Preface to the Korean edition: May the doors of possibility be opened as much as possible.
Prologue: He never moves forward

Part 1: Is Life Still Wonderful?

Lock | The guard is in our heads
Travel | People who don't want to leave their rooms
Smartphone | Tell me something wonderful will happen to me
Daily Life｜When Destiny Takes the Lowest Path
Private Life | I Was Not Mine
Room | (The world) with parentheses
Home | The Pains and Joys of a Chained Life
Sleep | Half of life spent in bed

Part 2 Your world is outside the door

Adventurers lying down with joysticks in hand
Slippers｜A life of walking with rhythm
Weather Forecast | The Correlation Between Weather and Your Mind
Eros | The Age of the Decline of Sensuality
Escape | How to Travel My Room
Existence | 365 Days a Year, 365 Fates
Routine | If you get angry at even a grain of sand

Epilogue: The Game Isn't Over Yet
Translator's Note: With a heart of eternal wandering
To individuals who spend each day

“How do we recover our true lives?”
- In an age of lethargy, a philosophy of adventure and discovery from world-renowned intellectuals.

Exhaustion and overwork, that is the life of modern people, said Nietzsche.
Do you ever feel like you're living a hectic, hectic life, but your overall life feels tedious? Pascal Bruckner, the French literary giant and winner of the Prix Renaudot and Prix Médicis, attributes it to apathy, adding:
“What threatens us now is not the virus but apathy, not the danger of disease but a deadly boredom.”

This book, “Inviting Wind into Our Lives,” interprets the apathy of our times from two major perspectives.
It is ‘isolation’ and ‘absence of real experience’.
As the barriers to privacy rise, individuals are isolated in their rooms, absorbed in smartphones and content, busy watching the wonderful things happening in the world on screen.
To borrow Hannah Arendt's words, it is a world filled with "the thick sadness of a private life that centers on nothing but oneself."
Individuals who are isolated from the outside world and locked within themselves cannot experience real life.
Instead of living a real life, we only experience brief mood swings, draining our energy and paralyzing ourselves with lethargy.

The author diagnoses that we live a life where we are “tired before we even open our eyes in the morning,” and says that we need to recover our “sense of life” to shake off lethargy and boredom.
“A house or a room can only function as a lung when it is open to the outside.
Only then can it expand and become more circulatory.
“If the doors and windows are tightly shut, the lungs will shrink and you will only breathe in the stale indoor air.” That is why ‘wind’ is needed.
The wind plays a role in expanding the field of possibility by moving between inside and outside, and the goal of this book is to breathe wind into the minds of modern people who are consumed by the inertia of everyday life by refreshing their thoughts.
You can't live a real life just by looking at a screen.
Now we need the experience of discovering life through real adventure.

“Humans are beings of light and exploration.”
- 15 clues to regain your sense of life, including privacy, sleep, slippers, and eros.

If we were to describe the history of modern humans in the future, we might be depicted as sitting, slumped over on a sofa or bed, instead of walking upright.
It is quite possible when you think about the modern person wasting away on a chair.
In the chapter “Slippers: A Life of Rhythm Walking,” the author points out that as we spend more time indoors wearing slippers and a gown, and the boundaries between indoor and outdoor clothing become blurred, the tension we originally had with the outside world has diminished.
“A life without taking off your slippers is not as interesting as a life with a rhythmic walk in shoes or sneakers,” is the reason the author argues for restoring the rhythm of life.

In "Weather Forecast: The Relationship Between Weather and the Mind," the author observes how the weather actually affects the human mind and how our minds have changed due to global warming.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel said, “Every landscape is a state of the soul.” In this age where daily weather forecasts have become like alarms, he says the human soul is also drifting off course and becoming unstable.
In "Eros: The Age of the Fall of Sensuality," the author explores the current situation in which the breath of others has become a source of fear.
They say that we are losing our intelligence for the wonders of sensuality.
“The new phenomenon of giving up sex is a sign of an allergy to others.
The real tragedy is when one day we stop loving and desiring.
“The opposite of libido is not abstinence, but the weariness of life.” In addition, he tries to regain a sense of life through a total of 15 clues, including a lock, travel, smartphone, existence, and routine.

“Your world is outside the door.”
- From Plato to Edward Hopper,
Philosophical, historical, and artistic reflections on seclusion and openness

“I would prefer not to.” These are the words of Bartleby, the main character in Bartleby, the Scrivener, written by Herman Melville, the famous author of Moby Dick.
Bartleby, with this peculiar negative affirmation that has long been remembered in the history of modern literature, planted the flag of apathy that went against the trend of the times.
Pascal Brückner superimposes the image of Bartleby, who stands still, defying the busy order of 19th-century Wall Street, onto the image of a helpless modern man trapped in an office.
If Bartleby were to come back to life in modern times, he would probably be a programmer working in an open office in a similar high-rise building.

The author, who is both a novelist and a philosopher, does not limit the anxiety, apathy, and boredom we harbor to the specific problems of the modern age.
As befitting an intellectual of the times, the diverse topics he brings out from a wide range of sources, including philosophy, history, and art, deepen the discussion.
Plato's 'Allegory of the Cave' was originally a fable criticizing the world of illusion, but today, with the introduction of modern equipment into the cave, its meaning has been reversed, as it has become a place of health and protection.
Edward Hopper's paintings, which depict urban landscapes as places of respite, also appear.
Through Hopper's paintings, we observe everyday life without suspense.

Pascal Brückner's story, based on a rich intellectual foundation ranging from philosophy to art, including Immanuel Kant, Louis XIV, Denis Diderot, the Flemish School, and Thomas Mann, elevates the level of thinking that allows us to view the world.
May you be able to invite wind into your life as you follow the vast wings of global intellect, freely transcending the universality of human history and the specificity of each era.