I landed a job at a mid-sized company with good work-life balance,
and lately, with work being kind of dull,
I’ve found myself killing time in the bathroom,
reading webtoons,
drifting in and out of online forums,
chatting on messenger…
?? Is it just me?
“What is everyone working so hard on, anyway?”
Someone has Excel open while watching Shorts,
someone is grinding through repetitive tasks by hand,
someone might not know how to put AI to work,
and someone might just be staring into space, letting the hours slide by.
We’re all busy for our own reasons,
but it seems we all show up to the office for the same thing: “to make money.”
So I decided to zero in on this “money” and run the numbers.
Divide your monthly salary by 20 workdays and you get your daily rate.
Divide that daily rate by the eight hours of a 9-to-6 (minus a one-hour lunch) and you get your hourly wage.
(The average monthly salary of an IT developer ten years into the job)
Taking 5 million won as the baseline,
that’s 250,000 won a day,
or 30,000 won an hour.
<For reference: minimum hourly wage by country, as of November 2026>
-South Korea: 10,320 won
-Japan: 10,800 won
-USA (Washington State): 21,850 won (varies by state)
-UK: 23,000 won
-Australia: 22,690 won
-Germany: 21,010 won
-Canada: 17,260 won
-Taiwan: 7,990 won
-China (Shanghai): 5,030 won
Digging a little deeper:
-How many hours a day do I actually spend focused on work? 1h–3h, so 2h on average
-That puts my real hourly wage at 130,000 won
-And how do I spend the rest of the day? Freelance gigs + job hunting + personal branding + automation + making content + consuming content…
[The Verdict]
The company is wasting its precious “money,”
and I’m letting my precious “time” slip through my fingers.
These hours of my thirties that I keep frittering away, hours that will never come back,
I need to start spending more carefully.
[Money and time, huh…]
If I were talented enough to have both work-life balance and a fat paycheck, I wouldn’t be wrestling with any of this. But so many of us are stuck weighing the trade-off between money and time.
First,
“money.” The whole point of currency is “exchange.” It can buy you a tiny piece of candy, and it can buy other people’s “time,” even their feelings. That’s why I’ve long lived by the premise that “my breathing room comes out of my wallet,” and so far, it still holds true.
On the flip side,
I can’t just sell the time I have in abundance at whatever high price I please. In that sense, I’m the “supplier” here, and the older I get, the cheaper my time becomes. Generally speaking, anyway.
People with plenty of “money,” on the other hand, can often pay well to buy many people’s time, or young people’s time. Think of people you hire to stand in line for you, designated drivers who take your car home after a night out, delivery riders. The list goes on.
So, to build a happy life with my family, the first thing I’m working on is my breathing room: making my “wallet” a little thicker.
So What? : I need to try more things and take more action.
###Raise Your Market Value
-I need to raise my hourly rate. => Prepare for a job change, study languages, build a portfolio, rack up a project track record, JUMP to a global/foreign company, build a career that will command a high price down the road. Credentials matter.
###Clone Yourself = Build Systems
-Apart from myself, I need to build systems that can turn [time] into [money]. => Create content, across many channels. Sell myself. My ideas are creative and fun.
-Keep at quant trading. Pile up valuable data and slice and dice it every which way. I could probably even sell the data.
###Side Hustle = Freelancing
-Pick up freelance work in the gaps, and raise my income, raise my worth.
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