When Does the Most Beautiful Moment in Life End? (Contest Finalist)
What is youth?
Trying to grasp such an ambivalent concept is never an easy task, and media has shown that a pretense to think there is an absolute answer to that question is a prelude to failure. Either through the monotony of undermining and mocking the struggles of growing up, or basking in the exaggeration of wild behavior, portrayals of youth always feel somewhat lacking in nuance, feeling a lot more interested in the performance of youth than understanding the people performing it. However, the same cannot be said about BTS’s poignant response, with the album trilogy of The most beautiful moment in life.
At first glance, BTS’s trilogy may feel like a classic tale on the fleetingness of youth, starting by the name in itself. With the four characters on the cover of all three albums, “花樣年華” (Hwa Yang Yeon Hwa) meaning flower, shape, year, and shining — with the combination of the first two characters meaning “like a flower” and the last two characters “a period of time,” “a blooming period of time” works as a reference to one’s most beautiful moment in life and thus an introduction of how they discuss youth is given to the public.
To me, what first resonated with what BTS was saying about youth is that it is brittle and bold, most important of all ephemeral. A blooming period is non-enduring, and a flower is only the most beautiful before withering. Youth is beautiful and it doesn’t last, and perhaps part of its beauty comes from its departure.
Many people might associate The most beautiful moment in life series with Wong-kar Wai’s film: In the mood for love, of which the original title is the same as the aforementioned four characters and also tackles parallel themes. In many ways, it is a story that similarly, with all its intricacies, dances with the idea of the beauty of a moment lingering due to its unfulfillment. Always teetering on the almost instead of the absolute. Something that was doomed from the start, and in hindsight is only perceived as beautiful because it never actually reached a conclusion and can only be revisited through memories.
If youth relates to the period of teenagehood and early adulthood, experiencing everything for the first time means it is also the last time you can experience it without having any experiences preceding it — good or bad, all first times are singular, a once in a lifetime event that will never be the same. Everything about being young gives off that intensity, the sense of something beautiful that can’t stay, an excitement that burns bright until it flickers and dies to never be lit up again.
Of course, our interpretations of art are a mirror to our perceptions; they always reflect who we are. I was no different. Not outright wrong, but very lacking in how I perceived BTS’s most beautiful moment in life, as well as my own youth.
Then, I spent nearly the entirety of my last year of high school in social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and while I can acknowledge many were in much dire conditions than my own, it was still quite awful.
I felt like I lost a crucial part of my most beautiful moment in life. Or worse, that it was stolen from me.
For the entirety of 2020, I missed many things about my daily life. I missed being in school to complain about being in school, and the smell of street food when I was finally walking home. I missed spending friends’ birthdays at karaoke, singing at the top of our lungs or watching them getting sunburnt at the beach on occasional weekend trips. I missed running to catch the bus with them, or hiding together away from the rain in local stores, missed putting cold hands on warm faces during vacation sleepovers. I missed the giddiness of sharing an umbrella or holding hands with a crush, missed the gratification of getting personally complimented by a teacher for well-done homework.
The pandemic provided an abrupt stop to my high school years, like a TV series being canceled, reaching an end but no conclusion.
And for the entirety of 2020, I also missed being by my friends’ sides as they experienced the death of relatives and missed being by their sides to cheer them on while watching their accomplishments of passing, or getting rejected, into universities and taking the next step forward in their own lives. I also began to miss myself as I became a passive agent in my life, facing the permanent loss of a moment in my youth while simultaneously struggling with the gnawing feeling of futility of worrying for such frivolous things in the middle of so many worse events happening. My anxiety worsened as did my insomnia.
By the start of last year, I had already been an ARMY for almost three years. BTS had already taught me many things. To me, who once was harsh and judgmental, they taught that everyone has inherent value simply because they exist, including myself. To me, who was a boiling cauldron of insecurities, they taught me that self-love is an active process, not a passive result; that I would have to make an effort to know myself and become able to love myself. To me, who only knew how to value myself through grades, they taught one should stand up against societal pressure and refuse to be trapped in someone else’s dream, but that it’s more than enough to only have small objectives as long as those give you happiness. To me, who is Japanese Brazilian and always felt out of place with both cultures, they taught me to value both experiences, taught me that belonging in both doesn’t mean I don’t fit in either.
Many times, BTS’s music comforted and soothed me when nothing else could. They taught me a lot, but awful circumstances bring out the worst in people, and I had to relearn many of those lessons during the pandemic.
