[Lee Hyung-seok column] Everyone returns to their place: Park Hae-young's world in 'We Are All Trying Here'

A scene from the drama series "We Are All Trying Here." Hwang Dong-man (Koo Kyo-hwan, left) and Byeon Eun-a (Go Youn-jung) cross paths at a railroad crossing on the way home. [Studio Phoenix·SLL·Studio Flow]

We live in an age when many people suffer from FOMO — Fear of Missing Out. It is the dread of being the one left behind, excluded from a group or an opportunity. Think of the embarrassment of playing tag late into the evening, only to realize your friends all went home without you. Or the bewilderment of arriving at school on what turns out to be a field trip day, finding the building empty. These are the kinds of situations most of us experienced or imagined in childhood — and they are the original template for FOMO.

The feeling that you alone are falling behind. That everyone else is racing forward while you stand still. That other people's lives are working out while yours alone is tangled. That everyone else is in on something you were never told. As we grow older, the swamp of FOMO in our lives grows wider and deeper, and its blade cuts sharper.

Evolution has designed the primate brain to experience pleasure and happiness in relative terms. Psychological and biological experiments have repeatedly confirmed a strong human tendency to prefer a world where nobody has anything over one where others have ten times as much as you. Giving up your own share simply because others receive more is not the "rational choice" of the "rational individual" assumed by classical economics. Modern behavioral economics, neuroscience and psychology have shown that people tend to be more sensitive to the relative size of rewards — happiness — than to the relative size of punishments — unhappiness.

Stories circulate everywhere of dormant stock accounts suddenly hitting it big. Tales of someone making hundreds of millions of won, or tens of millions, in just a few months seem to come from every other household — except yours. In 2026, the stock market is the torrential source of FOMO. FOMO was rampant when housing prices soared and when Bitcoin surged, but not like this. Back then, it still felt like someone else's lucky story, something merely to envy from a distance. Now it has become a story of destiny — one in which you should have been the protagonist, and if you have not been yet, surely must become one starting now. The compulsion not to miss this fate. It was the Kospi's unprecedented surge over the past year that turned FOMO syndrome into everyday vocabulary for the entire nation, but it is really just a compressed, dramatic cross-section of the competitive meritocracy that has been steadily spreading and inflating throughout Korean society.

Into this moment arrives writer Park Hae-young's drama series "We Are All Trying Here" (directed by Cha Young-hoon) — a work that offers comfort in the pandemic age of FOMO syndrome. The protagonist is Hwang Dong-man (played by Koo Kyo-hwan), a film director who has never made his debut while friends, seniors and juniors all thrive in the industry, leaving him steeped in jealousy. The series aired on JTBC twice a week for a total of 12 episodes from April 18 to May 24, and is available on Netflix.

Hwang Dong-man is a member of a group of eight people connected through the film world. Every other member has carved out a role — as a director, producer, executive or writer — but Hwang alone has never shot a debut feature, drifting from one part-time job to the next for 20 years. His constant complaints, grievances and sharp tongue make him a source of conflict wherever he goes, online or off, and virtually everyone tries to avoid him. Yet he finds someone who values him: Byeon Eun-a (Go Youn-jung), a film company producer who believes in his talent and individuality. Alongside the two leads, the drama places at its center Hwang's rival and embodiment of inferiority complex, director Park Gyeong-se (Oh Jung-se), and Park's wife and film company head Go Hye-jin (Kang Mal-geum). Woven into the story are Hwang's older brother Hwang Jin-man (Park Hae-jun) — a failed poet who works as a welder — top actress Oh Jeong-hee (Bae Jong-ok), who abandoned her young daughter Byeon Eun-a to pursue her own success, and Oh's stepdaughter, actress Jang Mi-ran (Han Sun-hwa).

As the title suggests, every major character struggles in their own way to prove their existence and worth. It is a fight not to be erased — from other people's lives, from relationships, from the world. Hwang Dong-man cries out that his only goal is to make his debut and shed the label of "unemployed." If Hwang is a boxer who simply wants to climb into the ring and prove he is a fighter, Park Gyeong-se is a boxer who wants to stand in that same ring and show off his victories through box-office hits and critical acclaim. Their battles for recognition are just as desperate outside the ring. Hwang must become a brother his older sibling can be proud of. Park must prove he can succeed as a husband even without his wife as his producer. Go Hye-jin must be not only the producer behind director Park Gyeong-se but also the wife who inspires him. Byeon Eun-a must free herself from the curse of her estranged mother Oh Jeong-hee and a former lover — she must earn recognition as a producer and writer in her own right, not as the "ghost writer" hidden inside an ex-boyfriend director's screenplay. Oh Jeong-hee must hold on to her social success as a top actress while navigating her place as Jang Mi-ran's stepmother and Byeon Eun-a's birth mother. Hwang Jin-man must reclaim the daughter he lost by locking himself inside the castle of poetry, and prove he is a father. And both Byeon Eun-a and Jang Mi-ran must be convinced that they are someone's child — that they were not born unwanted.

The cast and director of the drama series "We Are All Trying Here" pose at a press showcase on April 17. From left: Oh Jung-se, Kang Mal-geum, Go Youn-jung, director Cha Young-hoon, Koo Kyo-hwan, Han Sun-hwa and Park Hae-jun. [Yonhap]

"When I look at people on the street, they're not just walking. They look like enormous bundles of emotion moving around. Every step, every expression is soaked in everything that person is feeling. Do you know what kind of emotional bundle Mom is? A bundle of contempt."

