SOYEON of i-dle is back with “퇴사할게여,” a song she wrote and composed herself, this time with a rock-leaning band sound.
SOYEON described the song as something she hopes can comfort both herself and everyone listening. Her message is pretty simple: do what you want, because we’re all going to be grandmas someday anyway.
We’re going to get older eventually, so we might as well protect some of the happiness and romance in our lives while we’re here.
I hadn’t even gotten that far into the song when the title caught me.
퇴사할게여
Toesahalgeyeo
I was pretty sure the Korean I’d learned was 퇴사할게요 (toesahalgeyo).
Where did that 여 (yeo) come from?
The 여 in “퇴사할게여”
The standard spelling is:
퇴사할게요
Toesahalgeyo
I’m going to quit my job.
So thankfully, I hadn’t somehow missed an entire Korean grammar lesson.
In casual messages and online Korean, people sometimes change 요 (yo) to 여 (yeo) to make the tone more playful, cute, or just less serious.
English doesn’t have an exact equivalent, but the title gave me the energy of someone texting a friend “Welp, guess I’m quitting lol” rather than making a dramatic resignation speech.
That fits the actual song surprisingly well. SOYEON isn’t spending three minutes furious at her boss and storming out of the building. She sounds almost excited about getting her time back.
The 16-Year-Old Problem
Then I looked up another expression from the song:
이팔청춘
Ipal cheongchun
The definition basically told me it referred to the youthful age around sixteen.
Sixteen? 🤔 This is a song about quitting your job, so for a second I wondered if she was talking about quitting a part-time job or something.
The explanation turned out to be much more interesting.
이팔청춘 is written 二八靑春 in Hanja. The first two characters are literally the numbers 2 and 8.
二 = 2
八 = 8
Multiply them and you get 16.
So yes, the expression really did originally refer to being around sixteen, a young age in the bloom of youth.
The meaning has broadened over time, though. These days, 이팔청춘 doesn’t require someone to literally be sixteen. It can refer more generally to being young, lively, and in the prime of your life.
Once I knew that, SOYEON’s line made sense. She’s basically saying we’re still young, so what’s so terrible about making a choice we might regret later?
The 16 is where the expression came from.
The youth is what matters here.
She Seems Pretty Happy About Quitting
This might be my favorite part of the song.
SOYEON quits, and then her mind immediately goes to everything she finally has time for. She can eat without constantly canceling plans, travel around the world ✈️, write a novel, and sing without worrying.
There’s a weirdly cheerful sense of freedom running through the whole thing.
She isn’t standing outside her old workplace plotting revenge. She’s already thinking about what comes next.
That made the whole quitting part feel less like an ending to me. Suddenly she has all this empty space in front of her, and she’s deciding what she wants to put in it.
Honestly, I kind of love that.
And Somehow We End Up at Grandma 👵
Then SOYEON jumps from youth all the way to old age.
Eventually, we’re all going to be grandmas.
I definitely wasn’t expecting grandma to become part of a resignation song, but this is probably the idea that holds everything together.
SOYEON has explained that she wanted the song to encourage people to do what they want and hold onto happiness and romance in their lives.
And now 이팔청춘 being in the same song as 할머니 (halmeoni, grandma) feels perfect.
We’re somewhere between those two points right now.
Maybe we’ll make choices we regret. Maybe something that feels like a great idea today will look ridiculous ten years from now.
But by the time we’re old enough to look way back on it, maybe even the stupid decisions will have become stories we like telling.
I Finally Got the “Romantic Day” Part
The word romantic threw me off a little at first because this isn’t much of a romance song.
By the end, I was reading it more like romanticizing your own life.
Go somewhere because the weather is nice. Take the trip you’ve been putting off. Do something that’s been sitting on your bucket list forever. Make one slightly irresponsible decision because you actually want to.
Then years later, grandma-you can look back at that day and think, “Yeah, that was pretty romantic.”
That also made me appreciate the title more.
퇴사할게여 doesn’t sound like it wants to carry the full weight of a life-changing career decision. Even the intentionally nonstandard 여 takes a little seriousness out of it.
Maybe that’s the point.
You can make a big decision without turning it into the end of the world.
🎧 Today’s K-pop Recommendation
i-dle SOYEON – “퇴사할게여”
Work, school, relationships — most of us have something piling on stress or pressure.
Before all of that completely wears us down, maybe it’s worth thinking about what would actually make future-us happy. A trip we’ve kept postponing, something forgotten on a bucket list, or even what grandma-us might think when she looks back at today.
And for one day, we can borrow a little of SOYEON’s energy and say it with her:
퇴사할게여~
Toesahalgeyeo~