I Think, Therefore I Am

There are certain thoughts that seem to arrive more often later in life. Not loudly or dramatically. 

They come quietly, usually in still moments—walking home beneath a gray sky, sitting alone in a café while old music drifts softly overhead, or staring out the window of a train as the landscape passes without asking anything from you.

Who am I?

What is this existence?

Why am I here at all?

When I was younger, I assumed adulthood would eventually answer those questions. I thought experience itself would bring clarity. But the older I get, the more I realize life rarely gives us neat conclusions. Instead, it gives us moments. Fragments. Fleeting understandings that appear briefly and disappear again like breath against cold glass.

I first encountered the French philosopher René Descartes in college. Like most students, I approached him academically, as someone to study rather than someone to truly understand. I remember reading the famous line that has survived for centuries:

“I think, therefore I am.”

At the time, it sounded intellectual and distant to me, something belonging to philosophy lectures and underlined passages in textbooks. I understood what the sentence meant logically, or at least I thought I did. But looking back now, I realize I was too young to really grasp it.

Not age-wise.

Experience-wise.

There’s a difference.

When you’re young, philosophy often feels separated from ordinary life. You read thinkers like Descartes while worrying about exams, relationships, money, or what you’re going to do with your future. The words stay on the page. They remain ideas instead of lived truths.

It is only later—after disappointment, love, loneliness, failure, nostalgia, and time itself have left their marks on you—that certain sentences begin returning with different weight.

These days, I sometimes think about Descartes early in the morning while walking through Daejeon before the city fully wakes up. The streets are still quiet then. Traffic lights changing for almost no one. A delivery truck parked outside a convenience store. The smell of bread drifting from a bakery preparing for the morning rush. Apartment windows glowing here and there against the pale blue light before sunrise.

There’s a particular feeling to Korean cities very early in the morning. For a brief time, everything seems suspended between night and day. The noise hasn’t fully arrived yet. Even familiar streets feel slightly different, as though the city is still half dreaming.

Sometimes an old song will drift from somewhere, and without warning I’m carried backward thirty or forty years. A snack bar on George Air Force Base in 1979. On the road with The Jerks in the summer of 1981. A rainy street in Seoul in the early 1990s. A version of myself I thought had disappeared.

And suddenly Descartes no longer feels academic to me.

“I think, therefore I am.”

Not as philosophy.

As awareness.

As proof that we move through time carrying entire worlds inside us.

Because the older you get, the stranger existence begins to feel. One smell, one melody, one rainy morning can collapse decades in an instant. You hear a song you haven’t heard in years and, for the length of a chorus, you are young again. Not remembering youth. Returning to it.

You begin to understand that thinking is not merely logic.

It is remembering.

Questioning.

Regretting.

Missing people.

Loving people who are no longer beside you. Wondering whether the younger version of yourself would recognize the person you became.

When I first read Descartes, I thought he was talking about certainty. Now I think he was talking about presence. The simple miracle of being conscious at all. Of waking early in a quiet city on the other side of the world and knowing, however imperfectly, that you are here.

Perhaps that understanding only comes with time. Not because wisdom automatically arrives with age, but because life slowly deepens the meanings of things we once thought we understood.

The older I get, the less certain I become about grand answers. But I have begun to believe there is meaning in simply remaining awake to life—to its beauty, its sadness, its briefness, and its strange ability to connect one moment of our lives to another across decades and continents.

Maybe existence is not about fully solving the mystery. Maybe it is about learning how to live beside it. And perhaps that is what Descartes was really reaching toward in his own way.

Not certainty.

Presence.