Ifa

We Are All Trying Here feels like a quiet autopsy of the human heart. It dissects envy, failure, resentment, loneliness, and that unbearable feeling of watching everyone else arrive somewhere you have been trying to reach your whole life. Yet beneath all that emotional noise, the drama asks something much softer and far more difficult. What’s your purpose in life? More importantly, how do people continue living without letting bitterness consume them whole?

At first, this drama was honestly difficult for me to watch. It felt like rubbing salt into old wounds. Every episode forces reality right in front of you and hits you with truths you would rather avoid. The story emphasizes life’s imperfections with such painful honesty that it almost becomes suffocating. But strangely enough, that is exactly what makes it beautiful. It understands the ugly parts of being human that most of us try desperately to hide under fake smiles and half-hearted compliments. Envy. Depression. Anxiety. Worthlessness. Loneliness. Comparison. The exhausting performance of pretending you are okay.

Hwang Dong Man is one of the most relatable fictional characters I have ever seen. He is an aspiring director stuck in limbo while everyone around him moves forward. During university, he formed The Eight Club with seven others who all shared a love for film. Years later, every single member has successfully debuted except him. That alone already says everything about the emotional landscape of his character. Dong Man exists in that strange space between hope and humiliation. He talks too much, dreams too loudly, repeats stories he has already told ten times, criticizes everyone’s work, and somehow still keeps going even after the world has quietly decided he is a failure. Sisyphus in sneakers, basically. What makes Dong Man fascinating is that his nonstop talking is not simply a personality trait. It is survival.

“Whenever I feel a rush of anxiety charging in all of a sudden, I get loud and talk my head off to chase it away. I’m afraid of silence. I’m afraid the truth might pop out of nowhere in the silence. When it’s quiet, I feel like a Gollum-like demon will appear and whisper in my ear. You are worthless.”

That line destroyed me. As someone with social anxiety, I deeply understood him. There is a specific kind of anxiety that comes from entering a room where you already know people do not take you seriously. They brush you off. They think you are unsuccessful. They think you are embarrassing. To cope with that, you either become extremely quiet or you yap your soul out. I am somehow both. If I stay quiet, I overthink that people find me boring and will never invite me again. If I talk too much, I spend the entire night replaying every sentence I said like my brain hired a full-time archivist. This drama understands that feeling intimately. Dong Man screams his own name on top of a hill whenever there is nobody left to talk to. It sounds absurd at first, but it becomes one of the most cathartic scenes in the drama. Like every ounce of desperation and pent-up emotion finally bursting out at once.

“All I want is to not feel anxious.”

“I’m not even hoping for success. I just don’t want to be miserable.”

Those lines left me speechless because somewhere along the way, many of us stop dreaming about greatness. We just want to breathe comfortably again.

One of the smartest things about the drama is how it constantly shifts perspectives. From Dong Man’s point of view, his nonstop talking feels understandable, even endearing. But from the perspective of the other Eight Club members, his blunt remarks can be exhausting and painful, especially when they are dealing with their own insecurities. The drama never paints anyone as entirely right or wrong. Everyone is hurting in different ways.

Park Gyeong Se, once celebrated for his successful debut work, spirals after public failure. Yet his greatest fear is not criticism itself. It is Dong Man. Because Dong Man represents what Gyeong Se could become. Worse, Gyeong Se’s success was partially built from Dong Man’s drunken stories. Dong Man unknowingly inspired many of the club members’ works while believing he himself had nothing worthwhile to say. That irony hurts. One of my favorite moments comes when Gyeong Se finally confesses the truth to fellow club member Park Yeong Su. Instead of anger or condemnation, Yeong Su simply says, “that was a beautiful confession.” I found that strangely liberating. Sometimes the things we hide the most end up poisoning us from within. We carry anxiety, shame, and fear because we assume confession will destroy everything. This drama quietly suggests otherwise. Sometimes honesty is not destruction. Sometimes it is relief.

Then there is Byeon Eun Ah, the drama’s sharp-tongued and emotionally guarded producer. She dissects scripts with surgical cruelty while silently carrying her own loneliness and abandonment trauma. As a child, she was left alone for an entire month because of her parents’ fight and divorce. What makes her trauma especially painful is how realistic it feels. Her mother belittles her pain instead of understanding it. The drama understands a harsh truth many people experience growing up. Nobody fully understands your trauma except yourself.

“What’s your purpose in life?” Jing Man asks her.

“I want to be a strong mom.”

That answer stayed with me for a long time. As we grow older, we begin understanding exactly what our parents lacked and what we wished they could have done better. Eun Ah does not dream of perfection or glamour. She wants to become someone who stays instead of running away.

