I just finished watching My Liberation Notes. Written by Park Hae-young. And it’s a beauty.
In the last two weeks I finished three of her works: My Mister, We Are All Trying Here, and My Liberation Notes. Three dramas back to back. I didn’t plan it that way. I just couldn’t stop.
Her writing is philosophical teaching. When I asked Google Gemini, the writer never publicly talked about any philosophers that influenced her work. Everything came from her own sufferings. Gemini mentioned Albert Camus, and I see why. Her characters struggle with the emptiness of life. They’re all stuck in this mundane existence that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. They wake up, commute, work, come home, sleep. Repeat.
But what they don’t realize — what they can’t see because they’re too busy staring at the void — is that they have these precious people all around them.
It’s okay to live a dull life
I feel like Park Hae-young is trying to tell us something simple and devastating: it’s okay to live a dull life. Most of us will do exactly that for the rest of our lives and then die. We won’t become famous. We won’t change the world. We won’t even change our commute.
But the best way to get meaning out of your miserable life is to love someone, be loved by someone, care for someone, be a meaning to someone close to you. You feel like you don’t have anything. But you have everything. If you look.
Don’t try to love
Here’s where it gets interesting, and where Camus enters the picture.
Don’t try to coddle. Don’t try to change. Don’t try to influence. Don’t even try to love — because the moment you “try” to love, it becomes transactional. You’re keeping score. You’re expecting a return.
Instead: just worship someone. Just give everything.
That’s what Dong-hoon does for Ji-an in My Mister. And that’s what Ji-an does for Dong-hoon. He doesn’t try to save her. He doesn’t try to fix her situation. He doesn’t give her advice. He just sees her. He acknowledges her existence. He treats her like she matters, without asking for anything back. And she does the same for him. That’s how they become soulmates without ever physically being together.
Mi-jeong in My Liberation Notes does the same thing with Mr. Gu. She doesn’t try to change him. She doesn’t force him to stop drinking. She doesn’t stage interventions or deliver ultimatums. She’s just there when he needs her. She exists with him. She exists for him.
That’s it. That’s the whole philosophy.
The loss in translation
I feel bad for non-Korean viewers. There will be a lot of things they miss watching with subtitles. The writer’s dialogue is a poem. Every single line. The rhythm, the word choice, the silences between words — none of that survives translation. You get the meaning but you lose the music.
Park Hae-young doesn’t write dialogue that moves the plot forward. She writes dialogue that reveals the interior of a person. A single sentence from Dong-hoon can tell you everything about who he is and what he carries. That density of character through everyday speech is something Korean does beautifully, and English struggles to hold.
If you’ve watched her work, you know what I mean. If you haven’t — start with My Mister. But know that what you’re watching with subtitles is about 70% of what’s actually there.