These are the words Byeon Eun-a says to her birth mother Oh Jeong-hee's face — the greatest actress of her generation. Alongside "worthlessness," the other key word in this drama is "emotion." Hwang Dong-man and Byeon Eun-a each separately sign up for an experiment run by a technology company testing an "emotion watch," and only later discover that the other was also a participant. The emotion watch analyzes physical data — pulse, breathing, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels — and displays in real time what emotional state the user is in: joy, sadness, irritation, displeasure and so on. Negative emotions appear against a red background; positive ones against blue. Late in the series, during a psychiatric consultation arranged by the emotion watch company, Byeon Eun-a hears words that reveal another of the drama's central themes.

The psychiatrist tells her that "the vividness of a story is made by emotion," and that "the moment a negative emotion is read accurately, it comes under control" — that it at least stops compounding delusion upon delusion and growing ever larger. "When emotion fades, the power of the story weakens," the doctor adds. The psychiatrist then advises Byeon Eun-a that she has spent so long practicing how to observe emotion through film and screenplays that she can now do it without the emotion watch, and encourages her to try reading her emotions on her own.

Taken together, these lines suggest that "We Are All Trying Here" is a drama about learning to read one's own emotions accurately. If a person can "objectify" their feelings — Hwang Dong-man's jealousy toward successful peers, Byeon Eun-a's desire to punish the mother who abandoned her, Park Gyeong-se's inferiority complex that he is no different from the pathetic Hwang and succeeded only because of his wife — they can erase the "drama of the complex" that inflates inside the mind and ultimately swallows the self whole.

Max Bennett, an AI entrepreneur and expert, explores the evolutionary origins of emotion in animals, primates and humans in his book on AI and neuroscience, "A Brief History of Intelligence," defining those origins as "avoidance" and "seeking." Emotion, he argues, arose from the survival instinct to avoid danger and find food. He therefore distinguishes the emotional traits inherited by modern humans from the earliest animal brains into "valence" and "arousal." Valence divides into positive and negative — good feelings and bad feelings. Arousal divides into high arousal, when the pulse quickens and muscles tense, and its opposite, low arousal. Most emotions thus fall into one of four quadrants formed by the intersection of positive or negative valence and high or low arousal. Excitement, happiness and elation, for instance, are positive valence and high arousal; contentment, calm and relaxation are positive and low; anxiety, tension and embarrassment are negative and high; and depression, sadness and boredom are negative and low.

Ultimately, the drama suggests that "learning to read one's emotions accurately" means confronting the wounds and deficiencies within oneself. That is the first step toward escaping the complex — magnified by competition and comparison with others — and the private delusions that grow until they consume us.

The feeling that everyone has gone somewhere and you alone are left behind. That others are far ahead while you stand frozen in place. Escaping this suffocating FOMO, alienation and sense of defeat is, paradoxically, something no one can do alone. Even looking inward at one's own wounds and deficiencies is a place one cannot reach in isolation. Every crisis originates in relationships, and healing and salvation must also come through relationships.

Across her body of work — including earlier series "My Mister" and "My Liberation Notes" — Park Hae-young's dramas begin with characters in crisis: people struggling on the edge of elimination, failure and being left behind. In "My Mister," there was Park Dong-hoon (Lee Sun-kyun), passed over for promotion and betrayed by his wife, and Lee Ji-an (IU), cast to the very bottom of society. Park's brothers — the eldest (Park Ho-san), who took early retirement and is out of work, and the youngest (Song Sae-byeok), a film director whose debut turned out to be his last — were in the same position, as was Park's friend Gyeom-deok (Park Hae-jun), a monk who left his lover behind to enter the priesthood. In "My Liberation Notes," all three of the Yeom siblings (Lee El, Kim Ji-won, Lee Min-ki) are pushed to the margins at work and in love, ignored and overlooked. The Yeom family barely holds on at the far edge of Gyeonggi Province, far from Seoul. Their neighbor, known only as Gu (Son Suk-ku), is a man who fled Seoul in defeat and hides in the countryside, getting through each day on alcohol.

The major male characters in Park's dramas tend to fall into one of two types: those who say almost nothing, and those who never stop talking. Park Dong-hoon, his monk friend Gyeom-deok, Gu and Hwang Dong-man's older brother Jin-man are men of few words. By contrast, Park's youngest brother, the youngest of the Yeom siblings, Hwang Dong-man and Park Gyeong-se cannot seem to keep their mouths still. Yet whether they are silent or voluble, they share one thing: they are, or were, beings on the verge of being pushed out of the world and falling. Anxiety and a sense of crisis drove some of them to shut their mouths entirely and others to pour out words without end.

Their individual crises are also crises of relationships, of family and of community. Park arranges for her characters in crisis to reach out and support one another, so that each can stand their ground with greater strength. In this world — where, with the exception of Do Jun-yeong (Kim Young-min) in "My Mister," there are no absolute villains or saints — what ultimately sustains the individual, the family and the community is the goodness, friendship and compassion within each person. In Park's dramas, the positions characters occupy at the beginning and end of the story do not change dramatically. They are simply still standing there — but the self has grown, and the solidarity between people has deepened. In Park's world, adults ultimately fulfill the role of adults, the young the role of the young, parents the role of parents, children the role of children, siblings the role of siblings, and spouses the role of spouses. Everyone helps everyone else, and in the end each returns to their place and the community is restored. It is precisely the meaning captured in the lyrics of the song "Landscape" by the duo Siin and Chongjang: "The most beautiful landscape in the world — the landscape where everything returns to its place."

Park's dramas typically trace with great delicacy the relationships between wounded, deficient individuals, moving toward an ending in which family and community are restored. Here, family and community represent the totality of relationships sustained across a shared time and place. Park offers remarkably creative characters and stories, yet in the end she reaffirms and re-establishes the values and structures of existing family and community — which makes her work less a text of social critique than a "conservative" one. If that is so, her dramas represent the most dignified and most creatively realized form of conservatism that popular art can achieve.

suk@heraldcorp.com