How to Keep Living, Anyway
A quiet Korean singer-songwriter, a faded photograph, and a three-minute ritual for getting through the night
The Cover as a Doorway
The cover looks like something you might find in the back of a family drawer: a small, slightly washed-out photo, the kind that holds more time than information. An elderly man sits on the floor, knees bent, facing a toddler in a white outfit. His hand is raised as if offering chopsticks or a small utensil, half play and half care. The child stands steady, watching. The room is plain. The light is ordinary. But the tenderness is unmistakable: the everyday kind that doesn't perform itself, the kind that simply happens, and then becomes memory.
This is the doorway into "That's How We Go On Living" (그렇게 살아가는 것), a song by the South Korean singer-songwriter Heo Hoy Kyung (허회경). The track runs a modest three minutes and change, long enough to make you feel something and short enough to loop when you can't quite fall asleep. Its power isn't in grand choruses or cinematic climax. It's in the way it names what many people refuse to admit: that living can feel like repetition, and repetition can feel like both comfort and fear.
The Language of Endurance
For international listeners learning Korean, the title itself is a lesson in emotional grammar. "Geureoke" (그렇게) means "like that," but it carries a shrug, a story left unspoken. It implies context without explaining it, the way a friend might say, "Well… you know how it is." "Sara-ganeun geot" (살아가는 것) is "the act of living," not a triumphant "life," but a slow ongoing. Together, the phrase becomes a kind of sentence you whisper when you don't have a solution, only endurance.
Heo's music often lives in that space: not dramatic despair, not motivational hope, but the soft, stubborn middle. "그렇게 살아가는 것" is less a statement than a habit, a ritual repeated until it becomes survivable.
A Song Built from the Smallest Conflicts
The lyric world of "그렇게 살아가는 것" is domestic, interior, almost embarrassingly familiar. It turns on a contradiction that anyone who has ever loved another human being will recognize: you speak a sharp word, then you search for something gentle. You want to be kind, and you fail, and then you remember you wanted to be kind. The song does not ask you to redeem yourself in one dramatic act. It asks you to keep noticing.
That is one of the song's quiet strategies: emotional regulation without self-help slogans. The voice doesn't preach. It observes. It stays close to scenes that happen after the day is over: returning in the car, lying in bed, letting thoughts spin until they don't. Finally, sleep arrives not as victory, but as closure—today folded up, placed aside, allowed to end.
In a culture saturated with solutions, the song offers something else: acceptance. Not resignation, exactly, but permission. You don't have to "fix" yourself tonight. You just have to arrive at the next morning.
About the Artist
Heo Hoy Kyung (허회경) is a South Korean singer-songwriter known for her intimate, introspective approach to contemporary Korean music. Her work explores the quiet moments of human connection and the emotional landscapes of everyday life. Through her music, she creates spaces where listeners can find recognition of their own experiences—not through grand gestures, but through the careful observation of small, recurring moments that define what it means to be human.
Her latest single, "That's How We Go On Living," continues this tradition, offering listeners a three-minute meditation on endurance, care, and the small rituals that sustain us through difficult times.
Why This Song Travels Across Languages
For readers who are learning Korean, there is a special kind of intimacy in songs like this. Korean everyday speech has an emotional efficiency: it can compress complicated feelings into a phrase that sounds deceptively simple. "그렇게" is one of those phrases. It doesn't translate neatly because it doesn't mean only "like that." It means: "in the way we have learned to continue, despite everything."
If you're studying Korean, try listening for the way the song uses ordinary words to produce extraordinary resonance. This is not vocabulary for a classroom dialogue at a café. It's vocabulary for the private room where people tell the truth.
Key Korean Terms:
- "그렇게" (geureoke): context without explanation; a whole life implied in two syllables
- "살아가는" (sara-ganeun): ongoing, imperfect continuity; the present participle of endurance
- "잠에 드는" (jam-e deuneun): "to fall into sleep," as if sleep is a place you enter when you can no longer argue with your mind
The song's Korean is not difficult in the way academic Korean can be difficult. It's difficult because it is emotionally exact. It lands close to the places you might not have language for in your own tongue.
The Photograph as Philosophy
If you look again at that cover photograph, you can see why it works as a visual anchor for this song. The old man and the child are a simple pairing—past and future—but the more profound contrast is between motion and stillness. The elder is seated, at the level of the floor, closer to the weight of time. The child stands, not yet heavy with history. Between them is a small gesture: offering, teaching, playing, feeding, loving. It is the kind of gesture that makes "living" less abstract and more physical.
The photo refuses glamour. It refuses irony. It insists on something unfashionable: care. In a single image, it argues that survival is not always heroic. Sometimes it is just this: you sit down, you reach out your hand, you try again.
And then you sleep. And then, in the morning, you do it again.
A Listening Note for the Korean Learner
If you want to use "그렇게 살아가는 것" as part of your Korean study, here's a gentle approach:
First listen without translating. Let the tone and pacing teach you.
Second listen with the title in mind. Every time you hear "그렇게," ask: "What is being left unsaid?"
Third listen for images, not grammar. Notice how the song builds a day—words, regret, breath, bed, sleep.
Write one line you could say in your own life. Not a perfect translation, but a true one.
Because that is ultimately what Heo Hoy Kyung seems to be doing: turning ordinary language into a shelter. Not a big shelter. Not a permanent one. Just enough to make it through the night.
The Art of Honest Living
In the end, "그렇게 살아가는 것" is not about being inspirational. It is about being honest. It's about the small, recurring labor of being human: saying the wrong thing, longing to say the right thing, exhaling, closing your eyes.
And, somehow, living—like that.
Written by Professor Seungchul Yoo, Ewha Womans University
