In A River in Darkness, Masaji Ishikawa describes a childhood and youth that most people today can barely imagine surviving.

He lived in North Korea with his family of Japanese descent, and he was marked from the start as inferior, officially. He was considered “hostile class,” which meant fewer food rations, fewer opportunities, constant suspicion, and almost no path upward. The government watched everything. Neighbors informed on one another. Any misstep could cost you your life.

Jobs were scarce, especially for someone like him. Most work assignments were arbitrary and brutal, designed less to produce value than to grind people down. And the physical toll was brutal. Cold nights, empty stomachs, bodies slowly wasting away. Then, improbably, he was assigned a tractor.

When he drove the tractor, the noise swallowed the world. The guards faded. The hunger receded. The fear loosened its grip. People mocked him. Others, already defeated by the system, questioned him. Why are you working so hard? Why care? Especially when the outcome was fixed, when the effort would never be rewarded, when the system would never notice or thank you.

Ishikawa’s answer was simple: "I just enjoyed driving that tractor."

"We lived under constant surveillance, so stifling, you couldn't breathe. But on that tractor, I was strangely free. It was one of the only times I was entirely in my own world. Work was my only refuge, and I just enjoyed driving that tractor."

So he poured himself into it, because doing the work itself kept something alive inside him. The tractor didn’t change the politics. It didn’t fix the injustice. It didn’t end the hunger or erase the caste system. But it preserved his inner footing.

You don’t always get to choose your circumstances. Sometimes everything really is dark. Sometimes the system is rigged, the future sealed, your effort unrewarded. But even then, there can be one narrow space where your attention is still your own, where you can act with care even if the world doesn’t deserve it.

You don’t work there for approval. You don’t work there because it’s fair. You work there because it reminds you that you are still here. Because it makes you feel free. Because doing something well is sometimes the only choice you have left. Because the quality of your attention is the one thing they can't regulate or ration or take away.

Choose your tractor. Work hard in it.