Declaring My NEET Ambitions at Age Seven
My name is Yoon Seo-ah. I am seven years old this year. This place is a kindergarten that still carries the faint, waxy scent of crayons. Of all the classes, I am in the Apple Class, which somehow manages to feel even more obnoxiously cheerful than the rest.
“All right, Seo-ah! Why don’t you come up and tell us what you want to be when you grow up?”
At the teacher’s gentle voice, I trudged forward like a condemned prisoner. Thirty pairs of sparkling child eyes locked onto me. The teacher’s expectant gaze joined them, along with the parents who had come for observation day. Forty people, minimum, all staring at once. This wasn’t just a presentation. It was visual assault. Collective visual assault. In other words, child abuse.
A kindergarten that rounds up children and, under the noble-sounding excuse of “parent observation,” carries out such merciless public executions? This wasn’t a school. It was a coliseum. A living hell in the present world. The reason I threw tantrums about not wanting to come here when I was even younger was entirely justified.
“Seo-ah?”
“…Yes.”
I swallowed dryly at the teacher’s prompting. I had to answer. I had to open my mouth. I already knew exactly what kind of response they wanted. The usual dreams seven-year-olds were supposed to have. President, scientist, or at the very least something cute like YouTuber or idol. They were all waiting for one of those words to come out of my mouth.
But I do not compromise with the times. As the last true hero of this era, I would speak my convictions and die a glorious death.
“I’m going to be a rich bum. But a pretty one with a great body.”
“…Excuse me?”
The air in the classroom seemed to drop ten degrees. Probably because my brutally honest answer had doused them all in cold reality. For the early 2000s, a kindergartener’s dream was a little too radical. I watched the gentle (well, fake-gentle) smile on the teacher’s face freeze solid.
At that moment, a child sitting primly in the front row like a porcelain doll shot her hand into the air. Same face as mine, round glasses perched on her nose. My twin sister, Yoon Ji-ah.
“Teacher, I have a question.”
Her pronunciation was still a little lispy, like her tongue hadn’t grown in all the way, but the tone and inflection behind it belonged to no seven-year-old. The little traitor. The one who cozied up to the owner of this kindergarten, basked in affection, and lived a comfortable life while selling me out.
“Yoon Seo-ah’s goal of becoming a ‘pretty rich bum’ is difficult to classify as a concrete occupation. This creates challenges in establishing quantifiable evaluation metrics for goal achievement and makes systematic career path construction impossible. I believe the goal requires resetting. What is the teacher’s opinion on this matter?”
True to her treacherous nature, she attacked me the moment I finished speaking. She wrapped it in fancy words, but the core message was clear: That idiot is trying to coast through life, so please do your duty as an educator and crush her.
Yoon Ji-ah. My sister, born ten minutes after me. A financial monster wearing the skin of a child. A genius who displayed an almost supernatural talent for economics, management, and investment. Like me, she was also a reincarnator.
In my previous life, I had been the most average of average Korean office workers. After dying an empty death from endless overtime and stress, I opened my eyes as a baby girl. I spent my infancy in a blissful, thoughtless haze, swearing that in this life I would become a cute, lovable, beautiful woman who did absolutely nothing but play and eat.
Then one day, I heard a strange string of words from the sister lying next to me, born just ten minutes later.
“…Kospi… Nasdaq…”
In that instant, I knew. This kid was a reincarnator too. Our eyes met. We stayed silent for a long moment. A massive variable named Yoon Ji-ah had just crashed into my peaceful home-protector lifestyle plan.
It started out seeming harmless enough.
“Dad, that company feels weird. It’s like the sandcastle Seo-ah builds. It looks like it’ll collapse any second.”
“Mom, the new bakery over there is so good! That place is going to blow up!”
She chose words a child might actually use and casually dropped hints to our parents. At first they simply chuckled and ruffled her hair, saying, “Our Ji-ah is so smart.” But soon her prophecies began coming true one by one.
A friend had strongly recommended a stock that Dad almost took out a loan to buy. Thanks to Ji-ah’s desperate dissuasion, he gave it up with tears in his eyes, only for the stock to lose half its value. The bakery Ji-ah praised quickly franchised and became famous.
The decisive incident happened when Ji-ah was six. Dad had received an early retirement payout and suddenly had a lump sum. A bank employee was sweet-talking him into a fund when Ji-ah quietly approached.
“…If you think of it as buying me toys, could you buy just a little bit of Taesan Electronics stock? If you do, I won’t ask for any more toys for the rest of my life.”
At the time, Taesan Electronics was bleeding from poor performance, its stock price scraping the floor. Everyone said it would go bankrupt soon. No one was touching it. It was the kind of company where buying a thousand shares on a daughter’s whim, thinking of it as a few months’ worth of toy money, wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.
Exactly one month later, Taesan Electronics announced an exclusive technology contract with a massive overseas corporation. The stock price soared daily until it recorded an insane increase of over a hundred times. The look on our parents’ faces as they watched a hundred-thousand-won investment turn into over ten million won in an instant is still burned into my memory.
