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I was born in Seoul.

I left everything behind and crossed the ocean to New York. Twelve years there. I found new things — a new language, new people, a new rhythm of a city. The world, it turned out, was much larger than I had known. And somewhere inside those twelve years, I found something else: a version of myself that was growing old. A version of myself that was dying.

On January 1, 2026, I left everything behind in New York again. I boarded a plane.

I spent three months in Medellín. And now I am in Bogotá.

Bogotá will be the city where I declare death on all my old things. The old Paul — the familiar, the stable, the repeated — this is where he gets his formal ending. His official goodbye.

Perhaps this city matters because this is my hundredth Airbnb stay. One hundred carries its own weight. Perhaps Bogotá is the last stop before I return to New York — full again, new again, ready again.

But even that house, I suspect, I will not stay in for long.

Home, for me now, is not a physical space. Home is where the people I love, or work with, or pay attention to, happen to be. So wherever I go, that place becomes home.

IWBFD Studios — I Was Born For Death.

This studio does not talk about physical death.

It talks about the closed shop. The person who left. The ended relationship. The aging street. The shuttered business. The divorce. The resignation. The last day at work. Everything that no longer breathes.

IWBFD Studios declares death on those things. And inside that declaration, the next sentence already lives —

The moment you declare death, new life has already begun.

What we believed was an ending already contained its beginning. We are, in the end, eternal.

So we add newness to everything old. We add life to everything dead.

I now walk the cities where I find myself. I find people. I find companies and brands. I rewrite their endings as the opening line of their story. I make every success story. I carry every resurrection story. I make those stories visible to the world.

That is the work of IWBFD Studios.

The vision is one: to help everyone live through a day when hope is not lost.

To carry that story to the world, I built and continue to maintain bcdW Magazine — and every day I send Current Today. I talk about cities. The people inside them, the work, the deaths, and the futures — columns, interviews, articles, news, galleries, every day.

Today is the first of those stories.

IWBFD thinks about your death every day.

Today is my Happy Death Day.

I hope tomorrow is yours.

Whenever you want your death declared, invite me to your city.

Paul Joseph J. Kang

Storyteller, IWBFD Studios

Publisher, bcdW Magazine

Writing from Bogotá“Show, don’t code: if a robot can learn your workflow from a video, your process is a product.”

Seoul is where Paul was born. It is the city he left. Every person who has ever left Seoul knows the feeling he is describing — not escape, exactly, but departure toward something larger. Seoul is a city that produces extraordinary people and then watches them leave. The city's relationship with its diaspora — the generation that left for New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin — is the story of people who needed a death before they could find a life. Most of them never formally declare it. Paul just did. Seoul should listen. The people who leave and come back — or don't come back — carry something the city needs to understand about itself.

New York is the city where Paul spent twelve years and found himself dying. That is not an accusation. It is what New York does. The city accelerates everything — ambition, identity, longing, exhaustion. It gives people the life they came for, and then, if they stay long enough, it starts to take something back. The people who leave New York — really leave, not just move to Brooklyn — often describe what Paul describes: a recognition that the self that arrived is not the self that needs to continue. New York is very good at beginnings. It is less good at allowing necessary endings. Paul had to go to Medellín and Bogotá to get that. He'll come back. He always does. New York knows this.