Hyunam-dong with new ideas. Minjun assumes responsibility for the bookshop in the meantime. In her farewell note to him, Yeongju writes:

I had thought of work as stairs. Stairs to climb to reach the top. Now, I see work as food. Food that you need every day. Food that makes a difference to my body, my heart, my mental health, and my soul. There is food you just shove down your throat, and food that you eat with care and sincerity. I want to be one who takes great care in eating simple food. Not for anyone, but for myself.

Her words acknowledge the fundamental difference between the pressure to succeed and the instinct to improve, the difference between being a “job seeker” and searching for meaningful work. And they suggest that, perhaps, the wisest thing to do is to get up every day and treat our minor routines like they matter; to approach the various pockets of our lives, whether they are spaces of work or play, with both flexibility and commitment.