From that day on, the economic advisor for our household was no longer Dad’s banker friend or some stock trader. It was six-year-old Yoon Ji-ah. The venture boom and the dot-com bubble collapse provided the perfect stage for her to show her true power.
At first it was small, diversified investments. But every time they followed Ji-ah’s advice, the balance snowballed. After seeing it happen several times, the investment amounts grew larger and larger. Now that she is seven, Ji-ah no longer speaks in riddles, and Dad no longer treats her words lightly.
At breakfast, she opens the newspaper, sips warm milk, and briefs Dad on when to sell which stocks. At dinner, she reads books so dense I can barely understand the titles and explains new financial products to Mom. Our once-ordinary family had become an emerging bourgeois household with enough assets to eye a mid-sized apartment in Gangnam. At the center of all that wealth was my little sister, Yoon Ji-ah.
Our parents were careful to keep Ji-ah’s abilities hidden from the outside world. Thanks to that monstrous little sister, my dream became far more realistic and achievable than any ordinary career aspiration. I had simply planned to sit back and let her spoon-feed me for the rest of my life.
But lately, this wretched sister of mine kept trying to sprinkle ashes on the feast she herself had prepared for me.
Back in the kindergarten classroom. The teacher, flustered by Ji-ah’s surprise attack, forced a smile and tried to smooth things over.
“Oh my, our Ji-ah knows such difficult words! But isn’t it wonderful that Seo-ah already has such a firm dream?”
This was a parent observation day. A teacher who let herself be pushed around by a student would lose all face. So the teacher had, unusually, thrown down the gauntlet against Ji-ah.
But Ji-ah did not back down. She adjusted her glasses, which had no prescription, and continued.
“No. Teacher, I assess that my sister’s potential value is being severely underestimated, and that her unproductive goal-setting is generating enormous opportunity costs.”
The parents in the classroom began to stir. Or rather, they had already been stirring; now the murmuring grew louder.
Is that something a seven-year-old should be saying?
What is she even talking about? Potential value? Unproductive goal-setting? Enormous opportunity costs?
…Was a kid like that really in the same class as my child?
What on earth is the teacher teaching them?!
What kind of parents…
Even our parents, who heard this kind of talk at home every day and were used to it, and even the teacher, who had grown accustomed to me and Ji-ah and rarely lost her composure, began sweating profusely, at a complete loss.
It was an unprecedented event in the history of the kindergarten. I attempted to negotiate with the terrorist known as Yoon Ji-ah in a quiet voice.
“Hey. Did your frontal lobe get crushed? This isn’t our house. You know perfectly well why Mom and Dad try to hide us.”
“I simply concluded that shock therapy was necessary since you never listen no matter how many times we talk at home. And this much can just be glossed over. It might be difficult for you, though.”
“Look at this kid’s tone with her big sister.”
“I can do a lot worse. Want me to?”
The terrorist’s low whisper ended in a threat. For a moment I was speechless. Just how horrific a monster was living inside that tiny head? I finally understood why America declared it would never negotiate with terrorists. Negotiation is something humans do with other humans. You don’t negotiate with hellfire demons.
Confirming that my pupils were shaking, Yoon Ji-ah gave a satisfied smile and nodded.
“I’m sorry, Teacher… I just heard those words somewhere. I don’t actually know what they mean.”
She had used them far too perfectly for someone who supposedly didn’t know what they meant, but Ji-ah wore the exact expression that said, I said so, what are you going to do about it?
No matter how romantic the era, there was no way such a flimsy excuse would—
“I see. So our Ji-ah remembers difficult words after hearing them just once? That’s really amazing!”
—work. It actually worked. If a pathetic excuse like that was accepted so easily, then what on earth had all those parent-teacher conferences I’d suffered through been about…?
And so the Yoon Ji-ah Kindergarten Terror Incident was temporarily closed. The teacher proceeded to the next activity like a creaking robot. The parents pretended nothing was wrong while sneaking glances at me, Ji-ah, and our parents.
When kindergarten ended, we got in the car. Dad took the wheel, Mom sat in the passenger seat, and Ji-ah and I sat side by side in the back in our car seats, heading home in silence.
The moment we arrived, stepped inside, and the front door closed, Dad’s low, stern voice rang out.
“Both of you, sit in the living room.”
“…Yes, sir.”
“Yes…”
Mom silently set juice glasses in front of us and sat down beside Dad.
“…Yoon Seo-ah.”
“…Yes, Father.”
I was the first one called to the stand. Dad let out a deep sigh and put on his strict face.
“Did you really have to say your future dream… like that?”
“Lying is bad, isn’t it? I learned that Santa doesn’t give presents to children who lie.”
I knew perfectly well that I was no longer at the age where that worked, but sometimes a little variation wasn’t bad. I was a seven-year-old kindergartener. Everything that came out of my mouth was absolute truth…
“You were the one who told us Santa doesn’t exist when you were four.”
“Ahahaha.”
Right. I had. All I could do was laugh awkwardly.