, Change Your Life
A narrative is a story. Not just any story — it is the story of how someone has lived.
Most of the narratives we encounter in daily life are closer to fiction, of course. Films are like that. So are plays, paintings, and sometimes music. I know next to nothing about art, but recently my graduate students talked me into visiting an exhibition of Lee Jung-seob's work. Lee Jung-seob is one of Korea's most famous painters, best known for his striking images of bulls, so I walked in with high expectations. What I found were tiny, palm-sized sketches scrawled on postcards. Honestly, my first thought was: I could draw something like that.
Then I came to the paintings he made on Jeju Island while living with his wife, and something about them struck me as unusual. When I saw the drawings of children scratched onto cigarette-foil wrappers, a quiet feeling of being moved passed through me. I pulled out my phone to look up Lee Jung-seob's story, and the moment I began to understand the meaning behind these small images, that quiet feeling swelled into something much larger. It hit me hard.
Lee Jung-seob was born into a wealthy family during the Japanese occupation of Korea. He showed early talent for drawing, went to Japan to study art, and there fell deeply in love with a Japanese woman. They returned to Korea, where resentment toward the Japanese ran deep. Working as a schoolteacher, Lee navigated the tension between neighbors who looked sideways at his wife and a wife who felt their hostility, channeling all of it into his art. When the North turned communist, he was branded a bourgeois and persecuted. Then the Korean War broke out, and the entire family fled south through active combat zones, all the way to Jeju Island at the very bottom of the peninsula. There was a brief stretch of something like happiness: with nothing to eat, they caught crabs on the shore, and the whole family was, for a moment, content. But poverty is patient. Unable to outrun it, Lee sent his wife and children to Japan — her homeland — promising he would follow soon. Nearly every day he drew pictures and wrote letters on postcards to the wife he adored and the children he loved beyond words, soothing his loneliness by sketching the reunion he kept hoping for. His life only got harder from there. He fell into alcoholism. His health deteriorated rapidly. And this man who had spent his final years pouring all his longing into tears and paint simply slipped away.
As I read his letters and learned his story, something broke open in me. Suddenly his paintings looked completely different. The crabs his family had to eat to survive — Lee Jung-seob felt terrible about those crabs, and he painted them as an apology, asking their forgiveness through his art. When I saw the painting of children fishing, and the one of the whole family holding hands in a circle with bright, unclouded smiles, I could not keep it together. I found a corner and sat down, hoping my students would not notice, trying to pull myself together. It did not work. The emotion swept through my whole body, and I wept — shamelessly, uncontrollably. The weight this man had carried as a husband and father, the endurance of a human being who bore pain and heartbreak with everything he had in an era when nothing was certain — all I could do was bow my head.
And though my situation was nothing compared to his, something about his story called up my own. For a year, I had been a gireugi appa — a "wild-goose father," the Korean term for men who live apart from families sent abroad for the children's education. I had left my family in Canada. I had everything I needed, materially. And yet everything felt like it was not enough. That bone-deep loneliness, that solitude that cuts right through you — it was all there again. The narrative of life embedded in Lee Jung-seob's paintings was not just something I understood intellectually. I felt it with my whole being.
The Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self
It was the power of narrative. The experience shook me so deeply that I brought my wife and son back for a second visit. Lee Jung-seob moved me again — differently this time — and I found myself looking up every painting of his I could find. The experience reminded me of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of behavioral economics. Kahneman famously divided the human psyche into the experiencing self and the remembering self, and admitted that happiness researchers — himself included — had been getting things wrong for years because they had failed to distinguish between the two. The experiencing self is the one that feels things in the moment: enjoying a delicious meal, feeling happy on a date, feeling the rush of hang-gliding with your partner on vacation.
But suppose your partner cheated on you and you divorced. Afterward you learned that during that very vacation — during the hang-gliding and the laughter — she was already seeing someone else. That trip is no longer a happy memory. Now consider the opposite: a man who suffered so badly during his military service that he thought about ending his life. Yet decades after discharge, he brings up his army days at every gathering. Why? Because he found meaning in the suffering. This self — the one that looks back at past experience and weaves it into a story — is the remembering self.1
Kahneman had another name for the remembering self: the storyteller. More recently, Professor Kim Joo-hwan, whose book Inner Communication has generated enormous interest in both public and academic circles, takes the idea further with what he calls the background self. The background self is the deeper layer that interprets the events of our complicated lives, assigns them meaning, and files them away as remembered episodes. I completely agree. But here is the important addition: we do not live alone. Our narratives are not solo monologues. Every great film has a villain alongside the hero; good times and bad take turns. Consider the narrative of Professor Lee Ji-sun, who overcame full-body burns to become a professor at her alma mater. She describes her experience with quiet composure: "I met with an accident — and then I successfully parted ways with it." Those words have moved an enormous number of people. She was riding in a car with her brother when a drunk driver hit them. The car exploded and she was burned over her entire body. She survived — perhaps because her remembering self was strong enough to hold.2
The reason I could feel her story so deeply is that I, too, suffered severe burns in an accident during my freshman year of college and came close to dying. Even after my body healed, it took a long time to free myself psychologically from the scars. This is exactly what narrative does: someone else's story meets your own and together they create something new. And those new narratives become real. I first met Professor Lee Ji-sun in person in 2003, and twenty years later, we still share a relationship that means a great deal to both of us.