For starters, one might think online classes are easier. It means less time studying and therefore motivation to study more, especially when one is in the comfort of their own home, but online classes are extremely taxing and deeply unrewarding. You spend hours staring at your screen, that is, if you even had the privilege to continue having classes last year. It takes effort to understand and be understood when the teacher asks you to speak, and the teachers are tired too; their job is now in an unfamiliar space, one they are most likely unprepared to work in, and everyone’s internet connection is terribly temperamental. The weariness can’t help but build up. Not attributing your own value to grades is only easy in theory when you were raised to believe there’s no more accurate indicator of your intelligence than school — and my grades fell, I missed a few too many important deadlines, and I spent multiple nights crying over feeling worthless.
And with that worthlessness came the helplessness of being unable to create more, to spend my time productively. This pandemic was no stranger to online trends of reinventing oneself, using this “gained” time to do something different and to learn something new. To speak a language, to play an instrument, get better at drawing, read more books, and so on. The uncountable stories of people achieving their goals, feeling accomplished — daughters and sons of family friends and relatives or acquaintances, who used these times as an “opportunity” — it was almost inevitable that the feeling of everyone moving forward, while I was stuck struggling to get out of bed, would swallow me whole.
This pandemic did not bring me a creative high but an uneasiness that was worsened by fear. I remember in the few days before lockdown I was at best side-eyed and at worst outright cursed when walking down the street and taking public transport. Cases of Asian people suffering physical aggressions and harassment were rising almost everywhere, and small Asian businesses were closing. See, a model minority is but a false respect that can be stripped out from an ethnic group as long as its traits are easy to point out. I’m as Japanese as I’m Brazilian — I’m an East Asian person in a Western country. And what better scapegoat for the pandemic than Asian people who allegedly brought the disease to “Western civilization” with our “unsanitary” habits?
The helplessness in the face of the awful reality, the arbitrary judgments of self-worth, the dreading of my own identity, it all started to unravel and then strain, like a string around my neck. I felt tightly tied in place.
The most beautiful moment in life series loosened the rope. With its themes of dealing with the struggles of maturing and eventually finding your own place in the world, it taught me youth is a process of becoming: I realized I would have to learn to live with myself as long as I existed, and that the lessons BTS taught me would always have to be relearned.
In the ending ment for the BTS 2015 HYYH 화양연화 On Stage, leader Kim Namjoon defines the most beautiful moment in life as a way to view the world rather than something objectively beautiful. That to look at all moments with the will to accept your life regardless of the moment is what makes every moment beautiful by default — what is beautiful is not within the moment but within the person living it. Youth is that willingness to perceive the world wholeheartedly, to be and become.
Much of what BTS portrays youth to be in their overall discography is not necessarily beautiful; there’s a lot of criticism towards youth (especially in their school trilogy), but to take the beauty away from a person willing to live despite all the harshness of their personal experiences is dismissing their own individual complexities. There is beauty in seeing a person grow, there’s beauty in being that person growing. BTS very much understands that beauty.
In Jung Hoseok’s verse in the song “2!3!,” he sings:
“(So thanks) for becoming my light
for becoming that flower in the most beautiful moment in life”
As a reference to “花樣年華” (Hwa Yang Yeon Hwa), this is a sentence that starts with “flower” and ends with “light,” similar to the album title, while calling ARMY both of these things, meaning we’re their beginning and their end (tweet).
In the song “Love is not over,” Kim Namjoon sings:
“You are at my beginning and at my end like the word ‘annyeong.’”
The word (안녕) “annyeong” can be used both as a hello and a goodbye, as a greeting, and a parting (Doolset Lyrics).
BTS did not give me back the time I felt I had lost, did not take away my grief, did not erase my anxiety or the discrimination I’ve faced. They did, however, make me revise my own conflicting values, rebuild my own sense of self against the harshness of what I faced, and most importantly, made life a little easier for me to live. Through their songs, they lifted the weight in my chest that did not let my lungs expand, and I’ll be eternally grateful that they made it easier for me to breathe.
I have multiple times joked about living my youth vicariously through their The most beautiful moment in life series, but jokes aside, if ARMY are their beginning and their end, doesn’t that mean that the most beautiful moment in life lives with us? If youth is the willingness to accept your life wholeheartedly, can it truly be stolen? To BTS, youth is as ephemeral and fragile as it is alive and cyclical, as long as the people living it exist. And I’m once again relearning that lesson.
This essay was chosen as one of the finalists of the first BTS Essay contest hosted by The BTS Effect. Find out more here.
The BTS Effect Medium page publishes submissions from ARMY about how BTS has affected, inspired, or otherwise impacted their lives. If you’d like to submit a story, please click here for more information. This publication is part of TheBTSEffect.com. You can sign up for the newsletter here.
