A Cold Rejection at the New Threshold
Over the past few weeks, I went through two rather unpleasant initiation rituals. One came from AdSense; the other from Reddit.
AdSense scanned my blog and flatly turned it down, citing insufficient content. Reddit, meanwhile, removed a post I had spent considerable time and care writing, dismissing it as “AI-generated.” To be honest, neither rejection felt good. No matter how old you get, seeing your effort dismissed never quite gets easier.
Yet once I calmed down and sat with it, a strange thought crossed my mind:
Could this also be a kind of welcome ritual?
Samsung, 1988
It reminded me of 1988, when I first joined Samsung Electro-Mechanics—a Samsung subsidiary making electronic components—as a rookie. At the welcome gathering, my senior colleagues filled a bowl the size of a large mixing bowl, the kind normally used for cold noodles, with two full bottles of soju—nearly a liter of hard liquor—and ordered me to down it in one go.
By today’s standards, it sounds absurd. It was absurd. But back then, that rough culture was widespread across Korean workplaces. In their own crude way, it was how the older generation tested a newcomer before accepting him into the tribe. I don’t remember much else about that night, but I remember, with total clarity, showing up to work dead on time the next morning.
Bucheon, Years Later
Looking back, every major turning point in my life unfolded the same way. Years later, when I was appointed team leader at a regional branch of Daekyo, a Korean private education company, in Bucheon, history repeated itself. Trying to build rapport with the teachers there, I drank through the entire night. My stomach was in open revolt the next morning, but I walked into the office right on time with a perfectly composed face. Everyone stared in disbelief. “How are you so completely fine?” they asked.
It was sheer willpower. That was how I passed my initiation as a team leader.
The Same Question, Every Threshold
Of course, neither AdSense nor Reddit designed these cold rejections to build any kind of camaraderie with me. They simply run their own cold systems—one guarding ad quality, the other guarding a community.
But I see it differently. What if these systems are giving me such a loud welcome at the threshold precisely because they’re testing whether I’m worthy of joining the tribe?
So I decided to treat that cold blade as a warm hand reaching out to greet me.
Whenever I tackled a new field, started from scratch, or wrestled with a problem that seemed impossible to solve, the new world always asked me some version of the same thing. The wording changed, but the question underneath never did: Do you have what it takes to survive the initiation and still be standing?
Answer that question, cross the threshold, and you finally become part of the community. What binds people together isn’t the memory of shared laughter—it’s the memory of having endured the same barrier to entry, together.
In 1988, Samsung handed me a bowl brimming with two bottles of soju. Years later, Daekyo tested my grit with an all-night drinking session. And in 2026, AdSense pushed me back and told me to write more, while Reddit coldly erased my words.
Decades have flowed by like a river, and the world has changed completely. But the stubborn, hazing-filled way a new world greets a newcomer hasn’t changed nearly as much as it should have.
Well. The noisy welcome ceremony is officially over. Time to write the next post.