The silence I gained by shutting myself away from society didn’t last long. What crept in to replace it was a physical “premonition of the end.”
The Countdown to Zero
Every time I made a withdrawal, the balance displayed on the ATM screen crept one step closer to “death.”
I wasn’t working. I wasn’t earning. The assets I had built up on construction sites, covered in sweat and mud, were slipping away like sand in an hourglass just because I was alive.
A single rice ball or a bottle of water from a convenience store started to feel like an “unmerited luxury.” “Does a human who produces nothing have the right to pay for this?” This twisted self-interrogation repeated endlessly in my dark room. The more I had run in the past, the more this feeling was amplified.
The Rubble of a Career
The “gap period” on my resume was, to me, nothing but a “record of defective construction.“
The fear that my value was being scraped away from the market with each passing day was overwhelming. The blueprints I once held with pride and the feel of the heavy machinery I operated began to fade like memories from a distant past life.
The word “Reboot” sounded hollow back then. I thought it was insane to try and build a skyscraper again on a foundation that had already collapsed.
What I Grasped at the Bottom of the Mud
As the numbers in my bankbook decreased, my self-esteem wore down and became thin. But in that extreme thinness, something finally came into view.
“What is left of me now that I have no money, no job, and no title?”
Only one thing remained: a raw, unsightly, and intense scream of instinct—“I still want to live.”
The Xer’s Monologue
Losing money is terrifying. A gap in your career is scarier than death. As a former site manager, that felt like total “defeat.”
But listen—even if the numbers hit zero, it doesn’t mean your value is zero. Your bank balance has nothing to do with the strength of your soul. In fact, now that your “decorations” (titles) have been stripped away, your “foundation” as a human is being tested.
“If you’ve run out of materials, wait for a resupply. On a site that has been cleared back to bare earth, you can build something much better next time.”
Got it done.
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