The Story That Changes Your Life
Narratives change lives. I was born the youngest child and only son among six siblings — one boy, five older sisters. As a kid I had a serious inferiority complex about my looks and drifted through school without ever quite fitting in. My grades were reliably lower-middle. The one thing I was good at was sports and fighting — until one day a classmate's fist connected squarely with my jaw, shattered the bone, and put me in the hospital. It was humiliating. I could not even face the boy's mother, who showed up every day with homemade bone broth, pleading with me to forgive her son. The thought of going back to school and dealing with reality — the kid who got his jaw broken in a fight — was unbearable. The night before my discharge, I remember wishing the world would just end.
One source of my childhood shame was my parents' education level. Born in rural 1930s Korea, they had almost no formal schooling. My father finished elementary school but could not continue because the family could not afford it. He studied Chinese classics at the village seodang instead. But he always trusted me. Even when I was a high schooler sneaking in and out of nightclubs, he would hand me pocket money and say only: do not come home too late.
My academic struggles, it turned out, were a gift in disguise. Because I spent years as a poor student, I understand in my bones what it feels like when something just will not click. That is why I am good at reaching students who are falling behind. As a result, I received Yonsei University's Outstanding Faculty Award for Teaching — given to roughly seven professors a year — on three separate occasions. I then became only the second person to receive the Supreme Teaching Excellence Award, which is reserved for those who have earned the base award three times. The ADHD that once made my life difficult became an advantage, allowing me to multitask effectively. My chronic restlessness — the way I get bored with any one thing quickly — pushed me across a remarkably wide intellectual landscape: disability sport, exercise psychology, exercise physiology, exercise medicine, and artificial intelligence.
This breadth is why I hold concurrent appointments at Yonsei University not only in my home Department of Sport and Leisure Studies but also at the Cancer Prevention Center of the College of Medicine and the Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence — a rare arrangement even at a place like Yonsei. Long before "interdisciplinary research" was a buzzword, I was collaborating across departments of kinesiology, rehabilitation medicine, medicine, and engineering during my graduate school years in Canada, producing a dissertation that crossed all of them. Looking back, every one of my weaknesses became a strength, and because of all of them I became the person I am today. I sometimes wonder: what if my parents had been highly educated? They probably would have hovered over my schoolwork, criticized my grades, and nagged me constantly. Given how much I hate being nagged, I might well have gone off the rails entirely.
Recently my eldest son — who has been looking after his younger brother, a high school senior, back in Canada — came to Korea and left me two gifts. The first was intellectually introducing me to Robert Sapolsky and Daniel Kahneman. The second was a copy of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. In that book there is a parable about a chess master. Someone asks: "Master, what is the single most important move in chess?" It is a silly question. Chess is a game of reading your opponent's moves and responding with brilliance.
Our lives work the same way. "What is the most meaningful thing in your life?" The answer should differ from person to person and from situation to situation — and it should. Every one of us walking this earth needs a reason for being here. If that reason has not appeared on its own, we have to go looking for it. That is exactly why Frankl's original title is Man's Search for Meaning. Through meaning, Frankl healed his psychological wounds — a process he called logotherapy. When meaning is found, a new narrative begins. We have to reinterpret our past. We have to look at today's failure from the vantage point of tomorrow. Only then can we write a new narrative that points toward the future.3
I believe firmly that oxytocin can help us write those narratives. I am not saying you should inhale oxytocin through your nose. I am talking about the lifestyle that raises it naturally. Meet more people. Share meals together. Have real conversations. Act more selflessly. Volunteer. Pay attention to the people around you. Share more physical affection. Express more gratitude. Exercise together. Laugh together until you can barely breathe. Watch great films together. Seek out wonderful restaurants. Listen to good stories whenever you can. And the most important thing? Create your own narrative. Because our lives — yesterday, today, tomorrow — are nothing more than bundles of events waiting for someone to give them meaning. When my narrative meets yours and becomes ours, we gain access to a happier, more meaningful life.
Now it is your turn to write your oxytocin story — your narrative.