A K-drama Deep-Dive Review
Most of us are drawn to “full” k-dramas in the sense where each episode would constitute at least 50 minutes in length up to more than an hour. But have you ever considered shorter dramas—what I like to call “shorts”? One Day Off is one of them and it is a truly charming story. If you haven’t seen it yet, go check it out now—this article can wait.
The drama is a lovely story about a woman who takes a day off on Saturdays to get away to experience something different in life. With that, she intentionally takes time off to create her own short stories—unwritten, yet still stories in her life, of her life.
As the synopsis goes: Hagyeong teaches Korean literature in high school. To escape the ordinariness of her life, she decides to take one-day trips on Saturdays. During these trips, she wanders through unfamiliar places, tries different foods, and meets new people.
She realised she needed a change when, one day, in the middle of a lesson, both she and her students became so numb to the droning of facts that they all stopped—captivated by the sight of a white plastic bag drifting in the air, outside the window.
It was such a surreal moment.
That was how it all started. She began her one-day-off adventure by visiting a meditation centre in the mountains—such an unusual choice. Would you have thought of going to a place like that? Or would you have just gone to the park in town or maybe a bustling food street? Those are good places, but a meditation centre? That’s definitely quite out of the ordinary for an ordinary person.
Then she met the different people there. A woman who was on a silent retreat and did not speak, another who, in contrast, could not stop talking—the kind of person I would instinctively try to keep my distance from.
And then, a curious man who wanted to know why Hagyeong had travelled all the way from Seoul to the mountains. He even wondered if she, too, was curious about why he was there—but she wasn’t. She was still in a “look first and see” mode, not yet ready to engage with the more inquisitive people. And I could certainly learn that trick from her—just smile and move on without feeling guilty at all, because I do own my own space.
The strangers we meet in life—there will be many different kinds. How would they make you feel? Some of us, the more extroverted ones, would welcome them with open arms, getting animated as we engage with each other. But the quieter ones, like Hagyeong and me, would remain polite yet still want to protect our own space, at least for the time being.
Hagyeong then attended a meditation session. Just to be clear, I am not a believer in emptying one’s mind. To me, it is risky—an empty mind invites unhealthy thoughts. I believe in keeping good things in there while I meditate, like filling a house with meaningful and useful things, reflecting on life as I do so.
And Hagyeong wasn’t able to empty her mind anyway. She kept thinking about the Ding Dong Oolong Tea she had earlier(!!), the bibimbap she ate for lunch, and the stacks of stones she wished she could knock over.
Precisely my point. If she had started her meditation with good things already in her mind, she could have guided herself well—choosing what to reflect on, what to improve on. She couldn’t work with an empty mind.
But even before starting her one-day-off project, she had already been thinking about the surge of wanderers in late 19th-century France—people who left their homes, families, and jobs to travel. This phenomenon became known as dromomania, a pathological need for tourism and wanderlust, spreading across Europe like an epidemic.
They were also called mad wanderers. And aren’t we in that milieu now? Chasing travel, building bucket lists, rushing to travel fairs, consumed by a madness that fuels our desire to roam the world?
But I don’t see that in what Hagyeong was doing. What I see is an intentional choice—to go somewhere not too far away, to experience something different, to gain a fresh perspective on life, and to shape new stories of her own, woven into the larger narrative of her life.
Perhaps we don’t need to travel far to escape the ordinary. Maybe it’s less about the distance and more about the perspective we choose to take. Like Hagyeong, we can find small moments of adventure in the everyday—a quiet retreat, an unexpected conversation, or even just sitting still with a cup of coffee.
Taking one day off at a time, we can step out of routine, reflect, and return a little different than before.
After all, isn’t life shaped by the decisions we make, the memories we gather and the experiences that stay with us?
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