In another post, I’m going to do a slightly deeper dive of Antoine Laurain’s “The Red Notebook” because certain aspects of it remind me of a book I read in December by Jin Min Young, a Korean author whose book was translated to Japanese.

For now, I just wanted to touch on Laurent, the main character. On the surface, he and I have nothing in common. We are not the same sex, nationality, race, age. We do not have the same family background, job/career, or history. None of that matters (to me). When he recounts his life as an investment banker, he flashes back to a scene where I think he wanted to end it all. I could relate.

The story narrates, “Although the dichotomy weighed heavily on him, for a while the money he was earning was compensation enough, but then it could no longer make up for it. The gap between his ideal and his reality was too great.” He was happy with the money he made at first, but his actual passion for books and having a bookshop was what fulfilled him.

Money is nice. Some people are motivated by simply making money. I won’t judge them. However, for those of us who kept jobs they hated because they paid the bills probably understand Laurent. He took it to the extreme, contemplating ending his life: “He had coldly considered climbing over the railing of an office block at La Defense.”

Herman Melville’s “The Scrivener” also popped into my head during this scene. Meaningless and unfulfilling work can drive us to go to the extreme. I had been pretty resilient working in journalism, for example. I did so for 10 years, but as I approached my final year, I snapped. The environment was different, and the manager was a narcissistic bully. Whatever fulfillment I had finally left that year, and I felt that pain physically. I had knee pain, hip pain, neck pain, and back pain. I couldn’t climb the stairs. Sometimes it hurt to walk. I was in my early 30s by the way, still too young to feel the aches and pains like that. What a surprise that when I resigned from that job, the pain (mostly) went away.

That experience led me to pay attention to my body. When it was out of sync and hurting, that was my signal to change something if I could. Further down the road, I worked in retail management during the pandemic after my tutoring business was destroyed. (Thanks, COVID -_-.) I knew I had to leave when my work performance slipped, I skipped work, I fell into a depression, and I had crying spells. I listened to the state of my mind, and I jumped from that job after two years, definitely not over a railing.

I landed in the career (teaching) I had been meaning to get into before all of that happened, but like Laurent, I kept putting it off until I was forced to either jump or change. He put his foot down and did the thing readers know him for at the start of the book–bookseller. He was the only one stopping himself, just like I was the only one stopping me. If you can change something, do so. Don’t stay in something you hate simply for the convenience or complacency. Reading that part of the book made me smile, knowing that I could relate in my own way to what he went through.