**This article contains spoilers for the series “You and Everything Else.”

“You and Everything Else” begins in the small room that doubles as both home and writing studio for Ryu Eun-jung (Kim Go-eun), a television screenwriter. As a child, she never had a room of her own. She and her younger brother shared a cramped semi-basement, their legs tangled as they slept, and had to step outside to reach the bathroom. When her mother—who sold yogurt door to door—took her along to clean a future client’s house, Eun-jung saw, for the first time, an apartment with two bathrooms. That moment marked her first realization of how relative poverty can be. The note she left in that closet—“You’re so lucky.”—sets the emotional tone for the entire series. Set in 1990s Korea, “You and Everything Else” portrays a world where class differences quietly shape every corner of childhood. Eun-jung’s teacher proudly announces that her classmate Cheon Sang-yeon’s grandfather is a government minister, and when there aren’t enough desks for new students, the children from poorer families are told to sit on the floor. Even a survey about students’ home environments—clearly private information—is conducted by a show of hands. Discrimination and comparison seep into the air like oxygen, returning to Eun-jung when a classmate blurts out, “Eun-jung doesn’t have a dad.” Exposed to comparison from the start, the children internalize hierarchy so deeply that they learn to rank themselves without being told.

It’s no coincidence that “You and Everything Else” stages the first encounter between Ryu Eun-jung and Cheon Sang-yeon (Park Ji-hyun) through a vertical gaze. Seated at her desk, Eun-jung looks up at Sang-yeon, who stands on the platform beside the teacher—an image charged with hierarchy and awe. When the teacher praises Sang-yeon as “one of the top students,” Sang-yeon responds with an unexpected confidence, saying her name carries the meaning of “swallow” and declaring, “I’ll be a bum when I’m an adult.” Elected class president by an overwhelming vote, Sang-yeon is given the authority to punish students for talking in class—a power she exercises freely, even against Eun-jung, whose protests go unheard. The moment cements Eun-jung’s resentment, until Sang-yeon later offers her a recorder, saying, “If you feel that upset, you can hit me too.” Eun-jung, holding it in her hand, hesitates. “Did you even think about how bad this would hurt? It’s a lot harder than wood.” Eun-jung’s deep empathy eventually overturns her position. As they grow older, she transforms from a quiet, invisible kid into someone who looks after the increasingly isolated Sang-yeon. Sang-yeon, despite being blessed with beauty, intelligence, and privilege, finds herself growing lonelier the higher she climbs. In the intuitive class hierarchy of childhood, the factors that once granted power—grades, looks, money—eventually stop working. The timid become outgoing; the fortunate fall. Just as Eun-jung gains friends and confidence and climbs the social staircase, Sang-yeon’s father’s business collapses, sending her tumbling down. In the end, countless Eun-jungs and Sang-yeons step in and out of their rooms, climbing and descending the staircase that is each other.

If lining up on the social staircase is inevitable, perhaps education can offer a way to soften its edges. When Eun-jung is teased for not having a father, Yoon Hyun-sook (Seo Jung-yeon)—Sang-yeon’s mother and the homeroom teacher in the classroom next door—comforts her by sharing that she, too, lost her father at a young age. As a mother, Hyun-sook preaches humility to her children—her son Sang-hak (Kim Jae-won), who ranks twelfth on the national mock college entrance exam, and her daughter Sang-yeon, already solving sixth-grade math problems in fourth grade—reminding them that academic success is simply a matter of talent and that it doesn’t make them special. Yet despite her wisdom, she fails to truly reach her son. Sang-hak, forced into business management at Seoul National University instead of pursuing photography, struggles with her gender identity and eventually takes her own life. Hyun-sook cannot grasp her pain. Nor does she understand her daughter’s jealousy toward Eun-jung—the friendly classmate who effortlessly wins her brother’s and mother’s affection. Seeing Sang-yeon’s resentment as a moral flaw rather than emotional hurt, she disciplines her instead, deepening the rift between them. Once a respected teacher, Hyun-sook’s career unravels after her son’s death and her husband’s business collapse. Complaints from parents about her indifference lead her to resign—a symbolic downfall. She was a good teacher, but her care for students stemmed from a kind of noblesse oblige, an act of charity from a parent who was comfortably successful, rather than from genuine empathy. In that sense, Sang-yeon’s accusation—that her mother never truly looked into her heart—rings true; she believes that even if she were to go astray, her mother would have nothing to say, having never really seen who she is. While the impoverished Eun-jung, buoyed by her mother Jang Soon-young’s (Jang Hye-jin) love, throws open her own door and steps into a wider world, Sang-yeon—living in a spacious apartment—finds herself increasingly confined. Hyun-sook loved her daughter, but she never created the emotional space Sang-yeon needed to breathe.

