Life is Not ‘우상향’ (Life is Messy, and It Swerves) | Chris Hambarsoomian | TEDxSeoul Youth
Chris Hambarsoomian shares his 6-year journey as a content creator in Korea, arguing that life is not a straight upward trajectory (우상향) but rather a series of ups and downs. He emphasizes that success requires two key practices: continuously moving and swerving to adapt, and taking adequate rest to avoid burnout.
Summary
Chris Hambarsoomian begins by discussing his discomfort with the Korean concept of 우상향 (uusanghyang)—a word meaning to move right and up, representing the idealized straight-line growth people pursue in business, careers, and personal development. He contrasts this ideal with reality, sharing how his own life took an unexpected turn in 2019 when he was forced to leave his finance job in Hong Kong. Rather than continuing in finance, he took a leap of faith in 2020 to pursue content creation in Korea with minimal planning and savings. Over six years, he accumulated 2 million social media followers, appeared on Netflix and major Korean TV shows, and became recognizable on the streets. However, when he displays his subscriber growth graph, it appears to follow the idealized 우상향 line—but this is precisely his point: external metrics can be misleading. When examining his views graph instead, a completely different picture emerges with significant volatility, numerous peaks and valleys, and extended periods of decline. Hambarsoomian explains that before each peak in his journey, he never felt confident or happy; instead, he felt desperate and had low self-esteem. The critical realization he reached was that the drops themselves were the journey, not obstacles to be overcome. Over six years, he reinvented himself multiple times—dressing as a woman, making dad jokes, becoming a chef, climbing mountains, and giving gifts to strangers. He acknowledges experiencing depression, anxiety, self-loathing, and burnout approximately every three months. Hambarsoomian proposes two essential practices for navigating this messy life: first, becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable and continuing to move and swerve rather than repeating the same unsuccessful approach. He illustrates this with the Christmas gift-giving experiment that tripled his Instagram followers and led to brand partnerships. Second, he emphasizes the importance of rest, which he finds even more difficult than hard work. He practices regular temple stays where he disconnects from society, reflects, and resets himself. He concludes that life requires both continuous adaptation and strategic rest, not the pursuit of endless upward growth.
Key Insights
- When viewing people's lives from the outside, it is easy to assume everyone is always succeeding and growing exponentially, but external metrics like subscriber counts mask the actual volatility and downs that characterize real progress.
- Hambarsoomian discovered that every single peak in his journey was preceded by feelings of desperation, low self-esteem, and unhappiness rather than confidence, contradicting the assumption that peaks result from positive emotional states.
- The drops and difficulties in life are not obstacles separate from the journey itself but rather constitute the actual journey, requiring a mindset of continuous movement and adaptation rather than avoidance.
- Hambarsoomian argues that taking rest is paradoxically more difficult than working hard and swerving, yet it is essential for losing negativity, reflecting, and psychological renewal approximately every few months.
- A chance opportunity from a random Tik Tok comment during a period of poverty—asking him to eat four eggs in one minute—exploded into a major series that significantly accelerated his career growth.
Topics
Transcript
[0:07] [applause] >> Today we're going to be talking about something that I hold very close to myself. Uh, this is a word in Korean actually and I really, really, really dislike it. It makes me very uncomfortable. It makes me anxious. Gets me nervous and on multiple occasions it's given me an existential crisis. This word is There we go. Okay, that word is uusanghyang. So, the word uusanghyang it literally translates to moving to the right and [0:38] up. It's just three characters. It's very benign. There's no emotion attached to it. But this word makes me feel very uncomfortable. If we visualize this word, it's literally just a straight line. It's what we're aiming to have in…
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