Eun Ah and Dong Man are opposites when it comes to coping with anxiety. Eun Ah retreats into silence while Dong Man drowns silence out with words. Yet somehow they understand each other perfectly. On his way home after a terrible day, Dong Man meets Eun Ah at a railroad crossing while waiting for the train to pass. That brief interaction becomes strangely magical. Sometimes after an exhausting day, a simple “I heard you” or “I’m curious” is enough to keep someone going. I also loved the strange supernatural undertone involving Eun Ah’s nosebleeds. Whenever someone hurts her emotionally enough to trigger them, something bad eventually happens to that person. The drama never fully explains it, which somehow makes it even more intriguing.

What I adore most about Dong Man and Eun Ah’s relationship is how healing their conversations feel. Whenever Eun Ah’s nose starts bleeding, she calls Dong Man and asks him to tell her a fun story. And somehow, every conversation they share ends up healing the audience too. Park Hae Young writes Dong Man’s dialogue brilliantly. He tells stories in such dramatic, suspenseful ways only for them to end in something hilariously mundane yet strangely comforting.

“Like a small win. That’s what can change your mood.”

That line genuinely changed the way I look at life. Sometimes a good meal, finding money in your pocket, finishing a task you kept postponing, or simply getting enough sleep is enough to make life feel bearable again. Not every victory needs fireworks.

Hwang Jing Man, Dong Man’s older brother, might be the saddest character in the drama. A former poet whose life collapsed after what happened to his daughter, he carries depression like an empty room after everyone has already left. His pain feels quieter than the others. More worn down than explosive. There is a Korean saying that even mountains erode with time, and this drama understands that truth perfectly. People do not always break all at once. Sometimes they slowly wear down through regret, comparison, loneliness, and disappointment. Jing Man repeatedly attempts to end his life throughout the story, and those moments reveal the rawest side of Dong Man. Suddenly all his jokes feel desperate. Fake. Fragile. Watching him hold his brother’s hands, remove dangerous objects, beg him to keep living, and desperately try to cheer him up was heartbreaking.

“What’s your purpose in life?” Dong Man asks him.

“To live lightly. Letting go of everything I can, not forming deep attachments to anything, and living lightly.”

Another line that hit painfully close to home. This drama also contains one of the loudest and most sincere love confessions I have heard recently.

“I would've liked you even if you were a man, or even if you were a tree. And if you were the wind, I would've been nuts about you. You’re too precious to be held within such a small frame and a confined space. I want the whole world to be Byeon Eun Ah.”

Dong Man does not love Eun Ah for what she provides him. He loves her existence itself. Her soul, her mind, her humanity. Even if she became something entirely different, he believes he would still love her. That kind of love goes beyond romance. It feels closer to worship, or 추앙, which longtime fans of Park Hae Young’s writing will immediately recognize from My Liberation Notes. I also loved how the drama quietly carries emotional traces of Park Hae Young’s previous works. The deep emotional wounds reminiscent of My Mister. The worship-like love from My Liberation Notes. Even the grandmother-granddaughter dynamic brought a wave of nostalgia. And hearing Taeyeon’s voice in the OST instantly made everything feel even more emotional.

Performance-wise, I genuinely think the casting was perfect. Koo Kyo Hwan completely disappears into Dong Man’s eccentricity. He captures the exhausting mix of humor, insecurity, anxiety, bitterness, and sincerity so convincingly that I found myself simultaneously annoyed by him, inspired by him, and heartbroken for him. Go Youn Jung was equally incredible as Eun Ah. Her sharpness, loneliness, and emotional exhaustion all felt painfully real. I even appreciated how her complexion subtly changes throughout the story to reflect her emotional growth. Such a small but thoughtful detail. Even the ensemble cast leaves a strong impression. Park Hae Young somehow gives depth to everyone.

What makes We Are All Trying Here resonate so deeply is that it refuses easy redemption. Nobody becomes magically healed. No grand speech suddenly cures depression. The drama lingers in the uncomfortable truth that most people are simply trying their best while carrying invisible grief.

“What’s the point of all this? Everything disappears in the end anyway. So why are we living such hard lives as if we’ll never disappear?”

In another life, these characters might have loved each other better. In this one, they are simply trying to survive themselves. And maybe that is what makes this drama beautiful. Not because it offers hope in a loud cinematic way, but because it quietly insists that even wounded people continue forward. Even in pain, there is still life.

We Are All Trying Here ultimately becomes a story about embracing the imperfections of life and ourselves. While many may mistake it for a gloomy and depressing drama, I actually found it incredibly inspiring. In fact, I think this is the brightest among Park Hae Young’s slice-of-life works. It is deeply reflective, raw, emotional, cathartic, and strangely comforting all at once. This drama made me feel seen. Maybe we’re all still trying to figure it out. What’s your purpose in life?