"How is life in Korea?" Se-Woong Koo the country is on the verge of losing its soul

What a realistic picture! Yes, my observations... - Vladimir Tikhonov | Facebook

Vladimir Tikhonov

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What a realistic picture! Yes, my observations are very similar. Neoliberal S Korea is very much like USA, maybe just a safer and more rationally managed version - with neurotisized, overstressed, exhausted and alienated population, almost as litigious as Americans tend to be, often regarding the others as competitors until it is proven otherwise. There is hardly anything specifically Korean about all that. Just the usual neoliberal madness. A global disease, in fact.



Se-Woong Koo

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During dinner in Albania recently, a nice waitress struck up a conversation, telling me she is a university student and wants to leave the country, where she sees no hope for a good life. On hearing that I am from Korea, she asked me, "How is life there?"
I had to take a moment to answer that, and hard as I tried to put a positive spin, all the words that came to my mind were anything but encouraging.

1. Stress

I had lunch this summer with my old dentist friend in Seoul on one of his rare days off. Not long after sitting down, he announced his intention to retire at 55 because he is so burned out. He is lucky if he can take a vacation once a year, and even that for only three to four days.
While telling me how he spends his free time training employees of medical device companies for extra money, his phone rang. "I need to go to my clinic because of a problem with the ongoing renovation work," he sighed. I hadn't seen him in six years and we had a little more than 30 minutes together.

2. Status consciousness

My 78-year-old mother puts on makeup to go grocery shopping. she also tells anyone and everyone she meets where my brother and I studied, what we do for work, and that she was a Fullbright Scholar in her twenties. I plead with her often enough to stop. She always just dismisses it.
"If I don't do it, they think I am just any old woman."
I ask her why it's important that they don't think she is just any old woman.
"If they think you are a nobody, they walk all over you," she replies.

3. Human relations

My mother is also waging a war against upstairs neighbors - a couple in their late forties with a teenage daughter - who can be at times loud when walking. She called the police on them twice, and they came down to tell her never to do it again. They were holding up their phones and recording a video while talking to her, and I was flabbergasted.
Little did I know that in Korea it's become common practice to record each other to use as evidence in case a dispute lands at court.
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When one Korean school teacher after another was taking their life last year, and news broke of how much abuse many teachers suffer from parents and students alike, one professor I know commented that Korean society seemed to be undergoing extreme judicialization, in that each and every problem was dragged through administrative or judicial processes (partly as a way of harassing others), people no longer knew how to talk it out and compromise, and there appeared to be less and less time or energy for meaningful human connections and understanding.

I could have told the Albanian waitress that Korea is comfortable enough a place when you have education and some money and connections, know the language, and can navigate all its apps and online services. That much is very true.
I told her instead that somehow the country is on the verge of losing its soul. And I wonder how many people think it, too.

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Peter Y Paik

While I do not doubt that life is hard for many Koreans for the reasons you have laid, I have a sense that you are missing aspects of the bigger global picture. Did you know that 40 percent of Americans do not feel safe walking outside their houses at night? A French woman posted a video that went viral, showing how safe it was for her to walk around the streets of Seoul at night all alone, which she implied she could not do in Paris. Cities across the West have become much less safe over the past decade - I would imagine many Europeans and North Americans would find it easy to make peace with the quirky anxieties of a people who enjoy peace and security in their daily lives. Expats of course would have to put up with other hassles, but a cost-benefit analysis would make South Korea come out ahead for many of them.