Lee Min-ho Practiced Solitude at 35. It Started With One Airport Trip.

Lee Min-ho had spent so many years at the center of a professional orbit that going to the airport alone simply never came up. Staffers, friends, and family were always there, and the actor said on the YouTube talk show Jjanhan Hyung that this kind of constant accompaniment had become a natural condition of his life, not something he had sought out or thought much about.

The episode, uploaded on the 14th, brought Min-ho together with actors Ryu Hye-young and Kim Dae-myung, who also appear in the film Assassin(s), as guests of host Shin Dong-yeop. When Shin asked whether Min-ho had ever walked into a restaurant and eaten alone, Min-ho said he does it often now, particularly in Japan, and that he had spent the past few years deliberately reorienting his habits around solitude.

What changed at 35

"Two or three years ago, I went to an airport for the first time on my own," he said. "There had never been a reason to go alone." Ryu Hye-young responded with visible surprise, saying she couldn't quite picture what kind of life that implied.

Min-ho was quick to note that the arrangement had never been a deliberate choice. Friends and family had simply always been around, and within the entertainment industry, having people nearby who manage and assist becomes routine fast, especially for someone who rose to leading-man status at a young age. That structure, he explained, forms quietly around a person before they notice it.

Something shifted when he passed his mid-thirties. He said he began to feel that if he never grew comfortable being alone, it might eventually become a problem. That thought was enough to prompt a conscious change: he started traveling solo, beginning with airport trips.

The adjustment wasn't immediately easy. He described feeling awkward and self-conscious at first, a particular kind of embarrassment that comes not from anything external but from the unfamiliarity of one's own company. Solo travel in Japan, he said, was where he gradually worked through it, and he now finds the experience comfortable.

The value he still places on company

He closed the thought with a qualification that landed with the other guests: even after all this practice, what matters most to him when going anywhere is not whether he goes alone, but who he goes with. Learning to be comfortable with solitude, in his telling, didn't diminish the value of good company. It clarified it.

For someone who grew up on screen and spent the years since surrounded by the apparatus of a major career, the decision to deliberately practice something as ordinary as traveling alone carries a particular weight. It's a small story about a specific kind of loss that very few people experience, and fewer still notice in time to do anything about it.