In “You and Everything Else,” the note in the closet that reads “You’re so lucky” begins from Ryu Eun-jung’s point of view but gradually extends to Cheon Sang-yeon’s. As she transfers to another school, Sang-yeon receives a love letter from the boy Eun-jung has a crush on. When Eun-jung ranks tenth in her class, Sang-yeon tops the school with perfect scores in every subject. While Eun-jung feels out of place in the photography club, Sang-yeon earns praise for her talent behind the camera. Years later, when the two reunite as co-producers on the film “Good Man,” their dynamic remains the same. Eun-jung, who studied screenwriting at film school, struggles with the practical side of production, while Sang-yeon, who learned on set rather than in the classroom, quickly spots the flaws in Eun-jung’s budget plan. It’s then that Eun-jung finds herself agonizing, thinking, “Even after all these years, I still don’t think I’ll ever be able to beat you.” At first glance, “You’re so lucky” seems an ill fit for someone like Sang-yeon. Yet over drinks one night, when she introduces her first boyfriend to Eun-jung, she remarks that anyone truly burdened by insecurity could never speak so openly about it—that the ability to talk about it means you’re no longer trapped by it. Unlike Eun-jung, who can admit she has envied Sang-yeon but never wanted to surpass her, Sang-yeon cannot articulate her own inferiority complex—the sense that she can never be loved the way Eun-jung is. In that moment, “You’re so lucky” becomes a statement that cuts across everyone’s lives. Even someone like Sang-yeon—gifted, the kind of person others envy—suffers under the lifelong weight of inadequacy. “You and Everything Else” often frames the two protagonists like a mirror image—two figures reflecting each other, like a living decalcomania—constructing a delicate argument about the cruel truths of being human: why we long for what we lack, and how that longing, that sense of inferiority, quietly destroys us.

When the two meet again in college, Eun-jung tells Sang-yeon that poverty is relative. As a child, she lived in a room with no bathroom, only to realize that some apartments had two. Sang-yeon, however, once lived in such an apartment until her father’s business failed, forcing her family into a single room without one. For her, poverty became absolute. Having once stood at the top of the staircase, Sang-yeon measures everything in absolutes. After losing both her brother, Sang-hak, and her mother, Hyun-sook, she tumbles to the bottom and can only calculate her place from there, always placing Eun-jung somewhere above. Sang-hak’s death leaves Sang-yeon without an emotional anchor. Kim Sang-hak (Kim Geon-woo)—a friend of her late brother and the person who helped her regain her footing and enter college—becomes her sole source of stability. Yet discovering that he is already dating Eun-jung reignites her deepest insecurities. When he later joins the production of “Good Man” as cinematographer and shows signs of reconnecting with Eun-jung, Sang-yeon’s behavior turns desperate, almost childlike in its rawness. She pleads with Eun-jung not to see him, insisting that Eun-jung has everything—even a mother—while she has nothing. Having lost her family and pushed away her only friend out of envy, Sang-yeon no longer has a psychological safety net. Her fixation on Kim Sang-hak’s attention becomes a form of survival. In her irrational pleas to Eun-jung, we see a self that has never grown beyond the teenage girl still aching to be loved.

Eun-jung sees the world through relativity; Sang-yeon, through absolutes. Their fundamental difference becomes most apparent during a conflict on the set of “Good Man,” when the crew faces verbal abuse from the lead actor, Lee Seung-jae (Lee Jong-won). To Sang-yeon, the incident is simple math: Lee is the most important person on the payroll, and even if he caused trouble, the victimized staff should apologize to soothe his ego and bring him back to set. Eun-jung objects, arguing that such a compromise doesn’t solve the problem—it merely hands him a crown. Still, Sang-yeon insists: “Because he’s the king. He’s right on top.” Even when the man she loves, Kim Sang-hak, steps in to stop Lee’s violence, she intervenes—not to defend Sang-hak, but to keep the hierarchy intact. She makes the assaulted staff apologize, but when Sang-hak apologizes in turn, she kneels beside him, creating a visible distinction. Sang-yeon, who measures every situation in absolutes, interprets even acts of kindness as humiliation. When her unrequited feelings for Kim Sang-hak set off a chain of misunderstandings that led to their breakup, she takes Eun-jung’s attempts to help her financially as pity and insult. “No one has ever made me loathe myself the way you did,” she says—an echo of self-hatred that explains why, even when she needs money for her dying mother’s hospital bills, she insists on paying Eun-jung back. Later, when she and Lee Seung-jae are both asked to leave the film following a misunderstanding, she accepts the dismissal instead of fighting to stay. Kim Sang-hak urges her to be more open, to take care of herself, to find stability—but Sang-yeon continues to choose the opposite. Her refusal of help and her pride in isolation become a kind of preemptive self-punishment, the trace of a self that has never learned how to grow within relationships.

