The Number Nobody Writes Down, and It Hasn't Moved in Twenty Years

 

The Number Nobody Writes Down, and It Hasn't Moved in Twenty Years

There's a rule in a Korean office that nobody hands you on your first day. Nobody puts it in an employee handbook. You just absorb it, usually the first time a wedding invitation goes around the team and you watch what everyone else puts in the envelope before you decide what to put in yours.

The rule, for me, across every company, was almost embarrassingly simple. As a regular team member, fifty thousand won. Once I became a team leader, a hundred thousand. That's it. That's the whole system.

A rule with no document behind it

I've already written about how rank in a Korean office gets spoken out loud constantly — the ladder, the titles, who outranks whom by exactly how much. The cash-gift amount is the same logic, just quieter and more literal. Your position doesn't just tell you where you sit in a meeting. It tells you what number goes in the envelope.

Nobody announces the figure. You learn it the way you learn most things in an office like this — by watching, a couple of times, before your own turn comes. And once you know it, it stops feeling like a choice. It just becomes the number, the same way a price tag is the price.

The part I'm a little embarrassed to admit

Here's the detail that actually bothers me when I sit with it for more than a few seconds. I've been doing fifty thousand as a team member and a hundred thousand as a team leader for over twenty years now. Across six companies, multiple decades, however much everything else in the economy has moved in that time — this number hasn't moved at all.

I'm not proud of that, saying it out loud. It's not that I couldn't have given more at some point along the way. It's that the number was never really mine to begin with. It belongs to the position, not to me, and the position apparently decided two decades ago what the right amount was and never revisited the question. I just kept paying what the position told me to pay.

I don't know if everyone around me was doing the same quiet math, sticking to a number that hasn't kept pace with twenty years of prices, or if I was unusual in never adjusting it upward on my own. I suspect it's more common than anyone admits. Nobody exactly brings it up at lunch.

The case that still makes me pause

Most of these decisions are easy because the rule does the deciding for you. The one that still catches me, every single time, is when the invitation comes from someone who's already left the company.

It happens more often than you'd think. Someone you worked with for years, someone who was on your team or sat near your desk every day for a decade, moves on, and then a year or two later a wedding invitation or a notice of a parent's passing reaches you through whatever channel still connects you — a old group chat, a mutual former colleague, sometimes just a text out of nowhere.

And every time, I go through the same small hesitation. Do I go. Do I just send the money.

What I've actually done, consistently, is send the money and not go. I'm not entirely sure that's the right call, even now, but it's the one I keep making. Once the day-to-day connection is gone — once you're not walking past each other's desks anymore, not in the same group chat about the current project — showing up in person starts to feel like performing a closeness that isn't really there day to day anymore. The money still goes, because the obligation itself doesn't disappear just because someone left the building. But the version of me that shows up in person is, I think, reserved for people I'm still actually in regular contact with.

What becoming a team leader actually changed

People might assume that moving up changes the whole calculation — more income, more generosity, a looser hand with the envelope. For me it only changed one number: fifty became a hundred, exactly once, the week the title changed, and then it sat there just as still as the fifty had.

What did change, a little, was the volume. As a team leader you end up invited to more things — more of your own reports' life events reach your desk than they did when you were a peer among peers. So even though the per-event number only doubled, the total going out in a given year went up more than that, just from being someone people now feel obligated to invite.

Twenty-some years in, I still don't know if fifty and a hundred are the right numbers anymore. I just know they're the numbers, the same way they've always been, and that's apparently enough reason for them to keep being the numbers for another twenty.