Despite Kim Sang-hak’s advice, Sang-yeon ultimately chooses to take rather than receive. She quits the film she had been co-directing with Eun-jung, establishes her own production company, and releases “Romance of Youth”—a project originally conceived by Eun-jung and director Joo Dong-hyang (Kwak Min-gyu)—as her debut, effectively stealing the work. “I don’t like that you’re fine. I want your life to be ruined like mine,” she tells Eun-jung, a line that feels less like anger than a declaration of self-imposed exile—the deliberate destruction of her only friendship. When director Gyeong Seung-ju (Lee Sang-yoon) asks her why she’s hurting herself with the very sword she’s drawn, Sang-yeon answers, “Because my welfare doesn’t really mean anything to me.” It’s an admission that her cruelty is, at its core, self-directed. Yet her life that follows contradicts that very statement. Throughout her thirties, she tries desperately to prove Eun-jung’s final words—“Who will be at your side when you die?”—wrong. She marries quickly, struggles to keep a faltering relationship together, and tries to conceive a child. After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, she pushes her way back into Eun-jung’s life, asking to be friends again. Sang-yeon may have chosen isolation, but she spends her final years fighting against it, searching for somewhere—someone—to rest. Before severing ties completely, she visits Eun-jung’s mother, Jang Soon-young (Jang Hye-jin), and pleads, “I’m a bitch. I know that. But can I please have a hug?” The irony is devastating: even after a lifetime spent pushing people away, she cannot escape the human impulse to be held. In the end, when Eun-jung forgives her and accompanies her through assisted dying, Sang-yeon says quietly, “So you have accepted me in the end.” That, the series suggests, is what it means to be human.

Through Sang-yeon’s final choice after being diagnosed with a terminal illness, “You and Everything Else” expands its critique of a Korean society obsessed with comparison into a meditation on assisted dying. In Korea, assisted death remains outside the bounds of legality. When Eun-jung struggles to accept Sang-yeon’s decision to travel to Switzerland to end her life, Sang-yeon explains that she wants to go while she can still be herself. Paradoxically, her decision to pursue assisted dying—and to reconcile with Eun-jung—marks the first time in her life that she stops self-punishing and chooses self-care instead. “I’m always doing that,” she says. “I’m the stubborn one, always going against the grain, wanting everyone to remain where I left them.” Sang-yeon revisits the same beach where she once scattered her mother Hyun-sook’s ashes, this time with Eun-jung by her side. As her words suggest, her life has been defined by choosing the opposite of what she truly desired—refusing help when she needed it most, destroying the very relationships she wanted to protect. Yet on the verge of death, she finally delivers the apology she never gave to her brother Sang-hak and her mother, and seeks to end her life at a moment when she can still preserve her dignity. In doing so, she paradoxically chooses to protect her life’s integrity. Her words to Eun-jung echo as the series’ moral question on assisted dying: “Wanting to end this suffering without losing any of myself along the way, is it so wrong and selfish for me to want that? Don’t you think I should at least have the right to reject this pain?”

On the final day before her assisted death, Sang-yeon asks Eun-jung not to accompany her to the end, suggesting they say their goodbyes in the room instead. But Eun-jung refuses. “Just ask me to come with you,” she says. “Don’t say the opposite of what you want. You want me to go with you, right?” At those words, Sang-yeon breaks down in tears and, for the first time, affirms her true feelings. Having spent her life denying herself—distorting even her love for others and her longing to be loved—Sang-yeon finally reconciles with her own heart in the face of death, achieving a quiet kind of human growth. She leaves behind the stories she has written for Eun-jung: “That’s the key to the top drawer of my desk. Inside, you’ll find my diary. Do with it as you wish. I really enjoyed the story you wrote about us. If you finish writing it, I’ll live on forever in your story.” In that moment, Sang-yeon opens the once-sealed room of her inner life and offers it to Eun-jung before she goes. Now it is Eun-jung’s turn to complete the story in her own room. “You and Everything Else” closes with Eun-jung standing alone before the sea—the same horizon she once shared with Sang-yeon. A story that began inside a single room ends with the vast openness of the ocean. Historically, someone has always built a room through writing—a private space where the self could endure—and then invited another person inside. Together, they created a story that would live and breathe forever, spreading outward like the sea itself. As a line from the film “Barbie” reminds us, “Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever.” That, perhaps, is the meaning of art—and the reason “You and Everything Else” was written.